We Make Do Without A Refrigerator

If the Joenses can do it in south-central Texas... you should be able to do it no matter where you live!

About a year ago, we cranked our courage up and took a big step in the direction of self-sufficiency: we began to live without any refrigeration.

Since our somewhat remote home has no electricity, we'd been relying on two butane-powered fridges to keep our perishables cold. We'd also been watching in quiet desperation as butane prices soared out of sight. (It got to be downright maddening after a while.) Finally, when our gas bill went from astronomical to absurd, we just said, "That's it. No more refrigeration for us."

For the next week—as a steadily growing lump formed in our collective throat—we waited for the butane to run out. I guess, to be honest about it, we sorta hoped that final bottle of fuel would last forever . . . because when it was finally empty and the coolers' flames went out, we immediately panicked. Or to put it another way, our position was the classic one in which necessity suddenly becomes the mother of invention.

Then again, we didn't actually invent anything in the weeks that followed. We did, however, discover a few of the wholesome changes in one's lifestyle that can occur in the course of learning to live without refrigeration. And we found that the changeover to a freezerless existence was not as hard to make as we had imagined.

As we prepared for the switch, we asked some older friends how they'd gotten by without refrigerators years ago, BE (before electricity). Their answers usually involved putting milk and butter in a cistern, or storing perishables in a screened-in enclosure covered with a damp cloth (evaporation from the cloth would keep the box's contents somewhat cool).

Well, we'd already tried the second suggestion . . . with poor results. The humidity in our area was simply too high at the time of the experiment to allow much evaporation to take place. Thus, we gave up on the idea since—even though it may work during dry summer weather—we felt that any technique which couldn't be relied upon year round wasn't worth our time.

One trick we discovered early on which is useful during any of the four seasons is that food can be saved from spoiling if it is heated close to boiling every 24 hours. Apparently, this procedure kills the micro-organisms which are responsible for decay.