Saving Food From The Fridge: It Will Taste Better, May Even last Longer, And Reduce Your Energy Bills : TreeHugger


© jihyun ryou

Fridges are a recent invention; for thousands of years, people lived without them, but had many low-tech ways of making food last. Today most fridges are filled with stuff that would last just as long and probably would taste a lot better if it was never lost in the back of the fridge. They are expensive air conditioned parking lots for what Shay Salomon called "compost and condiments."

Some are looking at alternatives to such an expensive and wasteful model. Kris De Decker of No Tech Magazine "refuses to assume that every problem has a high-tech solution," and shows the work of Korean designer Jihyun Ryou, who says "we hand over the responsibility of taking care of food to the technology, the refrigerator. We don’t observe the food any more and we don’t understand how to treat it."

She has developed a series of modern designs that rely on traditional techniques, learned from her grandmother and other elderly people in the community, the " traditional oral knowledge which has been accumulated from experience and transmitted by mouth to mouth."


© Jihyun Ryou

Here is an interesting and complicated example. Many fruits give off ethylene gas as they ripen; a lot of people put their tomatoes in paper or plastic bags to make them ripen faster. That's why putting fruit is a fridge is so silly, the ethylene builds up inside the sealed box and the fruit goes rotten faster. But some vegetables react differently to ethylene; with potatoes and onions, it suppresses the sprouting process. Put a banana in a plastic bag with a potato and the banana will be rotten in no time, but the potato won't sprout. Jihyun Ryou's response:

Apples emit a lot of ethylene gas. It has the effect of speeding up the ripening process of fruits and vegetables kept together with apples. When combined with potatoes, apples prevent them from sprouting.


© Jihyun Ryou

The designer writes about the

Verticality of Root Vegetables:

Keeping roots in a vertical position allows the organism to save energy and remain fresh for a longer time. This shelf gives a place for them to stand easily, using sand. At the same time, sand helps to keep the proper humidity.

Kris de Decker elaborates:

Keeping vegetables in slightly damp sand has been a storage method for many centuries. While low temperatures are favourable for vegetables like carrots, high humidity is equally important. Keeping them in wet sand can be a good compromise.... Just don't forget to water them from time to time.


© Jihyun Ryou

An egg has millions of holes in its shell. It absorbs the odour and substance around itself very easily. This creates a bad taste if it’s kept in the fridge with other food ingredients. This shelf provides a place for eggs outside of the fridge. Also the freshness of eggs can be tested in the water. The fresher they are, the further they sink.

Everyone in North America stores their eggs in the fridge, but few people in Europe do, they can last for days on a shelf or in a pantry. In European supermarkets, the eggs are not refrigerated. Integrating the water into the egg storage shelf is really clever; according to about.com, if an egg:


  • Sinks to the bottom and stays there, it is about three to six days old.

  • Sinks, but floats at an angle, it's more than a week old.

  • Sinks, but then stands on end, it's about two weeks old.

  • Floats, it's too old and should be discarded
    • .

    Eggs act this way in water because of the air sac present in all eggs. As the egg ages, the air sac gets larger because the egg shell is a semi-permeable membrane. The air sac, when large enough, makes the egg float. Eggs are generally good for about three weeks after you buy them.

    There are more on the designers website and with more analysis at No Tech Magazine, where Kris concludes:

    The more food you can keep out of the fridge, the smaller it needs to be and the less energy it will consume. The designs described above show a refreshing way to do that, although it should be remembered that these are artworks, not consumer products. Using similar methods when storing food in a basement or a specially designed root cellar - the traditional way - will give better results.

    Smaller fridges use less energy, of course, take up less space and make good cities. Furthermore, these techniques are not relics from the past, they are templates for the future. In the hands of a talented designer, they can look beautiful, too.

    Tags: Designers | Food Safety | Less Is More | Living With Less | Preservation

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    via treehugger.com

    Some fantastic low-tech ways of storing food without a refrigerator!
    You can't do away with one, but it could be smaller.

    Tablet Zero | TechCrunch

    via techcrunch.com

    There is a lot to agree with in this article, but it's central tenet, that Apple have created a platonic form that almost invites copying, to the extent that avoiding copying aspects of the design are almost impossible; is disingenuous. It's a plagiarist's charter against minimalism.

    As a designer, I know that most of the time, products are simply 'over-styled'. Designers try to put their stamp on their product. Copying what has gone before is usually a sign of failure. There are aspects of tablet designs that could easily have been done differently. For example - a flat bezel.

    What about the buttons? Why a single button? Why is it centred? Why is the shape symmetrical? Why is it a physical and not a touch button? Why is it located on the bezel instead of at the sides. The Nook SImple Touch has buttons at the sides for navigation. Why not a row of rectangular buttons along an edge or the sides? Why an 'On' button and not a slider? Why use a design that has a seamless appearance between case and screen? Why the tapering edges? Even the location of some of the controls on many tablets is a rip-off of the iPad. Sony didn't rip off the iPad with their tablets, and no-one else needs to either.

    Minimalism is simply one style and a design philosophy among other equally valid ones. There is no set of rules dictating how things should be designed.

    Samsung has completely ripped off the iPad and iPhone design in the same way that that Asus has ripped off the design of the MacBook Air. This is scandalous and indicative of the total disregard for copyright in Asia.

    Look at tablet design before the iPad. Much more diversity. When Samsung ripped off Apple unashamedly they more or less gave everyone else carte blanche to do the same. Seriously, it looks like Samsung management said to their designers, "We want an Android version of this. Just copy it, make it widescreen, add our branding and we'll sort out the legal issues".

    Admittedly most of my criticisms are aimed at Samsung, but every subsequent tablet manufacturer has been a bit more cautious with copying the basic idea, as if to see how hard Samsung get hit by Apple's lawyers.

    All the other tablets add no extra functionality to the case design. The other reason Devin's article is disingenuous, is because designers ought to have a legal, moral and professional responsibility not to copy their rivals' designs but to add individuality, function and corporate identity. Every one has failed in this regard.

    In my opinion this kind of copyright abuse is blatant and scandalous. Devin is making flimsy excuses to justify it.