While I am loving all these great ideas for alternatives to refrigerators, I want to just share that, while I live in an apartment in a city of 1.2 million people, I actually unplugged my refrigerator about a year ago and do not use one at all!
Besides wanting to reduce my climate footprint, it's also partly to push myself to be vegan, since it keeps me from buying dairy products. But even for dairy products, for example, if I buy free range eggs directly from farmers, they don't treat them like the industrial producers do and the eggs don't require refrigeration. Nevertheless, I only buy a few at a time and use them within 2 days.
Same with all of my food - I only buy what I know I am going to use in one to two days.
Obviously this works for me because I live very close to an excellent year round farmers market.
Although there have been a couple of times when I've been frustrated not to have refrigeration - and I do miss ice cream! - I want to challenge us all to think about why we believe without question that a refrigerator is necessary equipment.
Of course for anyone who has medical needs and must keep medicine refrigerated, I do not want to guilt trip you at all, so please don't hear this as such, in any way. You need your refrigerator and you should have one. Of course.
But, in regards to health, another thing to remember is that drinking very cold drinks is actually not healthy; room temperature water is much better absorbed than cold water is. In fact, drinking cold drinks triggers our internal temperature regulation system to heat us up to keep us at 98.6, so we are actually are not cooling ourselves off but heating ourselves up.
Finally, I have found that not having a refrigerator helps me to be much less wasteful of food. I can't throw something in a fridge drawer and forget it, then have to throw it out 2 weeks later when I realize something smells awful.
I hope this doesn't sound at all preachy or anything. I just want to suggest that there are other options!
