most environmentally friendly way to defrost food

[wrights...]

As you will all know I am a committed environmentalist and keen supporter of all the various pressure groups that are presently striving so valiantly to force the ignorant masses to change their ways and abandon private motoring, meat eating, and other horrors.

I have a conundrum; one that I find sorely troubling. It concerns the best way (least use of electricity and gas) to defrost food that has come out of the freezer.

As I see it the options are (a) Put it in the fridge. This should cool the contents of the fridge and thus reduce the time the motor is running, which will save electricity. However it will be at only 6C when taken out of the fridge, so will need more electricity to cook in the microwave. (b) Leave it on the worktop. My problem there is that surely it will reduce the temperature of the room, and that might make the heating come on. (Unfortunately I cannot have ground source or air-source heating because my landlord is a fascist.) My friend Aurelia Weirdly-Blinkes (she leads the Concerned Rotherham Residents Against Plastic (CRRAP) group says leaving the food on the worktop is the best idea, but I'm not convinced. What if the dog gets it? (Of course that is hypothetical in my flat because domestic pets are an environmental disaster and should be banned outright.)

I should add that on Aurelia’s wife’s advice — she is very knowledgeable — I have set my freezer to a temperature of minus 6C to save electricity (and thus the planet!). When the freezer was set to minus 18C the motor ran quite a lot.

Any opinions? Not from Climate Changer Deniers or Tories, obv. — they are all nuts.

Bill

[Tim+]

Obviously put it outside to defrost. This will fix global warming and defrost your food faster. Win-win.

Tim

[Reentrant]

... However it will be at only 6C when taken out of the fridge, so will need more electricity to cook in the microwave.

Dunno but 6C is too warm for a fridge. Recommended temp is 4C, or 5C at a push.

[Fredxx]

That depends on how long you keep stuff in the fridge. Some people don't even have a fridge and still seem to survive rather well.

[Fredxx]

You transfer the frozen food to the fridge overnight and in the morning or a couple of hours before cooking put it on worktop to warm up that bit more.

[NY]

Yes, I'm sure it's perfectly possible to live without a fridge, as long as you buy fresh perishable food (eg milk) more frequently and keep perishable food cool some other way (eg wrapping a container of milk or meat in a wet sack which cools the contents (latent heat of vaporisation) as the water evaporates.

All a fridge does for you is reduce the frequency that you need to go shopping to (for example) once a week.

We keep our fridge at 3 deg C and a 4-pint bottle of milk keeps for well over a week - almost always I *just* manage to use it (mainly for breakfast cereal) before it goes sour. When we go on holiday, I freeze whatever milk is left and buy a small amount (eg 1 pint) when I return, to use that small amount until the remaining frozen milk has thawed enough to use (often if we get back one day, it's not thawed in the fridge by the following morning).

We tend to thaw frozen food at room temperature for an hour or so, and then once it has *started* to thaw, put it in the fridge to continue thawing overnight.

[Colin Bignell]

Having heating in your kitchen immediately blows your green credentials. The camel dung fuelled Aga should provide all the heat you need.

(Unfortunately I cannot have ground source or air-source heating because my landlord is a fascist.) My friend Aurelia Weirdly-Blinkes (she leads the Concerned Rotherham Residents Against Plastic (CRRAP) group says leaving the food on the worktop is the best idea, but I'm not convinced. What if the dog gets it? (Of course that is hypothetical in my flat because domestic pets are an environmental disaster and should be banned outright.)

[Colin Bignell]

An unglazed terracotta container, sitting on a glazed terracotta saucer, with water in it. That was how we kept milk and butter when camping in the 1950s. Meat, of course, was kept in a perforated zinc meat safe, hung in the shade.

[Ottavio Caruso]

Am 25/04/2023 um 12:16 schrieb [e-mail]:

My kitchen is cold enough. I don't even turn the fridge on.

[Ottavio Caruso]

Am 25/04/2023 um 13:01 schrieb Colin Bignell:

Fail! Being green means having a fridge but make somebody else pay for you.

Or videorecording your Last Generation soft terrorist acts with a phone made in a sweatshop by a 9yo.

[SH]

Why don't you give notice on the rental flat and buy back your previous humble abode with the electric gates?

You had enough land there to put in a ground source heat pump.

Or has your PC been hacked and someone is masquerading as you?

[Tim Lamb]

We need to know what happened to the Chickens!

[John Rumm]

Well the obvious (and very uk.d-i-y) answer would be to take the food from the freezer immediately before use, then slice off as many 1cm thick slices as required using an angle grinder. Return the rest to the freezer, and then microwave your slices from frozen :-)

[Chris J Dixon]

And jars of jam, sauces etc. lived on the shelf, and were not required to be in the fridge (which we did not have) after opening.

Chris

[Colin Bignell]

My mother used to cover opened jam with waxed paper disks, pressed onto the surface before putting the top back on.

[SteveW]

The problem for us is that we don't eat a lot of jam, so a jar lasts too long and goes mouldy unless refrigerated.

[Chris Green]

Sauce is usually pretty 'self preserving'. I recently finished a bottle of ketchup that had a best before date of something like 2016. It was perfectly OK and still tasted good (and I'm still alive!).

We also make our own marmalade and have several jars of that which are several years old. 2016 marmalade is lovely.

[Chris Green]

Our home made marmalade doesn't do that. I leave a jar on our boat in France to use the next time I'm there and it doesn't grow mould. It does eventually dry up a bit and goes sugary at the edges.

[The Nomad]

It has to do with, I suspect, the amount of fhtne/fnyg in them.

Pbzzrepvnyyl it is frowned upon to use too much of either as 'it is bad for you' - don't you know ... Whilst (1) home made we use a real recipe and put enough of either/both to make sure it tastes nice and keeps well.

Oh and if it goes off quick you need to buy more ...

Avpx (1) I got told of for using that worm once whilst I was a civil swerant - seems an ok worm to me

[Colin Bignell]

I suspect you use a lot more sugar than any commercial jam maker would dare to put in their products these days.