Creative Commons
A community fridge in Los Angeles
Last year, at the height of the pandemic, a group of Las Vegas residents started the Las Vegas Town Fridge Project. It emerged from a broader, nationwide movement where refrigerators are placed in strategic locations around various cities to make free food available to anyone who needs it. The refrigerators, maintained by volunteers, are stocked regularly with fresh produce, water, and other food items.
The concept of community fridges started in Germany in 2012 and has since taken hold in the United States; there are now hundreds of fridges in cities across the country.
“We have a two-fold systematic problem of food waste and food insecurity. We produce food in excess, yet people still don’t have enough to eat.”
John Chou, who says he was “mostly raised” in Las Vegas, minored in food studies in college and came back determined to combat food insecurity in his hometown. He began working with food banks at the start of the pandemic. “We were serving hundreds of families every day, but sometimes we’d still have pallets of food leftover,” he says. “I thought we could use points of distribution beyond that and get the food to people who needed it.”
Chou learned about community fridge programs through online research, and was impressed with how other cities were helping to make food easier to access.
“The community fridge concept is really like a movement. All we needed was food, a fridge, and a location,” he says. “We were able to find a nonprofit, the United Movement Organized Kindness, to host a fridge on their property.”
The fridge was well received—until city officials got wind of it. Because the fridge was set up near the sidewalk, Las Vegas Code Enforcement said it was actually in a “transitional zone” on city property.
Chou says he was also told that he would need to apply for zoning permits, at a cost of $2,000, and that the permits were unlikely to be approved.
City health officials, perhaps surprisingly, had no issue with the fridge. “I reached out to the health department, and they gave me the okay,” says Chou. “This isn’t about food safety concerns.”
The $2,000 price tag, coupled with what was almost sure rejection of the permits, put the Las Vegas proposal on ice. Chou says it boils down to the stigma of poverty and homelessness: “This is a population the city doesn’t want to have on their plate, or to worry about.”
In other major U.S. cities, the red tape that comes along with community fridge programs seems to be offset by at least some willingness on the part of city officials to work with activists. New York City has managed to pull this off, with programs like The Friendly Fridge operating and maintaining multiple fridges around the city.
Former mayoral candidate and activist Paperboy Love Prince operates the Love Gallery, a community center based in Brooklyn, New York. Founded in September 2020, it was one of the first businesses to provide a community fridge on-site.
“The Friendly Fridge was a block away from my first campaign office,” Prince says, “I started out helping to provide food for the fridge and became more involved in it.” This led to their decision to start their own fridge, which has become one of Brooklyn’s most popular and often-used fridges.
Prince and their team of volunteers help maintain fifty to sixty of the more than 100 fridges throughout the city, which involves making sure the fridges are kept stocked and clean. They also installed cameras at their fridge, in order to better monitor it. “We’ve been able to see how many people donated as well as the number of people using the fridge,” Prince says, estimating that it serves upwards of 200 families each day.
“As far as I know, here in New York City, we’ve never had issues with food poisoning or cleanliness,” Prince says. “These fridges are maintained better than a lot of public places, or even some restaurants and bars. We do regular checks and have a pretty organized system.”
Prince points out that the $2,000 fee that the city of Las Vegas wanted to charge Chou for simply applying for a permit could be put to much better use: “With the amount they are charging, I could start five to ten new community fridges here.”
The Bay Area, like New York City, has community fridges operating throughout the region. The Freedge program, a nonprofit based in Davis, California, helps those who want to start fridges in their communities by offering micro grants to purchase used refrigerators.
“We’ve been able to give approximately sixty micro grants across the United States,” says Ernst Bertone Oehninger, who, along with some friends, started the Davis program in 2014. “My first fridge was right in front of my house. I’d seen how the fridges worked in other countries and decided to start my own.”
The fridge in Davis was eventually shut down by the city, after Oechninger struggled with health inspectors, permits, and city codes. That’s when he decided to work toward breaking down those roadblocks. “We help with food permits, liability fears, and provide information on where to source food,” he says.
Like Chou, Oehninger says one of the biggest obstacles faced by these programs is the stigma of poverty, as well as laws that are intended to regulate restaurants but are being applied to food sharing from person to person. “A lot of health inspectors want to use codes that were created for businesses instead of people just exchanging food,” he says.
Oehninger and his group have started working to draft laws that can protect community fridges, which will hopefully help mitigate some of the problems the fridges in the Bay Area and other cities have struggled with. But for Las Vegas, those changes might come too late, or not at all.
“I had a conversation with one district representative, and they said they were not a fan of grassroots activism because they feel it takes away from established resource providers,” says Chou. “There is a lot of gatekeeping, lots of pauses in being able to install the fridges.”
Meanwhile, Nevada continues to have some of the nation’s highest rates of food insecurity.
As of right now, Chou says, fridges operating in Las Vegas include one with the nonprofit Project 4 Humanity and another with Solidarity Fridge, which is located on private property and is therefore able to circumvent zoning issues.
Chou has since left Las Vegas to attend medical school, but remains in contact with community organizers. “I’d like to see a fluid network of resources that people can use,” he says.
Oehninger agrees. “We have a two-fold systematic problem of food waste and food insecurity. We produce food in excess, yet people still don’t have enough to eat,” he says. “Community fridges are a gateway to mutual aid, and can lead to larger community projects such as gardens or kitchens. We have all of the resources available to provide quality food to people.”