I was recently thinking about refrigerators. Why do we need them? I mean, I know the technical reason, food preservation, but why do we need giant fridges specifically? It’s more interesting than you think.
I’ll preface this with the fact that I’m mainly talking about car dependent countries.
Wouldn’t it be better to just buy what you need? And does this tie into the lack of walkable cities?
Over time, due to capitalism wanting more and more out of workers, and the slow privatization of many governments, eventually, walkable cities became that thing that everybody wants but nobody has. Except Europeans, because of course. So we starting investing less and less into actually making life nice, and more, in, whatever. Highways. Suburban sprawl. Corporate profits. Not taxing properly. Not investing enough in public works.
Actual citizen comfort seems to be on the back burner. Cities became more and more crowded. Clear separation between residential and commercial areas. It means that you can’t just walk to the grocery store anymore. It’s too far. Especially daily. Even driving sucks. Some neighborhoods don’t have any nearby grocery stores, walkable or not.
Which means, you can’t just only buy for today or the next day, and use what you need. Even if close enough, most of our grocery stores aren’t designed for “pop in for tonight’s dinner” shopping. Mainly because sizes are too big. You are not going to go through 4 tomatoes in one day. If you are, you scare me.
And, work schedules don’t allow for daily market trips. If you work a 9 to 5, nearly every decent grocery store will be out of stock of the most desirable items or closed by the time you get off work, fight traffic, and arrive. Not to mention, cooking food is already time consuming. Going to buy food on top? And how far the average grocery store will be? Yeah, right.
Food distribution systems assume weekly bulk buying. Like I said, you’re not going through 4 tomatoes in 1 day. 4 is the smallest I’ve ever seen, not including loose tomatoes. Oil, rice, eggs, butter, margarine, peanut butter, jam, bread. Even the small 500g bags of rice, that’s 3 meals for a family of 4. Imagine a single person. Chicken breasts, mince (although to a lower degree), etc. These are made for weekly buying.
So the fridge becomes needed infrastructure to compensate for car-dependent sprawl. In walkable cities with neighborhood markets, people in many countries, do exactly what I describe, buy fresh food for that day or next day, keep smaller fridges (or just the freezer compartment), less waste. We buy bulk because it’s cheaper per unit, but then waste half of it, so we didn’t actually save money. Plus the mental load of “what am I going to do with these 4 tomatoes?”. 12 is more common, actually, which is even worse!
There is also a feedback loop, and it goes something like this:
Essentially, we are trapped. Each element reinforces another, and unless every one is broken at once, it’s hard to change anything
This also leads to food waste. Instead of buying when we need, we buy in advance. When we inevitably don’t consume all of what we bought, or none at all, well, the result is obvious.
Maybe the culture of individualism enabled the car-dependent sprawl in the first place (everyone wants their own house with yard, screw public transit, etc.), which then required the big fridges as infrastructure compensation.
Who can afford daily shopping trips? As I mentioned, a 9 to 5 ain’t all too friendly. And, it shouldn’t be more expensive, but it is. Mainly because of cars, and things are cheaper in bulk. To buy daily and fresh needs time, energy after work, proximity to stores, and ability to carry smaller loads. A privilege in car dependent areas. But bulk buying need: upfront capital, storage space, reliable transportation, a big fridge, they both lock out different groups
There’s also something to be said about the energy usage of running huge fridges 24/7 vs more frequent trips. In my opinion, in a walkable city, if you don’t take your car, it is way better to buy frequently.
1920s-1940s:
1950s-1960s:
1970s-???:
The system older generations had milkmen, daily bakery visits, corner stores, walking to the butcher, required density and mixed-use neighborhoods. Once zoning separated everything and suburban development spread homes far apart, those businesses couldn’t survive. The infrastructure literally made walkable patterns illegal in most new development.
European cities largely avoided this because many rebuilt after WWII with different priorities, maintaining density and investing in public transit rather than highways through city centers.
There’s no individual solution (we’re trapped in infrastructure). Maybe, if policies were introduced to blend commercial and residential areas more, this could work better.
But lets be honest with ourselves. This will probably never happen.
So yeah, we’re stuck with giant humming boxes in our kitchens because we designed cities wrong 70 years ago. Cool. No pun intended