The community fridge: A DIY answer to exploding hunger
An unusual ribbon cutting was held last week in Wilmington, said Marina Affo in the Delaware News Journal. The rite marked the unveiling of a standardlooking home refrigerator—except that this one sits outside and is accessible 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It’s also the first “community fridge” set up in the home state of our next U.S. president.
The community fridge concept has been spreading across the country all year, said Jenna Pelletier in The
Providence Journal. The global “freedge” movement can be traced to 2012 Germany, but it took hold here starting in February, when a group called In Our Hearts helped set up New York City’s first community fridge. A sign saying “Free Food” often announces the intent: Each outdoor fridge is stocked with healthy food that local people in need can take with no questions asked. Providence, R.I., artist Dana Heng set one up at a nonprofit where she works. “I just took it into my own hands,” she says. The nonprofit supplies the electricity; Heng secured donations from farmers, individual benefactors, and Farm Fresh Rhode Island so that volunteers can keep it stocked.
The movement’s growth is a response, of course, to a Covid-related explosion in the number of Americans going hungry, said Jenna Adrian-Diaz in Dwell.com. Ernst Bertone Oehninger, founder of Freedge, a global platform for promoting setup of the fridges, reports that almost 200 have been added across America this year. “The U.S. is kind of late to the game,” he says. “But that’s cool.” More important, he says, is that the fridges are sparking conversation about the systemic failures that create the need for them.