Week 11: The de-refrigerator movement and alternative food networks

Module 4 — Resistance and reconstruction.

Having spent ten weeks on the diagnosis, this week is the constructive one, and it has to be careful. The de-refrigeration position is easily discredited by overreach — a vaccine cold chain and a domestic door shelf are not the same claim, and conflating them is the standard way this argument gets dismissed.

The eco-Marxist and degrowth frame is what keeps it honest. The problem is not the appliance; it is a mode of provisioning that requires continuous throughput, in which the fridge is a component. Degrowth asks what a materially smaller system that met needs better would look like, and refuses the assumption that less throughput means less wellbeing. Applied here, the question is not “should we abolish refrigeration” but “how much of this refrigeration is doing work for us, and how much is doing work for the system that sold it?”

Four antidotes are worth taking seriously, each of which existed before the fridge and none of which is nostalgia:

• Fermentation and pickling — preservation that improves food rather than suspending it, and that gives a household back a competence rather than a subscription.
• Root cellars and ambient storage — much of what we refrigerate does not require it, and different countries disagree sharply about which parts, which is the best evidence that the boundary is convention rather than physics.
• Community fridges and shared pantries — pooling storage so surplus moves sideways to someone who wants it instead of downwards into a bin.
• On-demand local agriculture and alternative food networks — shortening the chain so the cold chain has less to do.

Inherits from week 10: the appliance extracts in exchange for reassurance. This week asks how much of that reassurance was ever needed, and what could replace the rest.

Outline#

• eco-Marxism and degrowth: throughput, sufficiency and wellbeing
• fermentation as a competence rather than a nostalgia
• ambient storage, and the international disagreement about eggs
• community fridges and the sideways movement of surplus
• alternative food networks and food sovereignty
• what the de-refrigeration position is and is not claiming

Reading#

• Giorgos Kallis, Degrowth (2018) — introduction and the chapters on sufficiency
• Selected literature on food sovereignty and alternative food networks, distributed in class

Tutorial preparation#

The tutorial is a practical fermentation and sharing workshop. Bring a clean jar.