The refrigerator. Where would we be without it? Well, our electricity bills would probably be lower, but our food would go off really quickly, so it’s a bit of a give and take. However, what if there was a way to preserve our food without the use of refrigeration?
Save Food From The Fridge is a project by Jihyun David, who believes that we ‘don’t observe the food anymore and we don’t understand how to treat it’. So, she’s designed a way to preserve our food which is just that little bit greener than our standard refrigeration techniques. Her website states that ‘through research into the current situation of food preservation, I’ve learned that we hand over the responsibility of taking care of food to the technology, the refrigerator…my design looks at re-introducing and re-evaluating traditional oral knowledge of food, which is closer to nature. Furthermore, it aims to bring back the connections between different levels of living beings, we as human beings and food ingredients as other living beings’. 
Jihyun David has created some ways in which we can preserve food without the use of a fridge. For example, a shelf in which to keep eggs. Eggs, according to David, absorb ‘the odour and substance around itself very easily. This creates a bad taste if it’s kept in the fridge with other food ingredients. This shelf provides a place for eggs outside of the fridge. Also the freshness of eggs can be tested in the water. The fresher they are, the further they sink.’.
Another idea is a shelf that holds apples, with room below for potatoes. She says ‘Apples…emit a lot of ethylene gas. It has the effect of speeding up the ripening process of fruits and vegetables kept together with apples. When combined with potatoes, apples prevent them from sprouting’. Another interesting method that Save Food From the Fridge is hoping people will adopt is that of keeping vegetables in damp sand. Keeping vegetables in slightly damp sand has been a storage method for many centuries. For vegetables such as carrots, high humidity is just as important as low temperatures and keeping them in wet sand can be a compromise. Jihyun has designed a shelf in which the vegetables are kept upright in sand to prolong their freshness.
The question is, does it work? The more food you keep out of the fridge, the smaller it needs to be and therefore the less energy it will consume. These products are a take on the traditional methods of storing food, and storing them underground in a basement or a specially designed cellar will give better results. However, the products will hopefully encourage others to search for alternative storage solutions and to encourage households to become that little bit greener.
You can find out more here.
images belong to Save Food From the Fridge
Holly Martin
