In your house, running all night and all day, right near the back door, is a box, a device that is responsible, at least partly for many of the ills and dangers in our culture. Yes, we're here to talk about the system that involves your refrigerator.

Hey, it's AJ, and this is a special archived episode of A Kimbo.

This is not actually a podcast about refrigerators. It's about systems and how hard

they are to change and the opportunities that are in front of us if someone, if some

organization finds the guts and the wherewithal and the persistence to actually

make a change happen. So let's talk about your fridge.

First of all, it is wasting a lot of power day in and day out. An old refrigerator is using a ton of electricity. New ones are a lot more efficient

thanks to the EPA ratcheting up the standards hopefully will return to that era of making

fridges even more efficient. Number two, human beings have been pushed by the marketing industrial complex to shop more and more in the

middle of the supermarket.

The edges of the supermarket where we find things like fresh fruits and vegetables

things like dairy products things that require cooking and innovation, meats and fishes as well, those are fading compared

to the prepackaged stuff in the middle of the store.

Third, we waste a lot of food.

By some estimates, a third of all the food we buy in the store.

We don't end up eating, either because it's left over at the bottom of the package or because it goes bad.

Number four, a lot of us are fat and one of the reasons for obesity is we are not eating at home enough and the things that we eat out of the home

Though they are more convenient have a lot more fat and salt and sodium and we eat them mindlessly. One of the reasons for

that is we are afraid of cooking. Go hang out at a fish store if you can find one and what you will see or at least what I have

seen is that people line up to buy shrimp and salmon. And my local farmers market they didn't sell either one because of course shrimp and

salmon aren't local to where I live in New York.

But eventually profits won out and they gave in and now they sell both.

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