Urban Survivor Coming in from the cold

Can we survive without a refrigerator?

This doesn’t mean that we won’t have any method to keep food cold. We will be using that old-fashioned method of an ice box. Literally a box that you put ice in. We have an old cooler that we use for weekend trips up in the mountains during the summer. It’s not in that great a shape and is rather small but it will have to do.

Now, if you come home one day from work and find that your refrigerator is grinding away but the ice in the freezer is melting but the food hasn’t unfrozen yet, you can save it. Put everything in your cooler and put dry ice on top. Dry ice is available from grocery stores. For heaven’s sake don’t touch the dry ice with your bare hands or you’ll have frozen fingers. Seriously dry ice has a surface temperature of minus 109.3 F. By the way, the lowest temperature ever recorded was 128 F in Antarctica.

Dry ice is carbon dioxide. It’s the stuff we exhale. It goes from the solid state to gas without transitioning through a liquid state, hence the name dry ice. And that’s the science lesson for today.

So we cleaned out the refrigerator and freezer. We’ve been planning this so there wasn’t much waste. Of course, both of us have had to increase our exercise to offset the ice cream, pizza and chicken wings — couldn’t let them go to waste — or waist — now could we?