Given the reality of climate change, are glaciers now creeping into East Tennessee?
Judge for yourself: After all, photos don’t lie.
Wait, I forgot! Photos do lie. This isn’t a glacier. It’s what happens when Cheri and I defrost our freezer.
Somewhere near 20 years ago, Cheri and I bought, second-hand, a chest freezer that quickly became one of our best assets. Living frugally, we often buy food in bulk, much of it requiring frozen storage. We make huge slow-cooker meals and freeze most of it for later use. Hardly a month passes that our freezer doesn’t pay for itself all over again.
The downside is that the thing is almost always filled to capacity. So there’s rarely a good time to defrost it. That’s not to say we never do. I think we did defrost it 12 years ago. When we moved.
But every time we open the lid, a bit of ambient humidity adheres to the inside in the form of ice. Which over time becomes an iceberg.
Once the growing ice began to crowd out stored food, we knew we had to act. So this past weekend, we transferred the food to coolers, left the freezer open, unplugged it overnight, then hauled out the larger ice pieces and mopped up the melt-water. The left-over chunks are what you see in the photo above.
Then we put it all back together. Before anyone sneers at our procrastination, let me say a word in defense:
When Cheri and I were Peace Corps volunteers (1989-90) in Grenada, West Indies, we lived in a tiny cottage with an even tinier refrigerator. (We were among the lucky: Plenty of Peace Corps folk, and many Grenada natives, have far less.)
Our Grenada fridge, no paragon of efficiency, tended to ice up badly. Never mind the freezer compartment at the top: There was a huge and fast-growing chunk of ice along the back wall of the main compartment. A nuisance and eyesore, perhaps, but we were too busy (or was that too lazy?) to defrost.
Grenadian friends who came over tended to be both amused and aghast. Neat housekeeping is deeply engrained in Grenadian culture. No one there would put off defrosting a refrigerator. I guess we were “crazy Americans”.
But maybe not entirely crazy. Because there’s something else deeply engrained in Grenadian culture (at least when we lived there):
Daily power outages.
So every day the power would be off for anywhere from several minutes to several hours. Cheri and I figured that the ice-block in our fridge kept everything cold, just like the frozen ice-packs you put in a cooler during a picnic.
During our Peace Corps stint, Grenada was flattened by Tropical Storm Arthur. Power was out, island-wide, for about a week. And everyone we knew — all our friends with properly maintained, regularly defrosted refrigerators — lost all their stored perishables. Milk. Veggies. Big slabs of meat. Packages of fish. All of it. Ruined.
By that time, however, our pet iceberg had grown so huge that it took the whole week to melt. So as long as we didn’t open the fridge door too often, everything kept cold. Food hoarders that we are, we had more perishables in cold storage than anyone — and every last bite stayed fresh.
Oh, and guess what else? By week’s end, our fridge was clear of ice. Just in time for electric power to be restored. So the defrosting happened without our having to lift a finger.
I love it when the solution to a problem is to decide that it isn’t a problem.
How often do you defrost your fridge and/or freezer? Why or who not? Please post your thoughts in the comments below.