How to build a community fridge
Chelle King decided to put a community fridge on her property. As a result, she's fed countless people (from the food insecure to those with the munchies) and has drawn the wrath of her neighbors.
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In 2020, Chelle King moved to her current house in Sacramento, California, and began cooking a lot. “It was just me and my husband and our kids, so we were ending up with tons of food waste because it was really fun to cook it and then nobody would eat the leftovers.”
The solution came in the form of a community fridge. Community fridges (sometimes called “freedges”) are an increasingly common mutual aid project that are exactly what they sound like: fridges placed in public spaces that anyone can drop food in, and that anyone can take food out of. They are godsends in a time of rising food insecurity for a number of reasons:
First, Americans waste 80 million tons of food each year (this is equivalent to 38% of all food, and roughly 149 billion meals). While 46% of this waste comes from the food industry itself, much of it comes from private households, and as you likely know yourself, the food that’s most likely to end up in the garbage is fresh produce. This is at a time where 49 million Americans rely on food assistance each year. For food kitchens, most of the food donated is nonperishable, which means that for the food insecure, it’s harder to get access to fresh produce. Community fridges cut out all the middlemen — you have some apples you’re not gonna get around to eating before they go bad, you put them in the community fridge. Boom — fresh food for someone in your neighborhood who needs it.
Second, unlike food kitchens, community fridges are rooted in mutual aid, not charity. This means there aren’t any barriers to entry for a community fridge — if you are, say, a trans person dealing with food insecurity, you don’t need to worry about what might be facing you if you enter a food kitchen that’s held in a conservative church. It also means that you don’t need to prove or quantify your need.
Building her own fridge
For King, though, the community fridge closest to her was still a trek. After schlepping a wagonload of food to the fridge, she started talking to the host of the fridge and asking whether there was a need for one in her part of town. They said, “Absolutely.”
With advice from the hosts of the other fridge, the help of a handyman, and a grant provided by the Freedge Network1 King installed a fridge on her own property.
King said she wanted the fridge to have a glass door “because I really wanted people to be able to see inside. I feel like it’s like super sketchy to like open a closed refrigerator door.” She also reached out to a local activist who goes by the Instagram handle “The Awkward Gardener”2, who has built relationships with groceries and restaurants, collects their leftover food, and distributes it to local community fridges.
In February of 2023, she finally got it up and running, and the initial response was great. “People were super excited.” King would tell people walking by about the fridge and answer questions to spread the word, and the fridge quickly became popular. “One of the most common questions I got,” King told me, “was ‘what do you do if the food goes bad or if it expires?’” She said, “That won’t happen. The food is gone in an hour.”
And the amount of food going through it went well beyond her and her family: she said she felt “really inconsequential” putting in her “piddly little leftovers” because “they last like two minutes and then everything's gone.” Even when she made stuff in bulk specifically for the fridge, it went out fast: “I had a whole bunch of dried pasta and a whole bunch of jars of pasta sauce and I was like I’m just gonna make a whole bunch of pasta and put it in there. It was the most I probably had ever put in because I wasn’t cooking for myself, I was just cooking for the fridge. It was still gone in like 10 minutes.”
It helped that she lives a block off of a restaurant street: as people found out about the fridge, they would drop their leftovers from the restaurant into the fridge. And in the summer, as people began having outdoor barbecues, they’d put their leftovers into the fridge as well. And some in her neighborhood were simply doing what she’d done before the project began: dropping off their own excess food.
As a rule, King tried not to pay too close of attention to who was taking food out of the fridge — people were appreciative, but she said “I try not to look at the people who are picking up food and put them in a bucket.” But because of what happened next, King ran an online survey, and has since gotten a better sense of the demographics that use the fridge: while the unhoused use the fridge regularly, many are housed people in the neighborhood who are dealing with food insecurity.
In the spirit of the community fridge, King is not picky about who uses it: you don’t need to be in need. “If there's a parent whose kid is going apeshit because they’re hungry, and if there’s something in there [they can] take it!” She added, “You don't have to be destitute. You could have money for something but sometimes it’s the convenience. I was super stoned one night and somebody had stocked the whole fridge with Lunchables and I was like ‘Oh my god, I’ve died and gone to heaven.’”
But as of my interview with King back in December, the fridge was not in operation — she’d unplugged it and was using it in the interim as a little free library. So what happened?
Attack of the NIMBYs
Unfortunately, the community fridge has drawn the ire of that classic feature of middle class neighborhoods: the NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) crowd. At some point, someone came to the fridge, found it empty, and attacked the door, shattering one of the layers of glass on the front. After this happened, King started receiving citations from the City of Sacramento.
She has “I think a total of five of them at this point,” and “most of them are closed.” King’s job involves regularly dealing with state regulations, so she’s used to reading code, and was quickly able to prove that most of the citations were spurious. It was clear that the code violations were the result of complaints from some of her neighbors. In order to make the fridge work better, King circulated a survey online to get a sense of what the problems were and how she could address them.
“I seem to have about 10 neighbors who really, really, really, hate this refrigerator,” she told me, “and about 100 neighbors who either really like it or at least think it’s okay. So it’s a vocal majority. The City of Sacramento doesn’t actually have any regulations governing community fridges, so the citation that has stuck at this point is a violation of my setback.”
Sacramento regulations require that any constructions be setback at least three feet from the property line. The problem is that she lives in a very old house, so the property lines aren’t clearly drawn on any document for her. She’s asked the city to come and show her where they’re measuring from so she can follow the regulation, but so far, they’ve ignored her. “I have walked around the neighborhood and found many, many presumably setback violations. So yeah: they’re just trying to get rid of it.”
In the survey King circulated, she got to the bottom of what really upset people: In a Facebook post breaking down the results, she wrote:
Most of the complaints about the I St Fridge fall into three buckets:
1. The fridge brings unhoused people to the neighborhood and, though we want to help unhoused people, we want to do it somewhere else.
2. The fridge is unsanitary.
3. Having the fridge resulted in an increase in trash.
The problem, she points out, is that the City is not actually allowed to tell unhoused people which neighborhoods they’re allowed to enter. They also don’t regulate community fridges, so they can’t really enforce anything on the basis of trash or sanitation. They only offer “best practices.” But she believes she understands the real problem: “My neighborhood is nicer than I would say any other neighborhood in Sacramento that has had or does have a community fridge. So they do have best practices but I think one of the unspoken best practices is: Don’t put it in a nice neighborhood.”
It frustrates her, she says: “I mean our neighborhood is such a liberal enclave. You can’t walk a block without seeing something about how Black Lives Matter, or ‘in this house we believe…’ like they're everywhere. But that is the extent of how the neighborhood wants to engage. They want to give money to food banks, which I think is great — like food banks really need money — but that’s kind of the boundary that I’m recognizing that my neighborhood sort of has.”
Lessons learned in feeding your neighbors
King suspects that the source of most of the trouble comes down to one man: “For the most part all of my interactions with people have been super pleasant. People are really kind people are really grateful. There is one man who is not kind nor grateful. He is clearly very emotionally distressed all the time. He is the only person who has ever done anything I would say that’s like, negative. He threw food at me and my older daughter while he was laying on the sidewalk in front of the fridge. I was like, okay, please don’t do that, but it wasn't dangerous.” She adds, “He is an incredibly disturbed man, and he was here before the fridge was here. And he's still here. This is his neighborhood. I don't really like him but I do think that he should get to eat.”
King suspects that this man is the one who broke the door of the fridge, and also caused the main source of the “unsanitary” complaints: he found figs in the fridge, didn’t like them, and threw them all over the sidewalk in the summer, attracting flies. “It got gross for sure. I had to get the pressure washer out and pressure wash the sidewalk.”
As part of her plan going forward, King wants to schedule more regular cleanings and pressure washings, and when they move the fridge to fit the setback regulations, she plans to put a bench, better signage, a trash can, and a phone charging station next to it, so people can sit and eat.
But the existence of a difficult person in her neighborhood does not outweigh the good the fridge does in her view, and she thinks the response from some of her neighbors is exaggerated. “I have two small kids right? Like I am not like an insane person who’s just gonna like put my kids in danger so I can feed people. The fridge is right downstairs from my front door.”
She also noted that all of the people who claimed the fridge was “unsanitary” had never actually used the fridge, per the survey. “The problem has solved itself,” she posted on Facebook: “Continue to not use the fridge.”
She adds, “Some of the comments I’ve gotten are like, why don’t you box up specific meals and then take them to a place and then give them to people. And I’m like, well, because maybe they want to choose their own food. We wouldn’t think for a second that we would take that agency away from anybody else but if you’re a poor, food insecure, unhoused drug user, they were very quick to be like ‘well you don’t get to make any choices anymore.’ And I disagree.”
King’s struggle with her neighbors appears to have been a productive one, though — as of publication, while she’s had to eat the fines (locals who support the project have chipped in to cover the costs), she’s also been offered free help by UC Davis’s Humanitarian Legal Aid Organization, and her case may result in the city putting together a legal pathway for community fridges to acquire permits, thus making them less susceptible to hostile neighbors weaponizing city code against these sorts of projects.
King admits that building her own community fridge is “not a low barrier to entry” for anyone looking to get into mutual aid — she first became familiar with the concept by volunteering with harm reduction groups for drug users — but if all goes well, it looks like her project will make life a lot easier for future Sacramentonians3 who wish to feed their neighbors.
They’re cool, check them out — they have a bunch of resources for navigating the practical and legal issues that come with running a community fridge. They also often will fiscally sponsor community fridges.
Her Instagram says she is “An awkward person showing you how to grow in awkward places to maximize output.”
The correct demonym for someone from Sacramento is “Sacramentan” but that sounds very Catholic to me, so I’m going with Sacramentonian. Sorry guys, I only get to flex the godlike powers granted to fiction writers every now and then on here.
This mutual aid series continues to be one of my favorite things I've ever read. I was very eagerly awaiting this piece on community fridges!
I've managed lots of offices over the years and offices create a lot of food waste so I've always been super thankful to have friendly fridges around to bring leftovers to. I've worked with some to pick up large product donations from my current company (we make food products). At the end of the week, I bring all of the leftover office fruit home with me and drop it in a fridge that I pass on the walk to my apartment so that it doesn't go bad in the office over the weekend. When I closed my offices for covid, all of our uneaten back stock of snacks went in a fridge.
These fridges are probably the easiest and most direct way to engage in mutual aid and I love them so much. Even living in Brooklyn, which is generally liberal, I know that some of the fridges have gotten complaints and have had to move. Chelle King is truly doing some great work by fighting to keep her fridge open!