September 21, 2019 • 37 mins
Do you know that hulking refrigerator in your kitchen emits CO2 thanks to the electricity it uses each year? It's a comparatively small amount, in truth, but enough that some people have foresworn their fridge and adopted a life without one. See how they do it in this classic episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello everyone, it's your old pal Chuck one half of
Stuff you should Know. Josh is asleep. I can hear
him snoring next to me. And this episode for my
select pick, Could you Live without a Refrigerator? Sounds silly
from January two two. I guess it was our New
Year's special edish, but hey, can you live without a refrigerator?
(00:22):
It's really about slow food. Check it out right now.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of My
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w Chuck Bryant, and Terry's
(00:43):
over there. She's she's eating stalks of broccoli. Yes, not
in the floretts. She's eating chunky trunk. She throws the
floretts away. It's bizarre. No, she's I'm not into food way,
So she's eating every single bit. She's just munching on
it like a rabbit in there. Oh, I see you know.
Oh no that I look more closely, I see that.
You're right. That was just a clever lead into what
(01:04):
will be a great interrupt from you. No, that was
the interro. Okay, Jerry doesn't waste food. People, No food
waste is a terrible thing, and we're we're that's that's
only part of the tip of the iceberg of this
subject that we're about to touch. On the tip of
the ice box. This is a huge, rambling, enormous topic
that we're about to tackle. See, Chuck, you've heard of
(01:28):
green eco friendliness. Yeah, yeah, we like eco consciousness. You'd
like to push that racket when we can. Yeah, what
said is like more and more today it seems to
be well, there's parts that have becoming green, like people recycle,
and like recycling is just the thing now, it's not
going anywhere. Like if you don't recycle, now you're kind
of like one of those people that throws cigarettes out
(01:49):
the window. Yeah, that's pretty bad too. You know a
lot of people still do that. Yeah, but I think
not to get off on my high horse, but I
think a lot of the people that toss the cigarettes
out the window probably like would say it's someone through
a McDonald's back out the window. They'd be like, how
can you do that? Yeah, Like they justify cigarettes somehow.
(02:10):
I've seen that people throw those things out like eco
friendly people. I think just eco friendly smokers, I think
justify that because it's like, well, you still don't want
to cigarette in your car? Do you write, dude? Because
they stink they're there, It'll end up in in a
lake or something. A birdle eat it? Did you know that?
I was at um the gas station the other day
and I saw a guy driving off and as he
(02:31):
drove off, he held his hand out the window and
released a stack of apparently losing lottery tickets a stay.
I'm talking like thirty, just right into the parking lot.
I couldn't believe my eyes. I mean, it's a joke now.
Literally on Anchorman in the original anchor Man, when they
finish all of their McDonald's, they just throw all their
stuff like in the park and the Madman had one
(02:54):
of those two they had like a family picnic, and
afterward they gathered up their stuff and just like picked
up the mine and throw all the trash out. We're like,
let's go right, That's how it used to be, though. Yeah,
isn't that weird that that used to be a thing
that it's okay to throw trash on the ground and
it's it's not okay, but some people still do it.
I've seen it, right, Um. But the point is, I
(03:15):
am making a point here. Believe it or not, there
is some parts of the green movement that have become entrenched,
ensconced in the mainstream culture, and it's having an impact.
It's having a real factor. It's not having enough of
an effect. We're all headed for global catastrophe eventually. Um.
But when we when we think about the green movement now,
(03:38):
it almost seems past tense like it was. There's parts
of it that seemed like a bit of a fad,
you know what I mean, like being green? How green
can you go? Like what can you do? And uh,
there was this thing that kind of popped up in
two thousand nine because of a New York Times article, um,
where people were starting to give up the refrigerators. Oh yeah,
(04:02):
as part of the green movement to be green, to
basically like say I'm greener than now. Right, you get
the impression that that's what they're doing. Ultimately they're saying, no,
it's just one less thing that's using up um electricity,
so it's saving c O two emissions. But it seems
to me to fall along the line of the people
who like had themselves sterilized so they couldn't contribute to
(04:26):
the growing population, global population. You're saying those are about
the same, it seems to me, although the the refrigerator
one is far more reversible because you just go out
and buy a refrigerator and plug it in. Then bam,
I'm back baby. Well you can reverse your your procedure
(04:48):
to not have kids to these days. Yeah, I think
it's kind of it's a roll of the dice. Oh
really was if it'll work again? Oh? I thought you
could get it REVERSI open the sweat. They can, you know,
reverse it, but it doesn't necessarily work. Okay, I thought
it was pretty good. All right, man, that was a sidebar.
(05:08):
Uh So should we talk about food waste? Well, let's
talk about this refrigerator thing. You're really fixated on the
food waste thing, aren't you. Well, it's a big part
of whether or not you can go without a fridge. Well,
let's let's talk about what happens or why people go
without a fridge first, chuck, if feel bear with me.
So people are pulling the plugs on these refrigers, or
they were in two thousand nine, or at least three
people were in two thousand nine one in Canada. I
(05:31):
think yeah, um, and but I get the impression from
reading the original New York Times article that there were
there were, It was just kind of the sub thing
among the green It wasn't all the rage. No, like
bamboo flooring a cork flooring. No. And the New York
Times article pointed out that it seems to be a
dividing line among green the eco conscious in the eco crazy. Yeah,
(05:56):
like where some people say that's preposterous, that's the dumbest
thing I've ever heard, And then other people were like,
look at how far I'm willing to go to be green.
So what's the what's the benefit of all that? Well,
a refrigerator uses electricity, and I guess we can give
you a couple of stats to bring it all home
(06:16):
for you. Typical fridge post two thousand uses about four
watts per year. Yeah, that's thanks to the Energy Star ratings. Yeah,
which is better than it used to be for sure. Um.
And if you want to translate that into uh, cheeseburgers,
no way, into miles driven in your car, because we're
(06:37):
talking about the emission of c O two. Uh, that's
about eight hundred miles driving your car about eight hundred
miles depending on what kind of mile did you get
because really it's gallons of gas. Uh yeah. So even
then in the article they point out that it's kind
of low on the list. It ranks behind clothes dryer,
(07:00):
central air in your furnace. Yeah, your furnace is like
six thousand kilowats a year. It's amazing. So you're you're
a refrigerator um is four and fifty kilowat hours of
electricity per year. So it's not even super high up
in your household. No, it's nowhere near. But I think
the people who are pulling the plugs on these refrigerators
are saying every little bit counts. Yeah, and they probably
(07:22):
have already taken other green precautions, like they probably don't
run their furnace like this, you know, like they might
have a pot belly stone. They they better not if
they use a normal old like yeah, terrible electric furnace.
They then I'm going to go to their house and
have a little chance like shaking outside their house. Yet
(07:44):
they're eating out of a glocooler, right, and that's what
they do. I mean, like when when when you pull
the plug on the fridge. I wish I could just
come up with another phrase that rolls off the tongue.
So I'm tired of saying that when you go out
a refrigerator dee fridge defridge chuck nice. When you de
fridge um, you still need typically some source of cooling
(08:09):
inside of your home, something that can keep some food
items from perishing, because we apparently refrigerate a lot of
stuff we don't need to. That is true. Yeah, you
can keep that ketchup and mustard out on the counter
hot sauce. Oh yeah, I've read it goes three years
in a regular pantry. Really, Rachi, just keep it out there. Yeah,
we kept growing up, kept a lot of stuff out
(08:31):
of the fridge, and not for any reason other than
that's just how it was in my house. Like I
remember butter like in a tray on the counter. Butter
is better that way. Room tip. Oh man, are you
kidne me? Yeah, it's like it's already it's so spread herble.
I keep mine in the fridge just to keep it
longer because they don't need that much butter. But man,
if you go to a restaurant and they give you
(08:54):
butter and it's cold, just like, what do you do?
It's literally Emily's big pet peeve is well, I agree
with cold rolls with cold butter or hot rolls with
cold but Yeah, because you get the hot rolls, you
think this place knows what they're doing, and you get
this cold pad of butter. So I've developed the technique, Um,
you know, the under the arm pit method that well,
(09:14):
it's close. It's it's you just cut your hands and
you put a couple of those little foil wrapped You
want to make sure it's wrapped in foil pats of
cold butter, and you heat them up pretty quick. And
I'll tell you what. You can make some friends around
the table if you eat somebody's butter up for him,
because nobody likes cold button. Then you hand them a
little butter pat and you're like, here, take this, it's
my gift to you. I like it when they just
(09:36):
have a little olive oil and balstomic enegar. You know
that's good too. But I like good room temperature butter,
especially like milk fat content or more good butter. Um. So,
like I said, I like butter out. We left Um
remember certain condiments being left out? What about fruits and vegetables? Um, yeah,
like a lot of vegetables. I don't refriger right now,
(09:59):
Like I never frigerate peppers and onions, and well you
don't want to. If you do refrigerate an onion, it
will last longer. But if you're going to use it,
you want to take it out of your refrigerator and
bring it up to room temperature before you cook with
it or use it in food, because it takes a
lot of the temperature white. But that's also a tip
if you hate crying. Um oh yeah, because if you
(10:22):
cut a cold onion, the enzyme that eventually sets off
the chain reaction that makes you cry is contained. It's
not as volatile. I've noticed that. So that's your your
tip from Chuck and Josh my eyes killed me too.
With onions, it depends on the onion. And it's not
just like oh it's a little tears. It's like massive burning.
(10:44):
It's really bad. Really Yeah, yeah, you should super sensitive.
I did it. Don't be dumb on it. That explains
exactly what's going on with you. I've seen that. Okay,
so you know, um so yeah, a lot of the
vegetables I don't keep, like it depends on when I'm
gonna eat it. If I bring home some like a
big head of cauliflower. I'll keep that out in the
fruit basket for a couple of days. I've never seen
(11:05):
that before my entire life. What cauliflower out? Yeah, I've
only seen it in like a crisper drawer. Yeah, I've
left cauliflower and broccoli out like green onions, and I
can see that lemongrass, garlic, of course, Potatoes I don't
want to refrigerate. I think I would like stop short
in the point if I saw like cauliflower out in
(11:26):
like a fruit pat be like, what is that? That's
just fine. I haven't even been to your house. I
didn't notice that. Well, I mean I don't always have,
had you gone through the coliflower, yeah, just eating it um.
Tomatoes are another one too. There they'll last longer in
the fridge, but if you're gonna cook with them, you
want to bring up to the room temperature. Some stuff
you just don't want to refrigerate. Potatoes apparently don't do
(11:47):
very well in the fridge. You put them in a
nice brown paper sack in your pantry away from the sunlight.
They keep for a really long time. Yeah, you know, Jerry,
I think Jerry showed me the little trick was that
you with the cilantro Jerry and the what I need
to know this because I eat a lot of cilantro.
You the cilantro you don't use Just fill up a
glass like half full of water and just throw it
(12:07):
in there and just leave it in your out in
your kitchen. Oh yeah, like the base of it in
the water and just stay fresh, like super long. And
you know, the fridge can beat up cilantro after like
a day or two. I like your optimism, by the way,
thank you. Um, the avocado is what always kills me though.
I well, I eat a lot of avocado as well.
(12:28):
It's hard to keep those fresh. Uh, tried a lot
of tricks too. Well, here's here's your trick. You're ready, okay?
Oh you're cutting up an avocado and like, yeah, that's
it for the avocado. I have no trick for that. Well,
what do you eat a whole? Yeah? Pretty much. I
don't understand what. Well, I don't know. I don't like
eat the skin and everything. No, that's not what I mean.
(12:49):
It's like, once I could into an avocado, all of
that avocado is about to be consumed by me. So
that's the tip. Yeah, but I do have another tip
for you though. With avocados. You know how you go
to the store and you like squeeze them, and you
you can find one out of a hundred and fifty
that's squeeze a bowles. Pretty annoying, it is. But that
squeezed one is gonna be nasty and bruised and just disgusting.
(13:13):
There's gonna be basically like rot wherever you and everybody
else squeeze that avocado. So you can have a lot
less usable avocado. So you want to get one that
you can't squeeze. It's so firm it can't be squeezed well.
But then you just have to wait a few days
to eat it. You can wait one day, it's all
it takes, my friend. And here's how. You take a
brown paper bag and buy a banana, and you put
(13:34):
the banana and the avocados in the brown paper bag,
roll it up pretty tight, but leave a little space
in there. And they do it, and the game right,
they get it on, uh, And what happens is the
avocados ripening. Really yeah. The the banana as it ripens, well,
it puts off a gas interesting um that ripens the
(13:55):
avocados I'm gonna try that, and I'm not kidding. Twelve
to twenty four hours you have totally ready avocado. Yeah,
because I like my avocados firm still. Oh, you're gonna
love this, Chuck, and not mushy but not not hard
but just firm. You're gonna thank me later. I'm excited
about your avocado experiences now I am too. So there's
(14:16):
plenty of stuff that doesn't need refrigerating, So that's one
way that people can defridge. Yeah, this is turning into
like food one on one with Josh and Chuck. Yeah,
I hope that's okay. Um. Yeah, plenty of stuff that
you don't have to refrigerate. Um, but people still use
some sort of cooling mechanism. Yeah, like a cooler, Like
if you have meats or dairy products. Um, if you
(14:39):
want to go without a fridge, most people use a cooler.
And the thing that annoy me with this article, as
they said, or they use a mini freezer to make ice.
I'm like, well, that's probably just about as bad as
you're stupid fridge. Well, it's pretty close. So like one
of those little chest freezers. Um, I didn't see the
size of it. Oh a six point four cubic feet
chest freezer, which isn't big, but it's not that small. Um,
(15:02):
But apparently that's the that's the thing that people who
defridge use. That still uses two kilowatt hours a year.
So really, by unplugging your refrigerator and using a chest freezer,
you're saving about fifteen gallons of gas a year. Yeah.
I don't know if that's your best, like spend your
time doing better things for the environment and the well. Again,
(15:24):
I think people who do this are saying, I'll do
this on top of stuff and then kind of cleverly,
if you ask me, they're using this the ice chest
to um will basically fill up like a two lead
bottle of water which they didn't allow to go to waste,
the two leader bottle um, putting those in the freezer chest,
and then having like a separate cooler that they put
(15:46):
the frozen water bottles in to keep cool their milk
and their meats and stuff like that. Uh yeah, and well,
you know what, we're going to talk about some tips
for shopping to accommodate in this lifestyle. But porst, let's
take a little message right all right, So you're talking
(16:18):
about the cooler full of frozen bottles of water to
keep like your milk in some of your dairy and stuff.
But if you when you go to the store, if
you're gonna try and live this way, you can't probably
buy the gallons of milk unless you really go through
a lot of milk. You might want to buy quartz
of milk. You can't go to Sam's Club and buy
eight gallons of mayonnaise unless you eat that pretty quickly.
(16:44):
If you should focus more attention on your mayonnaise habits
than what you're doing for the environment. So you're gonna
have to buy smaller amounts of things, which they say
can cost a little more. But if you're not wasting
food though, like if you added up the food you waste,
you're probably burning a lot of money and there's gonna
be far less food waste if you're buying in smaller amounts. Right.
The other the other side of that, though is um
(17:04):
if you're you know, eco friendly or eco conscious, um,
you're one of the things that you're probably trying to
avoid is packaging as well. And if you buy smaller
amounts of food, that means you buy more packages. And
think about that, and if you have smaller amounts of food.
That means you have to go to the store more often,
and then you may have to drive more often, which
(17:25):
doesn't matter if you're riding a bike or something like that,
but if you're driving a car, then you're burning those
gallons of gas that you might necessarily not have been anyway. Yeah,
you like you get in your old seventy to pickup
truck and drive the twelve miles to get like a
pint of Mannames. You have to stuff and fill up
at least once during that. So can we talk a
(17:46):
little bit about food waste though, Yeah, because it's a
it's a pretty big thing. Like if you have no refrigerator,
the chances of your food spoiling just simply increase if
you have no refrigerator. Well not so apparently, according to
a report, and less develop countries they have no refrigerators,
(18:09):
they experience less food spoilers. Bam, you just faced me,
because they're like they're eating what they need. You know,
they're not going to Sam's Club and buying seven dred
chicken McNuggets to put in the freezer. I hear that,
And I guess if somebody who defridges uses the developing
world as a model for their food consumption. Yeah. I
(18:31):
wonder what hang ups there are though that would keep
you from successfully doing that, or if it is just
entirely possible to just watch how you're eating enough so
you don't have very much food waste. Let's talk food
waste finally, Uh, in developing countries, post harvest losses of
food grains can reach his high dude in developing countries,
(18:55):
and that a sad statistic. Yeah, because one of the
things that makes that, so, said Chuck, is that that
food has been harvested and is ready to go. So
not only is it ready to go, it just doesn't
make it to somebody's stomach. Um, all of the energy
used to produce, harvest, and transport that food has already
(19:20):
been used as well. Yeah, I didn't think about that.
So that's a huge waste there too, since as food waste,
you add a double bummer onto every bummer that I expressed.
I'm good at it. The US spends about a billion
dollars a year to dispose of food waste in this
country a billion dollars a year, and the e p
A says that food leftovers are the single largest part
(19:41):
of our waste stream by weight. Right, they make up
about twelve percent of municipal landfills, which are pretty awful
word in and of themselves, because municipal landfills are responsible
for about thirty four of methane emissions globally, or at
least in the US, and methane is twenty one times
(20:02):
more damaging as a greenhouse gas than CEO two. Yeah,
and all that food waste is producing like tons of methane, yeah,
which is I don't understand why we're not trapping that
methane and burning it off as energy. I know there
are some pilot projects, but I don't understand why it's
not a bigger thing now. Yeah, didn't we study something
about cow farts? Yeah? I saw that. I seemed that
(20:25):
rings a bell from the past. Yeah. Livestock is a
huge contributor to methane emissions UM, and nobody knows what
to do about it. But there were plans to kind
of try to trap it and burn it for electricity.
I think there was a farmer who was doing he
was using cow poop or something. I think that Dirty
Jobs episode did something like that. I definitely remember looking
at that UM. But I agree methane, let's trap it.
(20:47):
Hey there's a T shirt. So yeah, so food waste
is a I thought it was. The potential was increased
without a refrigerator. You've opened my eyes here. Um. But
another those those double bummers that I did, add the
more packaging and more trips to the store. Um again
if you have if you lived near a store, you
(21:11):
can bike two or something like that. Um that gets
around that. And then also if you are one of
those zero waste people, like have you heard of b Johnson? Yeah,
she's pretty remarkable. What's her website? Uh? It is zero
Waste Home. Yeah, she's one of these people that is
doing like the family experiment, like let's see what we
(21:33):
can really do and putting it, putting it on a blog.
She Um, I think her family is the one that
has produced a court of waste in a year, a
quart of trash in a in a year. Everything else
is reused. She has five rs. You think your three
RS are worthwhile reduced reuse, recycle? What are her other two? Refuse?
(21:55):
So she's saying like, even if it's free, you know
that free frisbee the chiropractor gives you, say you don't
want it? I do that a lot. Actually, I don't
want a lot of that junk. Okay, So you're in
line with this reduce, which would be you know, say,
using your own, um, your own grocery bags. Oh sure, yeah,
so you're reducing the use of the store's grocery bag reuse,
(22:19):
So don't throw your own grocery bag away right, use
it again? Uh, recycle, Yes, you've heard of this one. Sure.
And then rot chuck rot like rotten. H If you're
not gonna do this, I think so that's the last one.
What do you mean by rot? I'm sure composting okay, Yeah,
(22:40):
And like you said about the people that like I
want to go without a fridge, but I'm gonna go
to the grocery store every ten minutes to get a
packet of mayonnaise. I don't think that's the case. Like,
I bet a lot of those people are growing food
in their gardens and composting and like probably not doing that.
And plus also she points out b Johnson points out that, um,
a lot of the stuff that we would consider or
(23:00):
food waste, like you know, grocery stores food waste to
me is a I think we should do a whole
podcast on it. It is fascinating, mind boggling the amount
of waste we produce food wise. I've read that something
like a third a third of all of the food
in the world goes to waste one way or another,
(23:20):
either like in the developing world, doesn't make it after
being wasted. UM. Food waste from the United States, in
the grocery stores in the US, there's any kind of
cosmetic imperfection, if it's not pretty enough, they just throw
it away. There's nothing wrong with it, but it'll just
get tossed. Yeah, that's I don't think I would like
to know what goes on behind the scenes of like
(23:40):
a huge grocery chain. I think we need to get
to the bottom of it, an expose perhaps. But but B.
Johnson points out, UM, a lot of this stuff that
even people at home would consider wasted, spoiled food, UM,
can be reused. So like if you have a bunch
of stale bread, make bread pudding. UM, if you have
some will to lettuce, drop it in an ice bath
(24:01):
and it wakes back up stale bread to the birds.
That's nice. Like when I have moldy bread, always just
like go out and throw it and then do you
eat the birds afterwards? Are you like raising them? Yeah,
I get my baby gun. You don't even need a
because you just teach them to eat out of your
hand and then grab them, snaff a little neck, and
(24:23):
you got brown thrasher for dinner. That's our state bird.
We get in trouble for that, would we? Yeah, you
can't kill your state bird. I figured it was the
state bird because it was the tastiest bird. I don't
think so, sk So you dug this up. This is
(24:57):
pretty interesting. Um, if you want to talk about people
really go in the extra mile to not have a
carbon footprint. Some folks are making on their own shoes
out of old tires and old jeans and hemp of course. Okay, yeah,
not much arch support though apparently right, it's sort of
like a moccasin. I would imagine you can eat your
(25:19):
weeds in your yard, right if you're into that. Um,
A lot of edible weeds like garlic, mustard or chickweed. Yeah,
I mean, like, what's a weed but some plant that
we decided we didn't want. Yeah. I read something somewhere
about the human diet. How um it's become so narrow.
We used to eat a lot more stuff that a
lot more weeds, um and as a result, our health
(25:43):
was a lot better. The bitter. I think we talked
about it before. Have you Have you gotten to the
point to where everything we talked about rings a bell?
Like we've mentioned everything before. Yeah, a world is getting narrower.
But um, I feel like we've talked about before. The
bitter the plant, the healthier it tends to be. And
(26:04):
I think you said also bitterness though also um so
suggests that as poisonous too. Well, that is part of
the edibility test, and you shouldn't just go in your
yard and just pull a bunch of weeds and eat them.
Not everything is edible. Dying is not that green. Oh,
but if you do have edible weeds and you want
to add them as in your salads or something, that's
(26:25):
that's something that some people do. Some people. Some people
use old license plates to side their houses. Is that true?
It's in this article, of course it's true. I bet you,
I bet you. That's the thing. I could see that,
and you know what, why not? That's they're just going
to waste, you know, all license plates. We got a
(26:46):
birdhouse made out of license plates. Oh, those are cute.
That's all right. We got it because it was Ohio, California,
and Georgia, which was Emily's three states, which is kind
of weird. So triumphant, I gotta have this. Do you
use it for BB gun practice? No, that's just birds. Um.
You know, I shot an animal once in my life
(27:07):
and it was one of the worst things that had
ever happened to me. I was too young, I gotta
be begun, and I was tired of shooting cans. So
I shot a squirrel and it haunts me to this day.
And I'm not pooping hunters. If you're into that, that's fine.
I'm just not into it. So I shot a squirrel
when I was twelve. You're haunted. I want to come clean. Yeah,
all right. So what's this poop burger thing? I couldn't
(27:31):
find any any corroborating evidence, but basically, there was a
a story that popped up on a couple of blogs
about a Japanese scientist who had basically converted human feces
into an edible burger. And the two blog posts I saw,
we're basically piggybacking off of each other, and the original
source led to a four or four era, so I
(27:53):
think it's I think the American press accidentally picked up
a yes Man article or like that. You know, well,
how about if if anyone can corroborate corroborate, I have
the worst time with that word. Can corroborate? Yeah, I
can't never say the word right. Corroborate, coroborate, corrobor rate,
(28:14):
corrobor rate. There you go. Can we put a ding
ding ding in there to post production? So if anyone
can let us know that this story is true, then
uh yeah, yeah, I'd love to know that. Yeah, let
us know there are speaking of fecal material though, chuck.
There there was also this green movement to give up
toilet paper. Oh I heard about that. Do you remember
(28:35):
that huge ball in Uh that was the size of
a school bus that was made of um like handy
wipes and fat in London. I don't remember that. It
was this fatty deposit made up of grease and used
handy white. Is it like an art project? No, it
was trapped in the London sewer system. Okay, I thought
(28:56):
display or something. No, God, no, no, remember that that's
it was. That's horrific. It was within the last year.
Um well, anyway, uh I guess some people are taking
this even further and saying, not even toilet paper will
touch my bottom. Instead, I'm going to use um basically diapers, Oh,
just like cloth squares. So you keep a pail of
(29:18):
clean ones on one side and a dirty pail on
the other, and then you just wash the poopy ones
and you're green. Huh. I don't think I would go
that far. I don't think, but I am interested in
a in a bid day because I do think toilet
paper is disgusting, like taking dry, thin paper and wiping
(29:42):
poop from your skin. It I don't get it, and
it's never made sense to me really, even as a child.
Well no, since I got grown enough to realize that
moisture is a pretty nice thing to happen if you're
cleaning poop. Yeah, you just pull a little vaseline in there.
So a bidday, i'd be into a biday, okay. And
(30:03):
I'm exclusively with the wet wipes. Well, you're contributing to
the huge fat deposit ball and what it was made up.
Even those that say they're flushable, it's it's probably a
bunch of bunk. The London thing proves it as bunk,
and for some reason. I don't remember why, but like
it was almost exclusively wet wipes and fat grease, Like
(30:25):
they were attracted to one another or something like that. Maybe,
So I don't understand it all right. Do you think
they'd be like a squirrel or the remnants of a
squirrel right in there something? But no, it's just wet
wipes and grease. Holy cal Well, I got Let's get
this one back on the rails and finish it up. Huh,
(30:46):
I don't have anything else. Did you see the Albert
Einstein refrigerator? Oh that's like no electricity whatsoever. That makes sense. Well,
it does need a source of heat. Um. But I
think Einstein in one of his former students, developed a
refrigerator that has no moving parts. Requires it could be
(31:06):
run on solar energy, but basically it uses um. You know,
when you lower the pressure, the atmosphere pressure of something,
it's boiling temperaturewards as well. Uh. And then when you
boil something, it sucks energy out of the surrounding atmosphere
and lowers the temperature. That's basically this kind of Rube
Goldberg esque Einstein invention that this guy in Oxford was
(31:30):
trying to rebuild. He made a test pilot version of it,
but it's like not very efficient. I think that's a
new not a new thing, but a lot. I've seen
a lot of stuff lately about people remaking like some
early inventions that were never able to be properly made. Yeah,
I think you were talking about that, like Da Vinci
stuff that. Yeah, there's a TV show where they definitely
(31:52):
did the Da Vinci stuff, but those were mainly like
weapons and things. But I did see a video the
other day that someone made a Da Vinci a musical
instrument that Da Vinci invented that was never properly made,
and it was look like a played like a piano,
but it sounded like strings and it was it was
really kind of awesome. Yeah. So that's a long way
of saying, build this fridge behind the Einstein fridge. Well,
(32:16):
there's other things you can do too. If you have
a fridge and you don't feel like giving up your fridge.
If you have a fridge that's older than two thousand
and you have a little bit of dough, go buy
an energy star rated one. Yeah. Throw that other one
in a landfill, right, Um, No use it as like
a planter or something out in your backyard to grow
food in. Yeah, you can always sell a fridge. Yeah,
(32:37):
like any appliance that works, you can sell to somebody.
You just want to take the door off to make
sure no little kids get trapped in it or Indiana Jones,
that's right. Um. You also, if you do have an
energy star rated fridge, you want to clean the coils
off once a year. That will keep it running efficiently,
right exactly. Um, you want to think about what you're
going to open the fridge to get, so you don't
(32:59):
just stand there with the fridge open like a slack
jawed yokel like everybody does. Right. And then apparently if
you keep your fridge fairly stocked, um, that will allow
it to um the temperature to to bounce back to
where it needs to be. It has less um atmosphere.
Cool my fridge. You have to open to get the
(33:20):
water filtered water, which really bugs me. It's not like
in the outside of the door. I've never seen that. Yeah,
you just live in a cuckoo house. You've got cauliflower around.
You got to open the door to get some water.
That cilantro sitting and cups all over the house. That's
a good idea. I've tried that, but put it in
the fridge and it just wrecks it. So I guess
(33:40):
maybe just leaving it out. I mean, it would lasts
for quite a while. Man, I love that stuff. Ye
don't you feel bad for people who taste dish soap
when they eat cilantro? Yeah? I love cilantro, me too, Muddy. Well,
let's it about cilantro. If you want to learn more
about it, you can type the word into the it's
part how stuff works, and you can also type in
(34:02):
can I go without a refrigerator in the search barnell
bring this article up? Uh And since I said search bar,
that means it's time for listener mayo. Yeah, I'm gonna
call this from one of our law enforcement officers. Hey, guys,
my name is Andy m a police officer for a
law enforcement agency in St. Louis, Missouri area. Go Cardinals.
(34:25):
I'm a big fan of the show and appreciate the
always new interesting topics and discussions. And I've noticed that
you seem to have an affinity for law enforcement related topics,
which is true. You definitely do you love them. I
would just listen. I think I wanted to be a
cop or something. Maybe you can be a security card.
That's not the same. I was just listening to the
(34:46):
meth podcast and notice that you mentioned one of the
first shaken bake incidences, and that's a mobile meth lab. Apparently,
that's like the coupling go which occurred actually in my
precinct at a Walmart. Remember we talked about that. Um
I was not yet employed there, but I know one
of the officers, uh, I know the officer that responded
what I understand, a woman was shop lifting, was in
(35:07):
custody of the loss prevention officers when they called for
police assistance. My now coworker arrested her and in the
process discovered a Gatorade bottle in her purse which is
being used as a mobile meth lab. That's so crazy.
It is very crazy. Meth usage in the area that
I work in is rampant, and only having been on
the force less than a year, I've already handled two
(35:27):
meth labs of my own. Having seen firsthand some of
the reactions to meth that these folks have, I will
say that you were pretty much right on, guys. Additionally,
another unfortunate situation is that, uh, where there is a
meth lab. Typically there are children. One of my meth
labs was also home to seven kids. It's a really
sad sight to see. You remember that one episode of
(35:47):
Breaking Bad, which one the one where Pinkman basically gets
kidnapped by those meth addicts who robbed And typically you
will find that the parents have little interest in their
children and pay them very little attention in general. Well,
of course, because they're all interested in using math. It's
kind of a one track mind situation. So it makes
(36:12):
you appreciate non Matthews. So it's just what Andy says,
So thanks Andy Officer. Yeah, he wrapped that up at
the end and spanked it on the bottom. He had
he had another part, So that might have read awkward
a suggestion which I can cut out, but I may.
I took the suggestion, but I just didn't read it.
Is it a mystery suggestion? Then? Um, yeah, maybe that's
surprise you. Well, if you want to send us a
(36:32):
mystery suggestion, we are welcome to those. You can tweet
to us at s Y s K Podcast. You can
join us on Facebook dot com slash stuff you Should Know,
or you can send us an email to Stuff Podcast
at how Stuff works dot Com. Stuff You Should Know
is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For
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(36:54):
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hello everyone, it's your old pal Chuck one half of
Stuff you should Know. Josh is asleep. I can hear
him snoring next to me. And this episode for my
select pick, Could you Live without a Refrigerator? Sounds silly
from January two two. I guess it was our New
Year's special edish, but hey, can you live without a refrigerator?
(00:22):
It's really about slow food. Check it out right now.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of My
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w Chuck Bryant, and Terry's
(00:43):
over there. She's she's eating stalks of broccoli. Yes, not
in the floretts. She's eating chunky trunk. She throws the
floretts away. It's bizarre. No, she's I'm not into food way,
So she's eating every single bit. She's just munching on
it like a rabbit in there. Oh, I see you know.
Oh no that I look more closely, I see that.
You're right. That was just a clever lead into what
(01:04):
will be a great interrupt from you. No, that was
the interro. Okay, Jerry doesn't waste food. People, No food
waste is a terrible thing, and we're we're that's that's
only part of the tip of the iceberg of this
subject that we're about to touch. On the tip of
the ice box. This is a huge, rambling, enormous topic
that we're about to tackle. See, Chuck, you've heard of
(01:28):
green eco friendliness. Yeah, yeah, we like eco consciousness. You'd
like to push that racket when we can. Yeah, what
said is like more and more today it seems to
be well, there's parts that have becoming green, like people recycle,
and like recycling is just the thing now, it's not
going anywhere. Like if you don't recycle, now you're kind
of like one of those people that throws cigarettes out
(01:49):
the window. Yeah, that's pretty bad too. You know a
lot of people still do that. Yeah, but I think
not to get off on my high horse, but I
think a lot of the people that toss the cigarettes
out the window probably like would say it's someone through
a McDonald's back out the window. They'd be like, how
can you do that? Yeah, Like they justify cigarettes somehow.
(02:10):
I've seen that people throw those things out like eco
friendly people. I think just eco friendly smokers, I think
justify that because it's like, well, you still don't want
to cigarette in your car? Do you write, dude? Because
they stink they're there, It'll end up in in a
lake or something. A birdle eat it? Did you know that?
I was at um the gas station the other day
and I saw a guy driving off and as he
(02:31):
drove off, he held his hand out the window and
released a stack of apparently losing lottery tickets a stay.
I'm talking like thirty, just right into the parking lot.
I couldn't believe my eyes. I mean, it's a joke now.
Literally on Anchorman in the original anchor Man, when they
finish all of their McDonald's, they just throw all their
stuff like in the park and the Madman had one
(02:54):
of those two they had like a family picnic, and
afterward they gathered up their stuff and just like picked
up the mine and throw all the trash out. We're like,
let's go right, That's how it used to be, though. Yeah,
isn't that weird that that used to be a thing
that it's okay to throw trash on the ground and
it's it's not okay, but some people still do it.
I've seen it, right, Um. But the point is, I
(03:15):
am making a point here. Believe it or not, there
is some parts of the green movement that have become entrenched,
ensconced in the mainstream culture, and it's having an impact.
It's having a real factor. It's not having enough of
an effect. We're all headed for global catastrophe eventually. Um.
But when we when we think about the green movement now,
(03:38):
it almost seems past tense like it was. There's parts
of it that seemed like a bit of a fad,
you know what I mean, like being green? How green
can you go? Like what can you do? And uh,
there was this thing that kind of popped up in
two thousand nine because of a New York Times article, um,
where people were starting to give up the refrigerators. Oh yeah,
(04:02):
as part of the green movement to be green, to
basically like say I'm greener than now. Right, you get
the impression that that's what they're doing. Ultimately they're saying, no,
it's just one less thing that's using up um electricity,
so it's saving c O two emissions. But it seems
to me to fall along the line of the people
who like had themselves sterilized so they couldn't contribute to
(04:26):
the growing population, global population. You're saying those are about
the same, it seems to me, although the the refrigerator
one is far more reversible because you just go out
and buy a refrigerator and plug it in. Then bam,
I'm back baby. Well you can reverse your your procedure
(04:48):
to not have kids to these days. Yeah, I think
it's kind of it's a roll of the dice. Oh
really was if it'll work again? Oh? I thought you
could get it REVERSI open the sweat. They can, you know,
reverse it, but it doesn't necessarily work. Okay, I thought
it was pretty good. All right, man, that was a sidebar.
(05:08):
Uh So should we talk about food waste? Well, let's
talk about this refrigerator thing. You're really fixated on the
food waste thing, aren't you. Well, it's a big part
of whether or not you can go without a fridge. Well,
let's let's talk about what happens or why people go
without a fridge first, chuck, if feel bear with me.
So people are pulling the plugs on these refrigers, or
they were in two thousand nine, or at least three
people were in two thousand nine one in Canada. I
(05:31):
think yeah, um, and but I get the impression from
reading the original New York Times article that there were
there were, It was just kind of the sub thing
among the green It wasn't all the rage. No, like
bamboo flooring a cork flooring. No. And the New York
Times article pointed out that it seems to be a
dividing line among green the eco conscious in the eco crazy. Yeah,
(05:56):
like where some people say that's preposterous, that's the dumbest
thing I've ever heard, And then other people were like,
look at how far I'm willing to go to be green.
So what's the what's the benefit of all that? Well,
a refrigerator uses electricity, and I guess we can give
you a couple of stats to bring it all home
(06:16):
for you. Typical fridge post two thousand uses about four
watts per year. Yeah, that's thanks to the Energy Star ratings. Yeah,
which is better than it used to be for sure. Um.
And if you want to translate that into uh, cheeseburgers,
no way, into miles driven in your car, because we're
(06:37):
talking about the emission of c O two. Uh, that's
about eight hundred miles driving your car about eight hundred
miles depending on what kind of mile did you get
because really it's gallons of gas. Uh yeah. So even
then in the article they point out that it's kind
of low on the list. It ranks behind clothes dryer,
(07:00):
central air in your furnace. Yeah, your furnace is like
six thousand kilowats a year. It's amazing. So you're you're
a refrigerator um is four and fifty kilowat hours of
electricity per year. So it's not even super high up
in your household. No, it's nowhere near. But I think
the people who are pulling the plugs on these refrigerators
are saying every little bit counts. Yeah, and they probably
(07:22):
have already taken other green precautions, like they probably don't
run their furnace like this, you know, like they might
have a pot belly stone. They they better not if
they use a normal old like yeah, terrible electric furnace.
They then I'm going to go to their house and
have a little chance like shaking outside their house. Yet
(07:44):
they're eating out of a glocooler, right, and that's what
they do. I mean, like when when when you pull
the plug on the fridge. I wish I could just
come up with another phrase that rolls off the tongue.
So I'm tired of saying that when you go out
a refrigerator dee fridge defridge chuck nice. When you de
fridge um, you still need typically some source of cooling
(08:09):
inside of your home, something that can keep some food
items from perishing, because we apparently refrigerate a lot of
stuff we don't need to. That is true. Yeah, you
can keep that ketchup and mustard out on the counter
hot sauce. Oh yeah, I've read it goes three years
in a regular pantry. Really, Rachi, just keep it out there. Yeah,
we kept growing up, kept a lot of stuff out
(08:31):
of the fridge, and not for any reason other than
that's just how it was in my house. Like I
remember butter like in a tray on the counter. Butter
is better that way. Room tip. Oh man, are you
kidne me? Yeah, it's like it's already it's so spread herble.
I keep mine in the fridge just to keep it
longer because they don't need that much butter. But man,
if you go to a restaurant and they give you
(08:54):
butter and it's cold, just like, what do you do?
It's literally Emily's big pet peeve is well, I agree
with cold rolls with cold butter or hot rolls with
cold but Yeah, because you get the hot rolls, you
think this place knows what they're doing, and you get
this cold pad of butter. So I've developed the technique, Um,
you know, the under the arm pit method that well,
(09:14):
it's close. It's it's you just cut your hands and
you put a couple of those little foil wrapped You
want to make sure it's wrapped in foil pats of
cold butter, and you heat them up pretty quick. And
I'll tell you what. You can make some friends around
the table if you eat somebody's butter up for him,
because nobody likes cold button. Then you hand them a
little butter pat and you're like, here, take this, it's
my gift to you. I like it when they just
(09:36):
have a little olive oil and balstomic enegar. You know
that's good too. But I like good room temperature butter,
especially like milk fat content or more good butter. Um. So,
like I said, I like butter out. We left Um
remember certain condiments being left out? What about fruits and vegetables? Um, yeah,
like a lot of vegetables. I don't refriger right now,
(09:59):
Like I never frigerate peppers and onions, and well you
don't want to. If you do refrigerate an onion, it
will last longer. But if you're going to use it,
you want to take it out of your refrigerator and
bring it up to room temperature before you cook with
it or use it in food, because it takes a
lot of the temperature white. But that's also a tip
if you hate crying. Um oh yeah, because if you
(10:22):
cut a cold onion, the enzyme that eventually sets off
the chain reaction that makes you cry is contained. It's
not as volatile. I've noticed that. So that's your your
tip from Chuck and Josh my eyes killed me too.
With onions, it depends on the onion. And it's not
just like oh it's a little tears. It's like massive burning.
(10:44):
It's really bad. Really Yeah, yeah, you should super sensitive.
I did it. Don't be dumb on it. That explains
exactly what's going on with you. I've seen that. Okay,
so you know, um so yeah, a lot of the
vegetables I don't keep, like it depends on when I'm
gonna eat it. If I bring home some like a
big head of cauliflower. I'll keep that out in the
fruit basket for a couple of days. I've never seen
(11:05):
that before my entire life. What cauliflower out? Yeah, I've
only seen it in like a crisper drawer. Yeah, I've
left cauliflower and broccoli out like green onions, and I
can see that lemongrass, garlic, of course, Potatoes I don't
want to refrigerate. I think I would like stop short
in the point if I saw like cauliflower out in
(11:26):
like a fruit pat be like, what is that? That's
just fine. I haven't even been to your house. I
didn't notice that. Well, I mean I don't always have,
had you gone through the coliflower, yeah, just eating it um.
Tomatoes are another one too. There they'll last longer in
the fridge, but if you're gonna cook with them, you
want to bring up to the room temperature. Some stuff
you just don't want to refrigerate. Potatoes apparently don't do
(11:47):
very well in the fridge. You put them in a
nice brown paper sack in your pantry away from the sunlight.
They keep for a really long time. Yeah, you know, Jerry,
I think Jerry showed me the little trick was that
you with the cilantro Jerry and the what I need
to know this because I eat a lot of cilantro.
You the cilantro you don't use Just fill up a
glass like half full of water and just throw it
(12:07):
in there and just leave it in your out in
your kitchen. Oh yeah, like the base of it in
the water and just stay fresh, like super long. And
you know, the fridge can beat up cilantro after like
a day or two. I like your optimism, by the way,
thank you. Um, the avocado is what always kills me though.
I well, I eat a lot of avocado as well.
(12:28):
It's hard to keep those fresh. Uh, tried a lot
of tricks too. Well, here's here's your trick. You're ready, okay?
Oh you're cutting up an avocado and like, yeah, that's
it for the avocado. I have no trick for that. Well,
what do you eat a whole? Yeah? Pretty much. I
don't understand what. Well, I don't know. I don't like
eat the skin and everything. No, that's not what I mean.
(12:49):
It's like, once I could into an avocado, all of
that avocado is about to be consumed by me. So
that's the tip. Yeah, but I do have another tip
for you though. With avocados. You know how you go
to the store and you like squeeze them, and you
you can find one out of a hundred and fifty
that's squeeze a bowles. Pretty annoying, it is. But that
squeezed one is gonna be nasty and bruised and just disgusting.
(13:13):
There's gonna be basically like rot wherever you and everybody
else squeeze that avocado. So you can have a lot
less usable avocado. So you want to get one that
you can't squeeze. It's so firm it can't be squeezed well.
But then you just have to wait a few days
to eat it. You can wait one day, it's all
it takes, my friend. And here's how. You take a
brown paper bag and buy a banana, and you put
(13:34):
the banana and the avocados in the brown paper bag,
roll it up pretty tight, but leave a little space
in there. And they do it, and the game right,
they get it on, uh, And what happens is the
avocados ripening. Really yeah. The the banana as it ripens, well,
it puts off a gas interesting um that ripens the
(13:55):
avocados I'm gonna try that, and I'm not kidding. Twelve
to twenty four hours you have totally ready avocado. Yeah,
because I like my avocados firm still. Oh, you're gonna
love this, Chuck, and not mushy but not not hard
but just firm. You're gonna thank me later. I'm excited
about your avocado experiences now I am too. So there's
(14:16):
plenty of stuff that doesn't need refrigerating, So that's one
way that people can defridge. Yeah, this is turning into
like food one on one with Josh and Chuck. Yeah,
I hope that's okay. Um. Yeah, plenty of stuff that
you don't have to refrigerate. Um, but people still use
some sort of cooling mechanism. Yeah, like a cooler, Like
if you have meats or dairy products. Um, if you
(14:39):
want to go without a fridge, most people use a cooler.
And the thing that annoy me with this article, as
they said, or they use a mini freezer to make ice.
I'm like, well, that's probably just about as bad as
you're stupid fridge. Well, it's pretty close. So like one
of those little chest freezers. Um, I didn't see the
size of it. Oh a six point four cubic feet
chest freezer, which isn't big, but it's not that small. Um,
(15:02):
But apparently that's the that's the thing that people who
defridge use. That still uses two kilowatt hours a year.
So really, by unplugging your refrigerator and using a chest freezer,
you're saving about fifteen gallons of gas a year. Yeah.
I don't know if that's your best, like spend your
time doing better things for the environment and the well. Again,
(15:24):
I think people who do this are saying, I'll do
this on top of stuff and then kind of cleverly,
if you ask me, they're using this the ice chest
to um will basically fill up like a two lead
bottle of water which they didn't allow to go to waste,
the two leader bottle um, putting those in the freezer chest,
and then having like a separate cooler that they put
(15:46):
the frozen water bottles in to keep cool their milk
and their meats and stuff like that. Uh yeah, and well,
you know what, we're going to talk about some tips
for shopping to accommodate in this lifestyle. But porst, let's
take a little message right all right, So you're talking
(16:18):
about the cooler full of frozen bottles of water to
keep like your milk in some of your dairy and stuff.
But if you when you go to the store, if
you're gonna try and live this way, you can't probably
buy the gallons of milk unless you really go through
a lot of milk. You might want to buy quartz
of milk. You can't go to Sam's Club and buy
eight gallons of mayonnaise unless you eat that pretty quickly.
(16:44):
If you should focus more attention on your mayonnaise habits
than what you're doing for the environment. So you're gonna
have to buy smaller amounts of things, which they say
can cost a little more. But if you're not wasting
food though, like if you added up the food you waste,
you're probably burning a lot of money and there's gonna
be far less food waste if you're buying in smaller amounts. Right.
The other the other side of that, though is um
(17:04):
if you're you know, eco friendly or eco conscious, um,
you're one of the things that you're probably trying to
avoid is packaging as well. And if you buy smaller
amounts of food, that means you buy more packages. And
think about that, and if you have smaller amounts of food.
That means you have to go to the store more often,
and then you may have to drive more often, which
(17:25):
doesn't matter if you're riding a bike or something like that,
but if you're driving a car, then you're burning those
gallons of gas that you might necessarily not have been anyway. Yeah,
you like you get in your old seventy to pickup
truck and drive the twelve miles to get like a
pint of Mannames. You have to stuff and fill up
at least once during that. So can we talk a
(17:46):
little bit about food waste though, Yeah, because it's a
it's a pretty big thing. Like if you have no refrigerator,
the chances of your food spoiling just simply increase if
you have no refrigerator. Well not so apparently, according to
a report, and less develop countries they have no refrigerators,
(18:09):
they experience less food spoilers. Bam, you just faced me,
because they're like they're eating what they need. You know,
they're not going to Sam's Club and buying seven dred
chicken McNuggets to put in the freezer. I hear that,
And I guess if somebody who defridges uses the developing
world as a model for their food consumption. Yeah. I
(18:31):
wonder what hang ups there are though that would keep
you from successfully doing that, or if it is just
entirely possible to just watch how you're eating enough so
you don't have very much food waste. Let's talk food
waste finally, Uh, in developing countries, post harvest losses of
food grains can reach his high dude in developing countries,
(18:55):
and that a sad statistic. Yeah, because one of the
things that makes that, so, said Chuck, is that that
food has been harvested and is ready to go. So
not only is it ready to go, it just doesn't
make it to somebody's stomach. Um, all of the energy
used to produce, harvest, and transport that food has already
(19:20):
been used as well. Yeah, I didn't think about that.
So that's a huge waste there too, since as food waste,
you add a double bummer onto every bummer that I expressed.
I'm good at it. The US spends about a billion
dollars a year to dispose of food waste in this
country a billion dollars a year, and the e p
A says that food leftovers are the single largest part
(19:41):
of our waste stream by weight. Right, they make up
about twelve percent of municipal landfills, which are pretty awful
word in and of themselves, because municipal landfills are responsible
for about thirty four of methane emissions globally, or at
least in the US, and methane is twenty one times
(20:02):
more damaging as a greenhouse gas than CEO two. Yeah,
and all that food waste is producing like tons of methane, yeah,
which is I don't understand why we're not trapping that
methane and burning it off as energy. I know there
are some pilot projects, but I don't understand why it's
not a bigger thing now. Yeah, didn't we study something
about cow farts? Yeah? I saw that. I seemed that
(20:25):
rings a bell from the past. Yeah. Livestock is a
huge contributor to methane emissions UM, and nobody knows what
to do about it. But there were plans to kind
of try to trap it and burn it for electricity.
I think there was a farmer who was doing he
was using cow poop or something. I think that Dirty
Jobs episode did something like that. I definitely remember looking
at that UM. But I agree methane, let's trap it.
(20:47):
Hey there's a T shirt. So yeah, so food waste
is a I thought it was. The potential was increased
without a refrigerator. You've opened my eyes here. Um. But
another those those double bummers that I did, add the
more packaging and more trips to the store. Um again
if you have if you lived near a store, you
(21:11):
can bike two or something like that. Um that gets
around that. And then also if you are one of
those zero waste people, like have you heard of b Johnson? Yeah,
she's pretty remarkable. What's her website? Uh? It is zero
Waste Home. Yeah, she's one of these people that is
doing like the family experiment, like let's see what we
(21:33):
can really do and putting it, putting it on a blog.
She Um, I think her family is the one that
has produced a court of waste in a year, a
quart of trash in a in a year. Everything else
is reused. She has five rs. You think your three
RS are worthwhile reduced reuse, recycle? What are her other two? Refuse?
(21:55):
So she's saying like, even if it's free, you know
that free frisbee the chiropractor gives you, say you don't
want it? I do that a lot. Actually, I don't
want a lot of that junk. Okay, So you're in
line with this reduce, which would be you know, say,
using your own, um, your own grocery bags. Oh sure, yeah,
so you're reducing the use of the store's grocery bag reuse,
(22:19):
So don't throw your own grocery bag away right, use
it again? Uh, recycle, Yes, you've heard of this one. Sure.
And then rot chuck rot like rotten. H If you're
not gonna do this, I think so that's the last one.
What do you mean by rot? I'm sure composting okay, Yeah,
(22:40):
And like you said about the people that like I
want to go without a fridge, but I'm gonna go
to the grocery store every ten minutes to get a
packet of mayonnaise. I don't think that's the case. Like,
I bet a lot of those people are growing food
in their gardens and composting and like probably not doing that.
And plus also she points out b Johnson points out that, um,
a lot of the stuff that we would consider or
(23:00):
food waste, like you know, grocery stores food waste to
me is a I think we should do a whole
podcast on it. It is fascinating, mind boggling the amount
of waste we produce food wise. I've read that something
like a third a third of all of the food
in the world goes to waste one way or another,
(23:20):
either like in the developing world, doesn't make it after
being wasted. UM. Food waste from the United States, in
the grocery stores in the US, there's any kind of
cosmetic imperfection, if it's not pretty enough, they just throw
it away. There's nothing wrong with it, but it'll just
get tossed. Yeah, that's I don't think I would like
to know what goes on behind the scenes of like
(23:40):
a huge grocery chain. I think we need to get
to the bottom of it, an expose perhaps. But but B.
Johnson points out, UM, a lot of this stuff that
even people at home would consider wasted, spoiled food, UM,
can be reused. So like if you have a bunch
of stale bread, make bread pudding. UM, if you have
some will to lettuce, drop it in an ice bath
(24:01):
and it wakes back up stale bread to the birds.
That's nice. Like when I have moldy bread, always just
like go out and throw it and then do you
eat the birds afterwards? Are you like raising them? Yeah,
I get my baby gun. You don't even need a
because you just teach them to eat out of your
hand and then grab them, snaff a little neck, and
(24:23):
you got brown thrasher for dinner. That's our state bird.
We get in trouble for that, would we? Yeah, you
can't kill your state bird. I figured it was the
state bird because it was the tastiest bird. I don't
think so, sk So you dug this up. This is
(24:57):
pretty interesting. Um, if you want to talk about people
really go in the extra mile to not have a
carbon footprint. Some folks are making on their own shoes
out of old tires and old jeans and hemp of course. Okay, yeah,
not much arch support though apparently right, it's sort of
like a moccasin. I would imagine you can eat your
(25:19):
weeds in your yard, right if you're into that. Um,
A lot of edible weeds like garlic, mustard or chickweed. Yeah,
I mean, like, what's a weed but some plant that
we decided we didn't want. Yeah. I read something somewhere
about the human diet. How um it's become so narrow.
We used to eat a lot more stuff that a
lot more weeds, um and as a result, our health
(25:43):
was a lot better. The bitter. I think we talked
about it before. Have you Have you gotten to the
point to where everything we talked about rings a bell?
Like we've mentioned everything before. Yeah, a world is getting narrower.
But um, I feel like we've talked about before. The
bitter the plant, the healthier it tends to be. And
(26:04):
I think you said also bitterness though also um so
suggests that as poisonous too. Well, that is part of
the edibility test, and you shouldn't just go in your
yard and just pull a bunch of weeds and eat them.
Not everything is edible. Dying is not that green. Oh,
but if you do have edible weeds and you want
to add them as in your salads or something, that's
(26:25):
that's something that some people do. Some people. Some people
use old license plates to side their houses. Is that true?
It's in this article, of course it's true. I bet you,
I bet you. That's the thing. I could see that,
and you know what, why not? That's they're just going
to waste, you know, all license plates. We got a
(26:46):
birdhouse made out of license plates. Oh, those are cute.
That's all right. We got it because it was Ohio, California,
and Georgia, which was Emily's three states, which is kind
of weird. So triumphant, I gotta have this. Do you
use it for BB gun practice? No, that's just birds. Um.
You know, I shot an animal once in my life
(27:07):
and it was one of the worst things that had
ever happened to me. I was too young, I gotta
be begun, and I was tired of shooting cans. So
I shot a squirrel and it haunts me to this day.
And I'm not pooping hunters. If you're into that, that's fine.
I'm just not into it. So I shot a squirrel
when I was twelve. You're haunted. I want to come clean. Yeah,
all right. So what's this poop burger thing? I couldn't
(27:31):
find any any corroborating evidence, but basically, there was a
a story that popped up on a couple of blogs
about a Japanese scientist who had basically converted human feces
into an edible burger. And the two blog posts I saw,
we're basically piggybacking off of each other, and the original
source led to a four or four era, so I
(27:53):
think it's I think the American press accidentally picked up
a yes Man article or like that. You know, well,
how about if if anyone can corroborate corroborate, I have
the worst time with that word. Can corroborate? Yeah, I
can't never say the word right. Corroborate, coroborate, corrobor rate,
(28:14):
corrobor rate. There you go. Can we put a ding
ding ding in there to post production? So if anyone
can let us know that this story is true, then
uh yeah, yeah, I'd love to know that. Yeah, let
us know there are speaking of fecal material though, chuck.
There there was also this green movement to give up
toilet paper. Oh I heard about that. Do you remember
(28:35):
that huge ball in Uh that was the size of
a school bus that was made of um like handy
wipes and fat in London. I don't remember that. It
was this fatty deposit made up of grease and used
handy white. Is it like an art project? No, it
was trapped in the London sewer system. Okay, I thought
(28:56):
display or something. No, God, no, no, remember that that's
it was. That's horrific. It was within the last year.
Um well, anyway, uh I guess some people are taking
this even further and saying, not even toilet paper will
touch my bottom. Instead, I'm going to use um basically diapers, Oh,
just like cloth squares. So you keep a pail of
(29:18):
clean ones on one side and a dirty pail on
the other, and then you just wash the poopy ones
and you're green. Huh. I don't think I would go
that far. I don't think, but I am interested in
a in a bid day because I do think toilet
paper is disgusting, like taking dry, thin paper and wiping
(29:42):
poop from your skin. It I don't get it, and
it's never made sense to me really, even as a child.
Well no, since I got grown enough to realize that
moisture is a pretty nice thing to happen if you're
cleaning poop. Yeah, you just pull a little vaseline in there.
So a bidday, i'd be into a biday, okay. And
(30:03):
I'm exclusively with the wet wipes. Well, you're contributing to
the huge fat deposit ball and what it was made up.
Even those that say they're flushable, it's it's probably a
bunch of bunk. The London thing proves it as bunk,
and for some reason. I don't remember why, but like
it was almost exclusively wet wipes and fat grease, Like
(30:25):
they were attracted to one another or something like that. Maybe,
So I don't understand it all right. Do you think
they'd be like a squirrel or the remnants of a
squirrel right in there something? But no, it's just wet
wipes and grease. Holy cal Well, I got Let's get
this one back on the rails and finish it up. Huh,
(30:46):
I don't have anything else. Did you see the Albert
Einstein refrigerator? Oh that's like no electricity whatsoever. That makes sense. Well,
it does need a source of heat. Um. But I
think Einstein in one of his former students, developed a
refrigerator that has no moving parts. Requires it could be
(31:06):
run on solar energy, but basically it uses um. You know,
when you lower the pressure, the atmosphere pressure of something,
it's boiling temperaturewards as well. Uh. And then when you
boil something, it sucks energy out of the surrounding atmosphere
and lowers the temperature. That's basically this kind of Rube
Goldberg esque Einstein invention that this guy in Oxford was
(31:30):
trying to rebuild. He made a test pilot version of it,
but it's like not very efficient. I think that's a
new not a new thing, but a lot. I've seen
a lot of stuff lately about people remaking like some
early inventions that were never able to be properly made. Yeah,
I think you were talking about that, like Da Vinci
stuff that. Yeah, there's a TV show where they definitely
(31:52):
did the Da Vinci stuff, but those were mainly like
weapons and things. But I did see a video the
other day that someone made a Da Vinci a musical
instrument that Da Vinci invented that was never properly made,
and it was look like a played like a piano,
but it sounded like strings and it was it was
really kind of awesome. Yeah. So that's a long way
of saying, build this fridge behind the Einstein fridge. Well,
(32:16):
there's other things you can do too. If you have
a fridge and you don't feel like giving up your fridge.
If you have a fridge that's older than two thousand
and you have a little bit of dough, go buy
an energy star rated one. Yeah. Throw that other one
in a landfill, right, Um, No use it as like
a planter or something out in your backyard to grow
food in. Yeah, you can always sell a fridge. Yeah,
(32:37):
like any appliance that works, you can sell to somebody.
You just want to take the door off to make
sure no little kids get trapped in it or Indiana Jones,
that's right. Um. You also, if you do have an
energy star rated fridge, you want to clean the coils
off once a year. That will keep it running efficiently,
right exactly. Um, you want to think about what you're
going to open the fridge to get, so you don't
(32:59):
just stand there with the fridge open like a slack
jawed yokel like everybody does. Right. And then apparently if
you keep your fridge fairly stocked, um, that will allow
it to um the temperature to to bounce back to
where it needs to be. It has less um atmosphere.
Cool my fridge. You have to open to get the
(33:20):
water filtered water, which really bugs me. It's not like
in the outside of the door. I've never seen that. Yeah,
you just live in a cuckoo house. You've got cauliflower around.
You got to open the door to get some water.
That cilantro sitting and cups all over the house. That's
a good idea. I've tried that, but put it in
the fridge and it just wrecks it. So I guess
(33:40):
maybe just leaving it out. I mean, it would lasts
for quite a while. Man, I love that stuff. Ye
don't you feel bad for people who taste dish soap
when they eat cilantro? Yeah? I love cilantro, me too, Muddy. Well,
let's it about cilantro. If you want to learn more
about it, you can type the word into the it's
part how stuff works, and you can also type in
(34:02):
can I go without a refrigerator in the search barnell
bring this article up? Uh And since I said search bar,
that means it's time for listener mayo. Yeah, I'm gonna
call this from one of our law enforcement officers. Hey, guys,
my name is Andy m a police officer for a
law enforcement agency in St. Louis, Missouri area. Go Cardinals.
(34:25):
I'm a big fan of the show and appreciate the
always new interesting topics and discussions. And I've noticed that
you seem to have an affinity for law enforcement related topics,
which is true. You definitely do you love them. I
would just listen. I think I wanted to be a
cop or something. Maybe you can be a security card.
That's not the same. I was just listening to the
(34:46):
meth podcast and notice that you mentioned one of the
first shaken bake incidences, and that's a mobile meth lab. Apparently,
that's like the coupling go which occurred actually in my
precinct at a Walmart. Remember we talked about that. Um
I was not yet employed there, but I know one
of the officers, uh, I know the officer that responded
what I understand, a woman was shop lifting, was in
(35:07):
custody of the loss prevention officers when they called for
police assistance. My now coworker arrested her and in the
process discovered a Gatorade bottle in her purse which is
being used as a mobile meth lab. That's so crazy.
It is very crazy. Meth usage in the area that
I work in is rampant, and only having been on
the force less than a year, I've already handled two
(35:27):
meth labs of my own. Having seen firsthand some of
the reactions to meth that these folks have, I will
say that you were pretty much right on, guys. Additionally,
another unfortunate situation is that, uh, where there is a
meth lab. Typically there are children. One of my meth
labs was also home to seven kids. It's a really
sad sight to see. You remember that one episode of
(35:47):
Breaking Bad, which one the one where Pinkman basically gets
kidnapped by those meth addicts who robbed And typically you
will find that the parents have little interest in their
children and pay them very little attention in general. Well,
of course, because they're all interested in using math. It's
kind of a one track mind situation. So it makes
(36:12):
you appreciate non Matthews. So it's just what Andy says,
So thanks Andy Officer. Yeah, he wrapped that up at
the end and spanked it on the bottom. He had
he had another part, So that might have read awkward
a suggestion which I can cut out, but I may.
I took the suggestion, but I just didn't read it.
Is it a mystery suggestion? Then? Um, yeah, maybe that's
surprise you. Well, if you want to send us a
(36:32):
mystery suggestion, we are welcome to those. You can tweet
to us at s Y s K Podcast. You can
join us on Facebook dot com slash stuff you Should Know,
or you can send us an email to Stuff Podcast
at how Stuff works dot Com. Stuff You Should Know
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(36:54):
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