Last year, at the height of the pandemic, a group of Las Vegas residents started the Las Vegas Town Fridge Project. It grew out of a broader, nationwide movement of refrigerators being placed in strategic locations in different cities to provide free groceries to anyone who needs it. The fridges, which are serviced by volunteers, are regularly filled with fresh produce, water, and other food.
The concept of communal refrigerators started in Germany in 2012 and has now also established itself in the USA; There are now hundreds of refrigerators in cities across the country.
“We have a twofold systematic problem of food waste and food insecurity. We produce food in abundance, but people still don’t have enough to eat. “
John Chou, who says he “grew up mostly in Las Vegas,” majored in food in college, and came back determined to fight food insecurity in his hometown. He started working with blackboards at the beginning of the pandemic. “We looked after hundreds of families every day, but sometimes we still had pallets of food left over,” he says. “I thought we could also use distribution points and bring the food to the people who needed it.”
Chou found out about community refrigeration programs through online research and was impressed with how other cities are helping to facilitate food access.
“The concept of the communal refrigerator is really like a movement. All we needed was food, a fridge and a location, ”he says. “We were able to find a nonprofit, United Movement Organized Kindness, to put a refrigerator on their property.”
The refrigerator was well received – until city officials got wind of it. According to the Las Vegas Code Enforcement, since the refrigerator was located near the sidewalk, it was actually in a “transition zone” on the city property.
Chou says he was also told he would need to apply for a $ 2,000 zoning permit and that the permits would likely not be approved.
The city health authorities, perhaps surprisingly, had no problem with the refrigerator. “I contacted the health department and they gave me the okay,” says Chou. “This is not about food safety concerns.”
The $ 2,000 price tag, coupled with the almost certain denial of permits, put the Las Vegas proposal on hold. Chou says it boils down to the stigma of poverty and homelessness: “This is a population that the city doesn’t want to have on their plate or to worry about.”
In other major US cities, the bureaucracy associated with community refrigerator programs appears to be at least offset by some willingness on the part of city officials to work with activists. New York City has done this, with programs like The Friendly Fridge that operate and maintain multiple refrigerators across the city.
Former mayoral candidate and activist Paperboy Love Prince runs the Love Gallery, a community center based in Brooklyn, New York. Founded in September 2020, it was one of the first companies to provide a communal refrigerator on site.
“The Friendly Fridge was just a block from my first campaign office,” says Prince. This led to their decision to start their own refrigerator, which has become one of the most popular and widely used refrigerators in Brooklyn.
Prince and his team of volunteers are helping maintain fifty to sixty of the more than 100 refrigerators across the city. This also means that the refrigerators are filled and kept clean. They also installed cameras on their refrigerator to better monitor it. “We could see how many people donated and how many people are using the refrigerator,” says Prince, who estimates that he looks after more than 200 families every day.
“As far as I know, we’ve never had food poisoning or cleanliness issues here in New York City,” says Prince. “These refrigerators are better maintained than many public places or even some restaurants and bars. We carry out regular checks and have a fairly organized system. “
Prince points out that much better use could be made of the $ 2,000 fee the city of Las Vegas Chou wanted to charge for simply applying for a permit: “With the amount they ask, I could get five to ten here start new community fridges. ”
In the Bay Area, as in New York City, there are communal refrigerators across the region. The Freeedge program, a not-for-profit based in Davis, California, helps those who want to start refrigerators in their communities by offering micro-grants to purchase used refrigerators.
“We were able to award around sixty micro-scholarships in the USA,” says Ernst Bertone Oehninger, who started the Davis program in 2014 with a few friends. “My first refrigerator was right in front of my house. I had seen the fridges work in other countries and decided to start my own. ”
The Davis refrigerator was eventually shut down by the city after Oechninger struggled with health inspectors, permits, and city codes. That’s when he decided to work on dismantling these roadblocks. “We help with food permits, liability fears and provide information about where you can get food,” he says.
Like Chou, Oehninger says that one of the biggest barriers to these programs is the stigma of poverty, as well as laws designed to regulate restaurants but apply to person-to-person sharing of food. “A lot of health inspectors want to use codes made for businesses rather than people just exchanging food,” he says.
Oehninger and his group have begun drafting laws to protect community refrigerators, which will hopefully help alleviate some of the problems fridges are struggling with in the Bay Area and other cities. But for Las Vegas, those changes might come too late or not at all.
“I had a conversation with a representative from the district and they said they weren’t a fan of grassroots activism because they believed they were being pulled away from established resource providers,” says Chou. “There’s a lot of gatekeeping, lots of breaks when installing the refrigerators.”
Meanwhile, Nevada continues to have one of the highest levels of food insecurity in the country.
Currently, according to Chou, Las Vegas-operated refrigerators include one with the nonprofit Project 4 Humanity and another with Solidarity Fridge, which is on private property and therefore able to bypass zoning issues.
Chou has since left Las Vegas to attend medical school but remains in contact with community organizers. “I would like a fluid network of resources that people can use,” he says.
Oehninger agrees. “We have a twofold systematic problem of food waste and food insecurity. We produce food in abundance, but people still don’t have enough to eat, ”he says. “Community refrigerators are a gateway to mutual help and can lead to larger community projects like gardens or kitchens. We have all the resources to offer people high quality food. “
