When you ask Jim Nanni a question about refrigerators, be prepared for a major data download.
As director of appliance testing at Consumer Reports, Nanni has tested thousands of refrigerators – with French doors, top freezer, double door to name a few. He can get statistics on capacities in cubic feet and ratings regarding energy use. So when he hears about a type of refrigerator that is new to him, it is remarkable. The term that sent it to the search engine: community refrigerator.
A community refrigerator is a common refrigerator like the ones Nanni has tried, but it is not installed in someone’s private kitchen. Instead, it is kept somewhere where the public can easily use it, often on the sidewalk or near a popular restaurant or store. And stocked by organized community groups or sometimes individual volunteers with fresh food, produce, and frozen items for anyone to eat, without limit and free of charge. Some have started calling them “freedges.”
The free food refrigerator is part of a growing global movement: there are freedges in places like India, Brazil and Slovakia, as well as more than 150 in the U.S. Their goal is to redistribute perfectly good food that would otherwise go to waste and unite people to combat the growing problem of hunger in underserved communities.
The consequences of the COVID pandemic – 19, as job losses and growing economic uncertainty, have brought the problem of food insecurity in the United States to the fore. An analysis of the data collected by the Household Opinion Survey, a nationally representative sample of households in the United States found that before 13 March 2020, around the 30% of households declared food insecurity; at the end of April, after the pandemic hit hard, that figure was 43%. A national representative Consumer Reports survey, conducted in August and September, also found that more Americans needed help obtaining food. About 2 of each 10 respondents said they had obtained food through a free distribution in the last year; half of those people shared that they had never sought free food distribution before the pandemic.
And while Nanni is quick to point out that most refrigerators are not made to withstand the elements in the air free, there are solutions. That’s what Anaika Forbes, from 36 years , discovered in July when he walked into his local Home Depot with $ 600 dollars and a petition. “I told them that I needed a refrigerator to go outside, and they answered, what?” Eventually, he bought a “beautiful” Magic Chef top freezer refrigerator from 10. 1 cubic foot that spent the night under a tarp after HashtagLunchbag Brooklyn’s Red Hook community refrigerator ribbon cutting, a group volunteers she coordinates.
Red Hook is a waterfront neighborhood in Northwest Brooklyn which in the decade of 1920 was one of the busiest ports in the world, but since then is in decline. The area, which was devastated by Superstorm Sandy in 2012, is home to the largest public housing development from Brooklyn, with about 6, 000 residents. Located on Columbia Street, a busy thoroughfare, the Red Hook Community Refrigerator is adjacent to Jam’It Bistro, a Caribbean restaurant, which also supplies the electricity to run it.
Forbes and others Volunteers take over the refrigerator, now housed in a custom-made wooden cabinet, stocked for their operating hours 7 days a week, from 11 am to 8 pm, a task that generally requires to be replenished every other day . Most of the food comes from donations made by local food companies, supermarkets and restaurants, and a small portion of the food is left by individuals.
For its inauguration on 16 August refrigerator It was filled with sandwiches, milk, fruit bowls, carrots, a Yoo-hoo 6-pack, and bottled water. “It was a rainy day, so there weren’t too many people, but by the time we cut the tape, a mother with two children walked over to the refrigerator and was able to get food for the night.” That was all the proof Forbes says it needed that “we were doing exactly what we intended to do.”
No waste
The goals of the community refrigerator movement are as varied as the communities they serve, according to Ernst Bertone-Oehninger, co-founder of Freedge.org, an organization that offers advice on starting and maintaining community refrigerators and maintains a database of refrigerators around the world.
“Here in the United States we are talking about mutual help to help people individually, the attitude to keep us fed,” he says. “That mentality is very much present in the refrigerator movement in the American community.”
For example, some community refrigerators, such as those run by a chapter of Veggie Mijas in Los Angeles, a collective led by women of color, aim to promote ecologically responsible plant-based diets by featuring vegan items or vegetarians. In Toronto, Road to Zero Waste has a refrigerator with food salvaged from supermarkets, restaurants, and farmers markets to mitigate the problem of food waste.
From 2014, Bertone-Oehninger, a Brazilian-born community organizer and Based in California, it has started freedges on 3 continents. In Germany, where the free refrigerator movement is believed to have started in 2012, the focus is on reducing food waste.
A study by the Institute for Sanitary Engineering, Water Quality and Solid Waste Management at the University of Stuttgart found that in 2011 the average German citizen threw away around 180 pounds of food per year. That’s a lot of meat, but food waste in the United States dwarfs that figure: A USDA study reported that the average American pulled around 273 pounds of food in 2008 .
By some measures, the United States is a world leader in food waste, and the 31% of it occurs at the retail and consumption levels, which includes from discarding products that do not exceed the size or appearance standards of stores from groceries to discarded food whose expiration date has passed. All that waste corresponds to roughly 133 billion pounds of food per year in landfills.
But given the enormity of food insecurity and food waste problems in the United States and elsewhere, many community refrigerator organizers admit that their “take whatever you need, leave what you can ”, however useful it may be, it can only be a small contribution.
“The refrigerator is a good starting point that helps put the community into action to solve problems, but it can only work if it is connected with other community action movements,” says Bertone- Oehninger.
Andy Fisher, co-founder and former CEO of Community Food Security Coalition, a national alliance of groups dedicated to improving access to food in urban communities, agrees.
“Refrigerators co They are wonderful, they are not institutionalized, they are not big business. They are a friendly way for neighbors to take care of each other, ”he says. “I think of them in the line of little free libraries that have appeared everywhere. But just as putting a book in the free community library will not solve illiteracy, putting your leftovers in a community refrigerator will not solve the problem of hunger ”.
Fisher believes that to truly fight hunger as a country we must rethink the way we conceive of the food safety net. In his book “Big Hunger: The Unholy Alliance Between Corporate America and Anti-Hunger Groups (The MIT Press, 2017), Fisher argues that “a hunger industrial complex,” a network of connections between large corporations, anti-hunger groups, and the government, in fact keeps the problem of hunger at bay. instead of trying to solve it.
Fisher argues that hunger is profitable for large companies, using Walmart as an example. It is the largest private employer in the United States and is also in the top 4 companies whose full-time employees receive government health and nutrition assistance, according to a 9-state survey by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). .
On 2012, Walmart redeemed around 18% of food through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, and the nation’s leading food and nutrition assistance program, according to the Wall Street Journal. In 2019, Walmart also donated 640 billion pounds of food to hunger groups in the United States. According to the Environmental, Social and Government Report of 2019 of the company itself, for which it can receive tax deductions.
In other words, Fisher argues, private companies like Walmart employ workers with wages that qualify them for government assistance, trade those government benefits for profits, and reduce their tax burden through cash donations. and charitable contributions.
“Maintaining the hunger problem is in everyone’s interest because some people earn good wages from it,” says Fisher. In his view, the current system allows the government to get away with it because it does not have to tackle the problem of hunger on a large scale, for example by increasing taxes.
After repeated attempts, Walmart did not respond to CR’s requests for comment.
Bertone-Oehninger and Fisher agree that the community refrigerator movement has been a useful force during the uncertainty of the global pandemic. But they would also like citizens to demand more corporate responsibility and government action to address the root causes of food insecurity, including stagnant wages, racism, unaffordable housing, and unfair labor practices.
“The amount of food charity, in terms of pounds of donated food, has doubled in the last decade, and this year it can’t even be measured,” says Fisher. “I don’t think anyone even knows how big it is. “The big question is, what will it take to fix the system so that we don’t depend so much on charity as a solution to hunger in this country?”
‘We have to attend to the need’
That question can be worthy of A serious questioning, but it’s not something Forbes at the Red Hook Community Refrigerator thinks much about.
“I got a call the other day from Hillshire Farm, and they said, ‘We have 10, 000 sausage units that we could give you, because they will expire at the end of December, ‘he says, explaining that he doesn’t care if the company gets a tax break by making the donation. “I really don’t go into the bigger picture of the politics of all this, because we have to address the need.”
But the bigger political picture is something millions of Americans are forced to confront. as the economy continues to reel from the COVID pandemic – 19. The USDA, which administers SNAP, reported that, on average, 35. 7 million people participated in the program each month in 2019, around 11% of population.
Some observers were disappointed when the president Elect Joe Biden nominated former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack as secretary of agriculture, instead of Congresswoman Marcia Fudge of Ohio, whom he appointed instead to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In addition to being a passionate advocate for expanding SNAP, Fudge is a longtime member of the House Agriculture Committee, where she chairs the nutrition subcommittee. His appointment could have marked a shift in focus so that the system does more to combat hunger.
Meanwhile, people in need have to survive, taking advantage of the few avenues they have.
In March of 2020, Carissa Crowley, of 37 years old, Oklahoma City was one of the millions of Americans who lost their jobs. Before the pandemic, he never sought food aid and, he says, “I pretty much got it on my own” working at a restaurant at Will Rogers World Airport. After being denied SNAP benefits in March, he went to a food bank at a local church. “My luck went from bad to worse, I didn’t have much food.”
In October he discovered OKCFreedge on Facebook, at 10 minutes from home that you share with your child from 17 years. “They help people who need it and who don’t have much at home,” he says. She is now a regular visitor to the refrigerator, where she says the row is usually around 20 people at 9 am His only criticism of community coolers is that there aren’t enough of them. “It would be nice if there were others out there.”
How You Can Help
The people who founded and maintain community refrigerators are not content to wait for government intervention to solve the problem of hunger and food insecurity. You can help them in their efforts:
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Refrigerators Community facilities are inherently local, so start where you are by talking to neighbors and friends about how they can support a refrigerator in your area. Or visit freedge.org, which has a registry of community refrigerators listed by city.
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Once you identify an organization , donate what you feel comfortable with. One strategy is to take advantage of “buy one, get second free” offers at grocery stores and donate free items.
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If you have used the time of pandemic inactivity to hone your culinary skills and would like to fill the refrigerator with homemade food, please contact the refrigerator operator for labeling protocol or any restrictions.
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If you are interested in starting a community refrigerator, contact an existing refrigerator operator in your area who can help you with local regulations. Freedge Yourself gives you a comprehensive guide of tips.
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Freedge.org also has a donation page where you can contribute, or apply for a micro grant to sponsor new community refrigerators.
And to find a Affordable and reliable refrigerator, use CR refrigerator ratings and check out our article on buying used appliances.
Consumer Reports is an independent, nonprofit organization that works side by side with consumers to create a fairer, safer, and healthier world. CR does not endorse products or services, and does not accept advertising. Copyright © 2020, Consumer Reports, Inc.
Consumer Reports has no financial relationship with the advertisers on this site. Consumer Reports is an independent, nonprofit organization that works with consumers to create a just, safe, and healthy world. CR does not endorse products or services and does not accept advertising. Copyright © 2021, Consumer Reports, Inc.
