Storing Vegetables to Save Food From The Refrigerator

Our generation is getting stupid ! An interesting alternative to store vegetables in refrigerators can be possible following ancient traditional methods. It is that lost knowledge about fresh food – what it should look like, how long it should last, how we should treat it. Korean designer Jihyun Ryou wanted to reintroduce in her thesis project at Design Academy Eindhoven, Save Food from the Refrigirator. Her solution is a set of ingenious, wall-mounted storage units that draw on traditional, pre-refrigeration food preservation techniques originated in Korea.

                     

Leaving aside the potential food preservation benefits and possible energy savings, perhaps the most important aspect of Ryou’s food shelves is their visibility. By putting fresh fruit and vegetables on the wall, Ryou’s design would force us to actually look at our food.

The result of this daily confrontation, she hopes, is that we would eat more healthy, wate less, and – intangibly but importantly – rebuild our relationship with these equally biological and perishable, if slightly less animate, fellow organisms.

In the current food preservation situation, we hand over the responsibility of taking care of food to the technology. We don’t observe the food anymore and don’t understand how to treat it. My design looks at re-introducing and re-evaluating traditional oral knowledge of food. Furthermore, it aims to bring back the connection between us as human beings and food ingredients as other living beings. I believe that once people are given a tool that triggers their minds and requires a mental effort to use it, new traditions and new rituals can be introduced in our culture.

Ryou doesn’t call for the complete elimination of the refrigerator, but her idea of redesigning domestic space to suit food (as opposed to redesigning food to our appliances) is pretty exciting. Unfortunately, her elegant designs are not commercially available, although they don’t look impossible to recreate with quite a basic set of carpentry skills.

I guess that everybody can understand that Food is put in refrigerator to prevent it from spoilage by the action of microbes. But this does not mean that all food must be handled equally and stored in refrigerators. It's a fact that out of our ignorance and lack of knowledge in food preservation is the main cause to blame that brought us to this point....