In 1956, refrigerator architecture got an overhaul, thanks to the Refrigerator Safety Act — also known as the “refrigerator death law.” Children were getting stuck inside fridges, which then had latches on the outside and a rubber seal locking in air, but no way to get out.
The safety act mandated that refrigerators must have the capability to be opened from the inside, punishable by a misdemeanor and a $1,000 fine or imprisonment up to a year.
While it drastically reduced refrigerator deaths, decades later, it has also paved the way for cities to write citations for community fridges offering free food. That’s according to Ernst Bertone Oehninger, who serves as the point of contact for legal issues at nonprofit Freedge. Oehninger was also part of the original group of then-UC Davis students who spearheaded the arrival of community fridges in Davis in 2014.
“You cannot have an abandoned fridge on the street, you cannot have that, and that's because of this ‘refrigerator death law’,” he said. “When you go to some cities, they’re gonna tell you, you cannot have the fridge here because of the refrigerator death law. That’s nonsense. … The striking majority of the fridges that I have seen, not one community [has one] with a latch on.”
That’s just one of the legal conflicts that Oehninger has seen community fridge organizers face during his time working with Freedge. While the project began almost a decade ago, the start of the pandemic — when physical distance defined the contours of many people’s days — brought community refrigerators into a wider spotlight.
But this year saw the number of Sacramento fridges, four at the year’s start, halved. First, the F Street location closed this summer once its owners moved and were unable to find someone willing to upkeep the fridge. Then — this past month — the I Street Fridge at 24th and I transformed into a little free library. The location saw a bevy of citations, from “blighted conditions” to installation in property setbacks, or the distance a building must be from the street.
A free library sits at the site of the former I and 24th Street community fridge, pictured on Nov. 15, 2023.Claire Morgan/CapRadio
The temporary loss of the fridge, which was the last remaining on the grid and in the central city, comes as the holiday season approaches and Sacramento residents continue to grapple with the end of Pandemic EBT, a federal food aid supplement which wound down at the start of this year.
While food banks and CalFresh provide access to food, community fridges and pantries occupy a specific niche in the food access ecosystem. They’re an extension of mutual aid, distinct from charity, meaning they’re a mode of community giving premised on people giving what they can and taking what they need.
“I think it's so important for people to have their own agency surrounding food — really, surrounding everything,” former I Street Fridge operator, Chelle Temple King, said. “It's nice to get to choose … when you want to go [to a community fridge]. And from the options, you get to choose what you would like to eat.”
Food insecurity in Sacramento, where fridges help
Despite Sacramento being the “farm-to-fork capital,” food insecurity is still a prevalent issue in the region. Before the pandemic, Sacramento Food Bank and Family Services served around 150,000 people a month. In September 2023, per the latest data available provided to CapRadio, it served over 300,000 people.
“Demand for food assistance spiked earlier this year when pandemic-era benefits ended, and it’s remained at an elevated level ever since,” said Kevin Buffalino, the director of communications at the Sacramento Food Bank and Family Services. “The average family’s income is falling, while the prices of groceries and other necessities continue to rise.”
In a press release, River City Food Bank said this year it had “already seen a 21% increase in service and that number is growing.”
The end of Pandemic EBT, which automatically gave each household the maximum amount of CalFresh benefits based on their size and eligibility, benefitted over 200,000 people in Sacramento County. While there was a legislative effort to raise the floor of CalFresh benefits — currently at $23 — to $50, that bill never made it past the Committee of Human Services in the state Assembly.
While food insecurity and access has existed prior to the pandemic, it has only been exacerbated by it, hence the surge in popularity of community fridges and pantries.
“There was a fridge that went viral, I think in New York … and then New York had like 50 fridges overnight, and then like, then it was Oakland, [and so on],” Oehninger, with Freedge, remembers of the start of the pandemic. “We went from around 15 fridges in the U.S. to around 400 in two years.”
Though the map on the Freedge site isn’t thoroughly updated — due to a lack of “people power” at the organization — it displays a wide array of community fridges throughout not just the country, but the world, too.
The Sacramento region isn’t without its own free fridges. Aside from the fridges currently operating in the central city, there are 10 other free pantry locations sans fridges and six community fridges in Davis.
Still, when discussion about starting Freedge in 2012 began — even before Oehninger became a student at UC Davis — they came as an effort to divert food waste. While there were tables of free produce and canned food that popped up in different communities, akin to the community farmstand locations in Sacramento, Oehninger said the fridges were distinct: “They have electricity … they … preserve the food a little longer, and the fact that we have an appliance on the street, it got people's attention, for good or for bad.”
“When you have conferences, or you know, any event on campus, there’s so much good food … luxurious food being thrown away,” he said. “We want[ed] to create a place where people can just put food and take food, and the idea was to reduce food waste and also help people who are food insecure and don’t have enough to eat.”
It was during the start of the pandemic, in 2020, that Freedge’s language and mission began to expand to include a mutual aid framework. Sac Fridge 4 All, which spearheaded the installation of Sacramento fridges and worked in the central city and surrounding areas to do so, emerged with a mutual aid ethos.
While Oehninger acknowledged the contradictions between mutual aid’s ethos and Freedge being a nonprofit organization, he also highlighted one benefit to community fridges.
“That is something that the fridge answers that other organizations didn’t answer, because you need to go through the hoops of … filling out forms, or you need documentation,” he said.
While food banks don’t require guests to fill out forms to access food, they’re also not open 24/7. That’s something King noted in talking about the importance of community fridges — they said they try to put food in at “weird times” just in case people wander by looking for food.
Community fridges can respond to a varying array of community needs: People looking for extra produce to cook dinner with, someone who gets hungry on a walk, anyone who needs access to food for whatever reason.
“I just really fell in love with the equity surrounding mutual aid, that we stopped trying to strip people’s agency and their personhood, and we’re like, ‘Hey, there’s stuff here, sometimes. Come get it as it works for you,’” King, the former I Street Fridge operator, said. “It’s really important to me to not be dictatorial about care. It seems like a bad idea.”
Community fridges exist in legal gray area
There is, as of yet, no legislation that exists to specifically regulate community fridges and pantries specifically, meaning they exist in a legal gray area.
“That is maybe good, as well, because it leaves the communities … a little bit more free to do [things by] their own rules,” Oehninger said.
But when he and the group of organizers behind Freedge began installing community fridges in Davis, they ran into trouble with county health inspectors. Eventually, they were able to work out an agreement, and Oehninger said setting up fridges has often been contingent on negotiating different factors around a fridge based on the regulations active where someone has constructed theirs.
“The Vegas community fridges had [to] negotiate factors,” he said. “Firstly, we would receive a citation, and say, ‘What are you going to do? Can we have a permit?’ But we can’t have a permit, because you have to be a food facility, and the fridge … does not check all the cases for food facilities.”
With zoning, he said, cities will often cite specific building codes, and fridge organizers can respond accordingly. For example, in Davis, they asked fridge organizers to provide pipe around the cables so they wouldn’t be exposed.
And the fridges can receive varying reactions from neighbors, Oehninger said: “It’s the stigma of poverty that people don’t want to see … Honestly, that’s what it is.”
Those experiences setting up fridges in Davis and elsewhere led him and other Freedge organizers to write a series of guides intended to help fridge organizers with potential questions.
Their hope with the guides is that guides “don’t lose time with liability questions, don’t lose time with food code questions, so then people can focus on the important parts, which is looking for free food … talking to grocery stores, talking to restaurants … setting up community gardens and setting up food recovery systems,” he said.
In the Sacramento area, The Awkward Gardener’s Community Table is one of the crucial parts of the local food recovery ecosystem, working with varying restaurants and grocery stores, including Panera, Trader Joe’s and Moonbelly Bakery to distribute surplus to community fridges, pantries and encampments. So is Community Fruit 916, which redistributes neighborhood fruit to fridges, community members and The Awkward Gardener’s Community Table.
The I Street Fridge has been a recipient of several of those food recovery packages.
Still, despite following that guidance and reaching out to other community fridge organizers in Sacramento, King has received five citations on the fridge this year, four of them within the span of two months. She said she hasn’t received any negative feedback from neighbors, but after the fourth citation, she decided to take down the fridge and replace it with a Little Free Library.
She said that specific citation — the setback citation, which says “detached accessory structures” like the community fridge aren’t permitted in front or side yard setbacks — has been the most frustrating, especially, she said, since multiple Little Free Libraries throughout the city have been installed in setbacks.
“It's not enforced if you're giving away books, but it is enforced if you're giving away food,” she said. “And I find that really tragic.”
Oehninger said that unfortunately, the legal guides that do exist are more focused on liability and food codes, rather than zoning, because zoning is so city-specific.
“Zoning depends a lot on the person who is applying the code,” he said. “In California, you have the same food code for the whole state. But the health inspectors are not going to interpret things in the same way if you’re talking to someone in LA or Davis.”
When asked if Sacramento’s regulation has shifted, city spokesperson Kelli Trapani said via email that “nothing has changed on our process” since the municipality shared guidance on community fridges and pantries last March. Trapani added that there are currently no active citations against community fridges.
“Each property will be different, so it would be best for whoever is interested in information about their particular property and zoning setback requirements to contact the City’s Planning Division,” she said. That email is [email protected].
Still, King said they used the guidance, along with the resources provided on the Freedge website, and as of yet, has not received follow-up from code enforcement officers despite reaching out.
She said she’d like the city to do an assessment of any “little free” structures encouraged in mandatory setbacks and come out to actually measure her setback, especially since her I Street neighborhood is really old. And she’s hoping, eventually, that the city will create some sort of procedure for installing community fridges so there are clear rules around what’s allowed and what isn’t.
“I really wish the city was willing to work with me,” they said. “I can move the fridge, if it needs to be moved. I am happy to comply with whatever I need to comply with. But dealing with all of the citations is exhausting, it’s emotionally exhausting, because it feels really targeted. And it's also just exhausting because I have to do something with every one of them.”
Even though “it’s not all sunshine and rainbows at the fridge, all the time,” she added that she’d still like to bring the fridge back, and in the interim, people are “welcome to pick up a book and charge your phone and sit without fear of being told you have to move.”
A sign inside the free library on 24th and I Streets directs visitors to free food resources, pictured on Nov. 15, 2023.Claire Morgan/CapRadio
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