Fear or Resilience?

I want to shed more light on our failing appliance that inspired my last post. In 2017, 9 years ago this month, I spent a large portion of my paycheck on a chest freezer. I had just moved in with my girlfriend and wanted to contribute to our joint excitement of building resilience in times of growing economic and climate uncertainty. Here she is:

With this purchase we achieved the ability to stretch our dollars farther and support small farmers with bulk purchases. We utilized this additional size and capacity to stave off future food shortages. Most holidays for us begin with pulling open the chest freezer and taking a look inside; this tradition continues even 9 years later and I don’t imagine it stopping anytime soon. Once our appliance kicked the bucket, it really got me thinking, ‘Why am I forced to buy a replacement appliance in under 10 years when it hasn’t always been that way?’

From my infant stage to just before leaving home to attend college, I was constantly exploring, hunting, and fishing up in the Catskill Mountains of New York. My Cocker Spaniel and I really covered some ground and it’s where I learned to become an environmentalist. After tromping through the woods together or coming in to rest at the A-frame cabin after fishing up and down the shores of Willowemoc Creek, we were hungry.

The first meal I ever cooked for myself was freshly caught Brook trout over the coals of the outdoor fireplace. But for all other meals our eating journey began by pulling out canned food from the tiny pantry behind the kitchen or by pulling open the school bus yellow refrigerator left over from my grandparents. With its rounded edges and faux silver non-mechanized handle, it was a dreamboat. It also still functioned perfectly going on its 56th birthday. To put it bluntly, when I left for college it was still buzzing along in its beloved place next to the tiny wall clock and emergency weather radio. I never did hear its death declared. I’m now 39.

Contained inside of my town life on Long Island, food security for my mother meant shelves of canned goods to outlast events like Y2K and chest freezers at my father’s house. From what I was told I can give no expiration date of either those cans or the chest freezer. But in 2026, 9 years after purchasing the stand alone freezer for my family, I have to replace it again if I want to maintain the level of food security we previously achieved. I believe this activity of making purchases on electrical appliances and then saving up enough to make the same purchases again just a few years later, mimics the activity of economically treading water. We aren’t getting to fulfilling the breast stroke or the backstroke, we are simply trying not to drown.

To prevent using only one dimensional words to describe what the business world has master minded to drive profits (Planned obsolescence), I gift to you this picture taken at my local dump the day I dropped off my failed appliance.

Expensive and short lived freezers, Refrigerators, Microwaves, Lawn mowers, Laundry machines, you name it, it’s there. As a consumer who wants to eat and support local farms prepare for their upcoming harvest season with agricultural shares from locals, I paid $400 for my replacement freezer. I then had to pay $60 for the dump to manage the left over dangers associated with breaking down and burying the freezer. Our dump looks like this anew each and every week. As we work hard to grow our savings to fund the replacement of technological advancements dreamed up by large scale businesses, those same businesses refuse to pay living wages to their staff, and have strategically architected a winning financial strategy at the cost of our entire planet.

It is my desire to formulate a better ending to this story but I don’t have one. But I do have a book recommendation, which I promise is coming shortly. Ambling on slightly farther down the path of my failed appliance, I found myself at a tire shop the very next day to get an oil change. Mostly, this was because I didn’t want my vehicle to go the way of chest freezer. As I sat outside in the sun trying to keep the smell of rubber out of my clothes and lungs, an older gentlemen sat down beside me. We discussed the lifetime of appliances these days. Me, fresh from the local dump and he from his garden. His shared his lived experience which included growing up in Los Angeles in the 1950’s and where he couldn’t remember having a freezer at all. He told me stories of his ice-box but he firmly declared ‘that was just for ice!’ and it was located in a small corner within the confines of the refrigerator. This made me immediately recall the design of my grandfathers yellow refrigerator. At the tire shop he spent time discussing how you didn’t need freezers back then, you just needed a father who could pick up fresh groceries at the close of each business day and a mother who would cook for dinner that night. ‘That’s how it was…we bought groceries for just one day, each and every day!” As he continued his attempts at tantalizing me with stories of iceboxes that held no food and the 1950’s house wife lifestyle, what was becoming clear was that my owning a chest freezer was deemed by him to be frivolous. Until of course I shared with him that the majority of food stores in our country stock only 3 days of food on hand. Living amongst wildfire seasons and week-long power outages in the high desert of Central Oregon taught me this fact while I googled for information on why the grocery stores were empty until the mountain passes were re-opened. When you’re running out of food, Google makes a great appetizer?

His first words when I spoke of my expired chest freezer were:

“Oh… Fear” he said.

To which I said “You mean…food resilience”.

We looked at one another as if we didn’t understand what the other person has said. Food is an emotional topic. It’s so emotional that I’m writing a two-part piece on chest freezers and he missed his bus that day because of our conversation.

Two people living in the same time who have lived amongst such differing conditions. Is Fear why I store food? No. Is Fear why he doesn’t? Maybe.

What we could agree on that day in the sunshine was the importance of growing a garden. When my wife sees me walk around our house with this book under my arm she knows I’ve hit a new breaking point with the ways of this world that have been artificially created. A tell-tale sign I am using a self-care mechanism is when I find myself re-reading this book for maybe the bizzilionth time. If that doesn’t magnetize you enough to give this title a try, consider that in the same year this book was published (1997) another book came out that named it’s author on a list of 100 people who were destroying 'merica. Barbara Kingsolver made it to #74. Now do you want to put this book on hold at your nearest library?

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