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We’re over-freezing our food. Turning up the temperature slightly could avoid 17 Mt of CO2
(www.anthropocenemagazine.org)
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this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
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How often do you want to get food poisoning? That’s the trade off. Each degree increased is shifting the statistical curve on which the tail end is food poisoning occurrences.
If Google didn’t just lie to me 17MT of CO2 is the equivalent of taking 19 private jets out of service for one year. You’ll excuse me if I choose to lower my chance for food poisoning by making some rich dude fly commercial.
The international standard for freezing food is -18C, about 0F, they are talking about increasing that by three degrees to about 3F or -15c, which would have no impact on likeliness of food poisoning. People should use private jets less as well but this seems like a change that could be made across an industry more easily. This isn't about people turning up their freezers at home but rather commercial food operations which accounts for a much larger portion of energy used.
This is the internet so take this with a grain of salt. I work in a life safety field and the last 50 years of research has been to shift the evaluation of safety from an arbitrary value for safety to a statistical basis - all in the name of efficiency (cost, material, environmental - pick you’re cause, they all have a voice). There is generally no perfectly safe condition, only a poly at which the number of standard deviations from the norm makes failure so unlikely as to be nearly impossible. We have classes of prevention and imposed conditions and there are under the intersection of (failure in prevention)x(exceptional imposed danger) are dead people, or at least loss of property.
Shifting the freezer set point is moving the prevention curve. The number may be small, but it’s still finite. The question the actuaries will ask is if the economic value of 19MT is worth an increase in probability for the sickness or death of X people. I’m merely arguing that the value, to me personally, is not sufficient.
Yep this is why I place a thermometer in the warmest part of the fridge (upper door, near the butter tray) and make sure that part never goes above 36-37°F. The back of the fridge hangs out in the low 30s – enough to freeze – but my food lasts a lot longer before going moldy. And there's the added bonus that it helps keep the kitchen warmer in the winter, too.