Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: Could You Live Without a Refrigerator?

Episode Date: September 21, 2019

Do you know that hulking refrigerator in your kitchen emits CO2 thanks to the electricity it uses each year? It's a comparatively small amount, in truth, but enough that some people have foresworn their fridge and adopted a life without one. See how they do it in this classic episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hello everyone, it's your old pal Chuck, one half of stuff you should know. Josh is asleep, I can hear him snoring next to me. In this episode, for my select pick, could you live without a refrigerator?

Sounds silly, from January 2, 2014. I guess it was our New Year's special edition, but hey, can you live without a refrigerator? It's really about slow food. Check it out right now. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark,

and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's over there. She's eating stalks of broccoli. Yeah, she's pretty. Not the florets, she's eating the chunky trunk. She throws the florets away, it's bizarre. No, she's, I'm not into food waste, so she's eating every single bit.

She's just munching on it like a rabbit over there. Oh, I see, you know? Oh no, that I look more closely, I see that you're right. That was just a clever lead-in to what will be a great intro from you. No, that was the intro. Oh, okay. Jerry doesn't waste food, people.

No, food waste is a terrible thing, and that's only part of the tip of the iceberg of this subject that we're about to touch on. Tip of the ice box? This is a huge, rambling, enormous topic that we're about to tackle. See, Chuck, you've heard of green, eco-friendliness. Yeah, yeah, we like it.

Eco-consciousness. We like to push that racket when we can. Yeah, what's sad is more and more today, it seems to be, well, there's parts that have become ingrained, like people recycle, and recycling's just a thing now, it's not going anywhere. Yeah, like if you don't recycle now, you're kind of like one of those people

that throws cigarettes out the window. Yeah, that's pretty bad too. A lot of people still do that. Yeah, but I think, not to get off on my high horse, but I think a lot of the people that toss those cigarettes out the window, probably like would say, if someone threw a McDonald's bag out the window,

they'd be like, how can you do that? Yeah. Like they justify cigarettes somehow. I've seen that, people throw those things out. Like eco-friendly people, I think, eco-friendly smokers, I think justify that, because it's like, wow, you still don't want to cigarette in your car.

Dude, because they stink, they're gross, they're bad for you. Put it out there, it'll end up in a lake or something, your bird will eat it. Did you know that I was at the gas station the other day, and I saw a guy driving off, and as he drove off, he held his hand out the window and released a stack of apparently losing lottery tickets.

I'm talking like 30, just right into the parking lot. I couldn't believe my eyes. I mean, it's a joke now, literally, on Anchorman. In the original Anchorman, when they finish all of their McDonald's, they just throw all their stuff like in the park. It's a joke. Mad Men had one of those, too.

They had like a family picnic, and afterward, they gathered up their stuff and just like picked up the mic and threw all the trash out and were like, let's go. Right, exactly. That's how it used to be, though. Isn't that weird that that used to be a thing, that it's okay to throw trash on the ground?

And it's not okay, but some people still do it. I've seen it, right? Yeah, but the point is, I am making a point here, believe it or not, there is some parts of the green movement that have become entrenched and scanced in the mainstream culture, and it's having an impact. It's having a real effect, sure.

It's not having enough of an effect. We're all headed for global catastrophe, eventually. But when we think about the green movement now, it almost seems past tense. There's parts of it that seem like a bit of a fad. You know what I mean? Being green, how green can you go? What can you do?

There was this thing that popped up in 2009 because of a New York Times article where people were starting to give up their refrigerators as part of the green movement. To be green, to basically say I'm greener than thou. Right. You get the impression that that's what they're doing. Ultimately, they're saying, no,

it's just one less thing that's using up electricity, so it's saving CO2 emissions. But it seems to me to follow along the line of the people who had themselves sterilized so they couldn't contribute to the growing population, global population. You're saying those are about the same? It seems to me.

Yeah. Although the refrigerator one is far more reversible because you just go out and buy a refrigerator and plug it in. Yeah, that's true. And then bam, I'm back, baby. Well, you can reverse your procedure to not have kids too these days.

Yeah, I think it's a role of the dice. Oh, really? If it'll work again? Oh, I thought you could get it reversed and open the sweat. They can reverse it, but it doesn't necessarily work. Oh, okay. I thought that was pretty good. All right.

Man, that was a sidebar. So should we talk about food waste? Well, let's talk about this refrigerator thing. You're really fixated on the food waste thing, aren't you? Well, it's a big part of whether or not you can go without a fridge. Well, let's talk about what happens or why people go without a fridge first, Chuck,

if you'll bear with me. Okay. So people are pulling the plugs on these refrigerators or they were in 2009, or at least three people were in 2009. One in Canada, I think. Oh, really? Yeah.

But I got the impression from reading the original New York Times article that it was just kind of the sub thing among the eco-green- It wasn't all the rage. No. Like bamboo flooring and cork flooring. No, and the New York Times article pointed out

that it seems to be a dividing line among green, the eco-conscious. And the eco-crazy. Yeah, like where some people say that's preposterous, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. And then other people are like, look at how far I'm willing to go to be green. So what's the benefit of all that?

Well, a refrigerator uses electricity and I guess we can give you a couple of stats to bring it all home for you. Typical fridge, post 2000, uses about 450 kilowatts per year. Yeah, thanks to the energy star ratings. Yeah, which is better than it used to be for sure. And if you want to translate that into cheeseburgers,

no wait, into miles driven in your car, because we're talking about the emission of CO2, that's about 800 miles, driving your car about 800 miles. Depending on what kind of miles you get, because really it's equivalent to what, 35 gallons of gas? 35 gallons, yeah. So even then in the article, they point out that

it's kind of low on the list. It ranks behind clothes dryer, central air in your furnace. Yeah, your furnace is like 6,000 kilowatts a year. It's amazing. So your refrigerator is 450 kilowatt hours of electricity per year. So it's not even super high up in your household. No, it's nowhere near.

But I think the people who are pulling the plugs on these refrigerators are saying every little bit counts. Yeah, and they probably have already taken other green precautions, and like they probably don't run their furnace like this, you know? Right. They don't have a potbelly stove.

They better not. If they use a normal old like terrible electric furnace, they, then I'm gonna go to their house and have a little chat with them. It's like shaking outside their house, yet they're eating out of a glue cooler. Right, and that's what they do. I mean like when you pull the plug on the fridge,

I wish I could just come up with another phrase that rolls off the tongue. So I'm tired of saying that. When you go without a refrigerator. Yeah, deep fridge. Deep fridge, Chuck. Nice. Thanks.

When you deep fridge, you still need typically some source of cooling inside of your home, something that can keep some food items from perishing, because we apparently refrigerate a lot of stuff we don't need to. That is true. You can keep that ketchup and mustard out on the counter. Yeah.

Hot sauce? Oh yeah. I've already goes three years in a regular pantry. Really? Little sriracha? Just keep it out there? Yeah. I kept a lot of stuff out of the fridge,

and not for any reason other than that's just how it was in my house. I remember butter in a tray on the counter. Butter's better that way. Room temperature? Oh man, are you kidding me? Yeah. It's just like, it's so spreadable.

Right. I keep mine in a fridge just to keep it longer, because I don't eat that much butter, but man, if you go to a restaurant and they give you butter and it's cold. Dude. I'm just like, what do you do? It's literally Emily's biggest pet peeve is

Well, I agree with them. Cold rolls with cold butter, or hot rolls with cold butter. Yeah, because you get the hot rolls and you think this place knows what they're doing, and you get this cold pad of butter. So I've developed a technique. You know the.

Under the armpit method? Well, it's close. It should just cup your hands, and you put a couple of those little foil wraps. You want to make sure it's wrapped in foil. It's pats of cold butter. Sure. And you heat them up pretty quick,

and I'll tell you what. You can make some friends around the table if you heat somebody's butter up for them, because nobody likes cold butter. And then you hand them a little butter pat, and you're like, here, take this. Yeah, it's my gift to you. I like it when they just have

a little olive oil and balsamic vinegar, you know? That's good too, but I like good room temperature butter, especially like 83% milk fat content or more. Yeah, good butter. So like I said, I left butter out. We left, I think I remember certain condiments being left out.

What about fruits and vegetables? Yeah, like a lot of vegetables I don't refrigerate now. Like I never refrigerate peppers and onions. Well, you don't want to. If you do refrigerate an onion, it will last longer, but if you're going to use it to eat, you want to take it out of your refrigerator and bring it up to room temperature

before you cook with it or use it in food because it takes a lot of the temperature away. But that's also a tip if you hate crying. Oh yeah. Because if you cut a cold onion, the enzyme that eventually sets off the chain reaction that makes you cry is contained. It's not as volatile.

I've noticed that. So that's your tip from Chuck and Josh. My eyes kill me too with onions. It depends on the onion. And it's not just like, oh, it's little tears. It's like massive burning. It's really bad. Really?

Yeah, yeah. I'm hypersensitive. I did a don't be dumb on it that explains exactly what's going on with you. I haven't seen that. Oh, okay. So you know. So yeah, a lot of the vegetables I don't keep.

Like it depends on when I'm going to eat it. If I bring home some, like a big head of cauliflower, I'll keep that out in the fruit basket for a couple of days. I've never seen that before in my entire life. What, cauliflower? Out. Yeah. I've only seen it in like a crisper drawer.

Yeah, I've left cauliflower and broccoli out like green onions and lemon grass, garlic of course, garlic of course, potatoes, don't refrigerate potatoes. I think I would like stop short and point if I saw like cauliflower out in like a fruit basket. Really? Be like, what is that? No, that's just fine.

I haven't even been to your house. I didn't notice that. Well, I mean, I don't always have. Had you gone through the cauliflower? Yeah, just eating it. Tomatoes are another one too. They'll last longer in the fridge. But if you're going to cook with them,

you want to bring up to room temperature. Some stuff you just don't want to refrigerate potatoes, apparently don't do very well in the fridge. You put them in a nice brown paper sack in your pantry away from the sunlight. They keep for a really long time. Yeah, you know, Jerry, I think Jerry showed me the little trick.

Was that you with the cilantro, Jerry? And the, yep. Oh, what? I need to know this because they eat a lot of cilantro. You, the cilantro you don't use, just fill up a glass like half full of water and just throw it in there and just leave it out in your kitchen.

Oh yeah, yeah. Like the base of it in the water. Right. And it just stays fresh like super long. And, you know, the fridge can beat up cilantro after like a day or two. I like your optimism, by the way. Thank you.

The avocado is what always kills me though. Well, I eat a lot of avocado as well. It's hard to keep those fresh. I've tried a lot of tricks too. Well, here's your trick. I will teach you the trick. You ready? Okay.

Oh, you're cutting up an avocado? Yeah. And like, yeah, that's it for the avocado. I have no trick for that. Well, what do you eat them whole? Yeah, pretty much. I don't understand. Well, I don't, no, I don't like eat the skin

and everything. No, that's not what I mean. It's like once I cut into an avocado, all of that avocado is about to be consumed by me. Oh, so that's the tip? Yeah. But I do have another tip for you though with avocados. You know how you go to the store and you like squeeze them

and you can find one out of 150 that's squeezable? It's pretty annoying. It is, but that squeezed one is gonna be nasty and bruised and just disgusting. There's gonna be basically like rot wherever you and everybody else squeeze that avocado. So you're gonna have a lot less usable avocado. So you wanna get one that you can't squeeze.

It's so firm, it can't be squeezed. Well, but then you just have to wait a few days to eat it. You can wait one day. One day? That's all it takes, my friend, and here's how. You take a brown paper bag and buy a banana. Okay. And you put the banana and the avocados

in the brown paper bag, roll it up pretty tight, but leave a little space in there. And they do it. And the, right, they get it on. Uh-huh. And what happens is the avocados ripen. Really? Yeah, the banana as it ripens itself.

Turns to dust. Well, it puts off a gas. Interesting. That ripens the avocados. I'm gonna try that, man. And I'm not kidding. 12 to 24 hours, you have totally ready avocados. Yeah, cause I like my avocados firm still.

Oh, you're gonna love this, Chuck. And not mushy, but not hard, but just firm. You're gonna thank me later. I'm excited about your avocado experiences now. I am too. So there's plenty of stuff that doesn't need refrigerating. So that's one way that people can defridge. Yeah, this is turning into like food 101 with Josh and Chuck.

Yeah. I hope that's okay. Yeah, plenty of stuff that you don't have to refrigerate. But people still use some sort of cooling mechanism. Yeah, like a cooler. Like if you have meats or dairy products, if you wanna go without a fridge, most people use a cooler.

And the thing that annoyed me with this article is they said, or they use a mini freezer to make ice. I'm like, well, that's probably just about as bad as your stupid fridge. Well, it's pretty close. So like one of those little chest freezers, I didn't see the size of it. Oh, a 6.4 cubic feet chest freezer, which isn't big,

but it's not that small. But apparently that's the thing that people who defridge use. That still uses 200 kilowatt hours a year. So really by unplugging your refrigerator and just using a chest freezer, you're saving about 15 gallons of gas a year. Nia, I don't know if that's your best, like spend your time doing better things

for the environment. Right. Well, again, I think people who do this are saying, I'll do this on top of stuff. And then kind of cleverly, if you ask me, they're using this, the ice chest to, will basically fill up like a two liter bottle of water, which they didn't allow to go to waste,

that two liter bottle. Sure. Putting those in the freezer chest and then having like a separate cooler that they put the frozen water bottles in to keep cool their milk and their meats and stuff like that. Yeah, and you know what? We're gonna talk about some tips for shopping

to accommodate in this lifestyle, but first let's take a little message break. Okay. Stuff you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses

and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references

to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s,

called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander

each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so you were talking about the cooler, full of frozen bottles of water to keep like your milk in some of your dairy and stuff. But if you, when you go to the store, if you're going to try and live this way,

you can't probably buy the gallons of milk unless you really go through a lot of milk. You might want to buy quarts of milk. Right. You can't go to Sam's Club and buy eight gallons of mayonnaise unless you eat that pretty quickly. That makes you. Yeah, and if so, maybe you should focus more attention

on your mayonnaise habits than what you're doing for the environment. So you're going to have to buy smaller amounts of things, which they say can cost a little more, but. Well, yeah. If you're not wasting food, though, like if you added up the food you waste, you're probably burning a lot of money.

And there's going to be far less food waste if you're buying in smaller amounts. Right, the other side of that, though, is if you're eco-friendly or eco-conscious, you're one of the things that you're probably trying to avoid is packaging as well. And if you buy smaller amounts of food, that means you buy more packaging.

Shoot, I didn't think about that. And if you have smaller amounts of food, that means you have to go to the store more often. And then you may have to drive more often, which doesn't matter if you're riding a bike or something like that. But if you're driving a car, then you're burning those gallons of gas

that you might necessarily not have been anyway. Yeah, like you get in your old 72 pickup truck and drive 12 miles to get like a pint of mayonnaise. Right, you have to stop and fill up at least once during that stretch. So can we talk a little bit about food waste, though? Yeah, because it's a pretty big thing. Like if you have no refrigerator,

the chances of your food spoiling just simply increase. If you have no refrigerator? Yeah. Well, not so. Apparently, according to a 2008 report, unless developed countries where they have no refrigerators, they experience less food spoilage. Bam.

You just faced me. Because they're eating what they need. Right, yeah. They're not going to Sam's Club. Right. And buying 700 chicken McNuggets to put in the freezer. I hear that. And I guess if somebody who defridges

uses the developing world as a model for their food consumption, yeah. I wonder what hangups there are, though, that would keep you from successfully doing that. Or if it is just entirely possible to just watch how you're eating enough so you don't have very much food waste. Maybe. Let's talk food waste, finally.

In developing countries, post-harvest losses of food grains can reach as high as 50%. 50% dude in developing countries. Isn't that a sad statistic? Yeah, because one of the things that makes that so sad, Chuck, is that food has been harvested and is ready to go. So not only is it ready to go, it just doesn't make it to somebody's stomach.

All of the energy used to produce, harvest, and transport that food has already been used as well. Yeah, I didn't think about that. So that's a huge waste there, too. It's not just food waste. You add a double bummer onto every bummer that I express. I'm good at it. The US spends about $1 billion a year

to dispose of food waste in this country, $1 billion a year. And the EPA says that food leftovers are the single largest part of our waste stream. Yeah, by weight. Right, they make up about 12% of municipal landfills, which are a pretty awful word in and of themselves, because municipal landfills are responsible for about 34% of methane emissions globally, or at least in the US.

And methane is 21 times more damaging as a greenhouse gas than CO2. Yeah, and all that food waste is producing like tons of methane. Yeah, which I don't understand why we're not trapping that methane and burning it off as energy. I know there are some pilot projects, but I don't understand why that's not a bigger thing now.

Yeah, didn't we study something about cow farts? Yeah, I saw that. I see that rings a bell from the past. Yeah, livestock is a huge contributor to methane emissions. And nobody knows what to do about it, but there were plans to try to trap it and burn it for electricity. I think there was a farmer who was using cow poop or something.

Yeah, I think a Dirty Jobs episode did something like that. I definitely remember looking at that. But I agree, methane. Let's trap it. There's a T-shirt. So yeah, so food waste is a, I thought it was the potential was increased without a refrigerator.

You've opened my eyes here. But those double bummers that I did add, though, more packaging and more trips to the store, again, if you live near a store that you can bike to or something like that, that gets around that. And then also, if you are one of those zero waste people, like have you heard of B. Johnson? Yeah, she's pretty remarkable.

What's her website? It is Zero Waste Home. Yeah, she's one of these people that is doing the family experiment. Like, let's see what we can really do and putting it on a blog. She, I think her family is the one that has produced a quart of waste in a year. A quart of trash. In a year.

Everything else is reused. She has five Rs. You think your three Rs are worthwhile? Reduce, reuse, recycle. What are her other two? Refuse. Oh, wow. So she's saying, even if it's free,

you know that free frisbee the chiropractor gives you? Yeah. Say you don't want it. I do that a lot, actually. I don't want a lot of that junk. OK, so you're in line with this. Yeah. Reduce, which would be, say, using your own grocery bags.

Oh, sure, yeah. So you're reducing the use of the storage grocery bags. OK. Reuse, so don't throw your own grocery bag away. Use it again. Recycle. Yes. You've heard of this one?

Sure. And then rot, Chuck. Rot. Like rot in H, if you're not going to do this? I think so. That's the last one. What does she mean by rot? I'm sure composting.

Oh, OK. Yeah, and like you said about the people that, like, I want to go without a fridge, but I'm going to go to the grocery store every 10 minutes to get a packet of mayonnaise. I don't think that's the case. I bet a lot of those people are growing food in their gardens and composting and probably not doing that.

And plus, also, she points out, B. Johnson points out that a lot of the stuff that we would consider food waste, like, you know, grocery stores, food waste, to me, is a, I think we should do a whole podcast on it. It is fascinating, mind-boggling, the amount of waste we produce food-wise. I've read that something like a third, a third,

of all of the food in the world goes to waste one way or another. Either, like, 50% in the developing world doesn't make it after being harvested. Food waste from the United States in the grocery stores in the US, there's any kind of cosmetic imperfection. Yeah, if it's not pretty enough. They just throw it away. There's nothing wrong with it, but it'll just get tossed.

Yeah, that's, I don't think I would like to know what goes on behind the scenes of, like, a huge grocery chain. I think we need to, like, get to the bottom of it. An expose, perhaps. But yeah, right. But B. Johnson points out a lot of the stuff that even people at home would consider wasted, spoiled food can be reused.

So, like, if you have a bunch of stale bread, make bread pudding. If you have some wilted lettuce, drop it in an ice bath and it wakes back up. I feel like I still breaded the birds. That's nice. Like when I have moldy bread, I always just, like, go out and throw it.

That's nice. And then do you eat the birds afterwards? Are you, like, raising them? Yeah, I get my BB gun. Not true. You don't even need a BB gun. You just teach them to eat out of your hand and then grab them.

Snap the little neck. And you got brown thrasher for dinner. That's our state bird. We get in trouble for that. Would we? Yeah, you can't kill your state bird. I figured it was the state bird because it was the tastiest bird.

No, I don't think so. Y, S, K, S, K, K, K, K, K, K, K, K, K, K, K. La-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. La-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. La-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews,

co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger

and the dial-up sound, like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So you dug this up.

This is pretty interesting. If you want to talk about people really going the extra mile to not have a carbon footprint. Some folks are making their own shoes, out of old tires, and old jeans, and hemp, of course. OK, yeah. Not much art support, though, apparently. Sort of like a moccasin, I would imagine.

You can eat your weeds in your yard, if you're into that. A lot of edible weeds, like garlic mustard or chickweed. Yeah, I mean, what's a weed? But some plant that we decided we didn't want. I read something somewhere about the human diet, how it's become so narrow. We used to eat a lot more stuff.

Oh, I bet. A lot more weeds. And as a result, our health was a lot better. Yeah. The bitterer, I think we talked about it before. Have you gotten to the point, too, where everything we talk about rings a bell? Like we've mentioned everything before?

Yeah, our world is getting narrower. It is. But I feel like we've talked about before, the bitterer, the plant, the healthier it tends to be. And I think you said also bitterness, though, also suggests that it's poisonous, too. Well, that is part of the edibility test. And you shouldn't just go in your yard

and just pull a bunch of weeds and eat them. Not everything is edible. Dying is not that green. But if you do have edible weeds and you want to add them in your salads or something, that's something that some people do. Some people use old license plates to side their houses.

Is that true? It's in this article. Of course it's true. I bet you. I bet you that's a thing. I could see that. And you know what? Why not?

They're just going to waste. Old license plates? Sure. We got a birdhouse made out of license plates. Oh, those are cute. It's all right. We got it because it was Ohio, California, and Georgia, which was Emily's three states, which is kind of weird.

The triumvirate. I got to have this. Do you use it for BB gun practice? No, that's just birds. OK. You know, I shot an animal once in my life, and it was one of the worst things that had ever happened to me. I was too young.

I got a BB gun, and I was tired of shooting cans. So I shot a squirrel, and it haunts me to this day. I imagine. And I'm not pooping hunters. If you're into that, that's fine. I'm just not into it. So I shot a squirrel when I was 12. You're a haunted man.

I want to come clean. Yeah. All right. So what's this poop burger thing? I couldn't find any corroborating evidence. But basically, there was a story that popped up on a couple of blogs about a Japanese scientist who had basically converted human feces into an edible burger.

And the two blog posts I saw were basically piggybacking off of each other. And the original source led to a 404 eras. I think the American press accidentally picked up a yes-men article or something like that, you know? Well, how about if anyone can corroborate? I have the worst time with that word. Corroborate?

Yeah, I can't ever say the word right. Say it. Cooperate? No. Cooperate? Corroborate. Corroborate. There you go.

Can we put a ding, ding, ding in there, post-production? So if anyone can let us know that this story is true, then yeah, yeah, I'd love to know that. Yeah, let us know. There are, speaking of fecal material, though, Chuck, there was also this green movement to give up toilet paper. Oh, I heard about that.

Do you remember that huge ball that was the size of a school bus that was made of handy wipes and fat in London? I don't remember that. Oh, really? No. It was this fatty deposit made up of grease and used handy wipes.

Was it like an art project? No, it was trapped in the London sewer system. Oh, OK. I thought it was on display or something. No. No, God, no. No, I don't remember that. That's horrific.

It was within the last year. Wow. Well, anyway, I guess some people are taking this even further and saying, not even toilet paper will touch my bottom. Instead, I'm going to use basically diapers. Oh, just like cloth squares? So you keep a pail of clean ones on one side

and a dirty pail on the other. And then you just wash the poopy ones and you're green. I don't think I would go that far. I don't think so. But I am interested in a bidet because I do think toilet paper is disgusting, like taking dry, thin paper and wiping poop from your skin. I don't get it.

And it's never made sense to me. Really, even as a child? Well, no, since I got grown enough to realize that moisture is a pretty nice thing to have if you're cleaning poop. Yeah. Oh, you just put a little Vaseline in there. So a bidet, I'd be into a bidet. OK.

And I'm exclusively with the wet wipes. Well, you're contributing to the huge fat deposit ball. Really? That's what it was made up. Even those that say they're flushable, it's probably a bunch of bunk. The London thing proves it as bunk. Really?

And for some reason, I don't remember why, but it was almost exclusively wet wipes and fat grease. That's really gross. It's like they were attracted to one another or something like that. Maybe so. I don't understand it.

All right. Do you think there'd be like a squirrel? Yeah. Or the remnants of a squirrel in there or something. But no, it's just wet wipes and grease. Holy cow. Well, let's get this one back on the rails and finish it up, huh?

I don't have anything else, do you? Did you see the Albert Einstein refrigerator? Oh, that's like no electricity whatsoever. Yeah. That makes sense. Well, it does need a source of heat. But in 1938, I think, Einstein and one of his former students developed a refrigerator that has no moving parts.

It could be run on solar energy. But basically, it uses, when you lower the pressure, the atmospheric pressure of something, it's boiling temperature lowers as well. And then when you boil something, it sucks energy out of the surrounding atmosphere and lowers the temperature. That's basically this kind of Rube Goldberg-esque Einstein invention that this guy in Oxford was trying to rebuild.

And he made a test pilot version of it, but it's not very efficient. I think that's a new, not a new thing, but I've seen a lot of stuff lately about people remaking some early inventions that were never able to be properly made. Yeah, I think you were talking about that. Da Vinci stuff, people trying to make that?

Yeah, there's a TV show where they definitely did the Da Vinci stuff. But those were mainly like weapons and things. But I did see a video the other day that someone made a musical instrument that Da Vinci invented that was never properly made. And it was played like a piano, but sounded like strings. And it was really kind of awesome.

So that's a long way of saying, build this fridge, the Einstein fridge. Well, there's other things you can do too. If you have a fridge and you don't feel like giving up your fridge, if you have a fridge that's older than 2,000 and you have a little bit of dough, go buy an energy star rated one.

Yeah, throw that other one in a landfill. Right. No, use it as like a planter or something out in your backyard to grow food in. Yeah, you can always sell a fridge. Yeah. Like any appliance that works, you can sell to somebody. You just want to take the door off

to make sure no little kids get trapped in it, or Indiana Jones. That's right. You also, if you do have an energy star rated fridge, you want to clean the coils off once a year. That will keep it running efficiently. Right, exactly. You want to think about what you're

going to open the fridge to get so you don't just stand there with the fridge open like a slack jawed yokel. Like everybody does. Right, yeah. And then apparently, if you keep your fridge fairly stocked, that will allow it to the temperature to bounce back to where it needs to be. It has less atmosphere to cool.

My fridge, you have to open to get the water, filtered water, which really bugs me. It's not like in the outside of the door. I've never seen that. Yeah, you just live in a cuckoo house. You got cauliflower on your fruit basket. You're going to open the door to get some water. Got cilantro sitting in cups all over the house.

That's a good idea. I've tried that, but put it in the fridge and it just wrecks it. So I guess maybe just leaving it out. I mean, it lasts for quite a while. Man, I love that stuff. Don't you feel bad for people who taste dish soap when they eat cilantro? Yeah, I love cilantro.

Me too, buddy. Well, that's it about cilantro. If you want to learn more about it, you can type the word into the search bar how stuff works. And you can also type in, can I go without a refrigerator in the search bar? And it'll bring this article up. And since I said search bar, that

means it's time for listener mail. Yeah, I'm going to call this from one of our law enforcement officers. Hey, guys, my name is Andy. I'm a police officer for a law enforcement agency in St. Louis, Missouri area. Go Cardinals. I'm a big fan of the show and appreciate

the always new interesting topics and discussions. And I've noticed that you seem to have an affinity for law enforcement related topics, which is true. You definitely do. You love them. I would just list. I think I wanted to be a cop or something, maybe. You can be a security guard.

That's not the same. I was just listening to the meth podcast and noticed that you mentioned one of the first shaken bake incidences. And that's a mobile meth lab, apparently. That's like the cop lingo, which occurred actually in my precinct at a Walmart. Remember we talked about that?

I was not yet employed there, but I know one of the officers. I know the officer that responded. What I understand, a woman was shoplifting, was in custody of the lost prevention officers. And when they called for police assistance, my now co-worker arrested her and, in the process, discovered a Gatorade bottle in her purse, which was being used as a mobile meth lab.

That is so crazy. It is very crazy. Meth usage in the area that I work in is rampant. And only having been on the force less than a year, I've already handled two meth labs of my own. Having seen firsthand some of the reactions to meth that these folks have, I will say that you are pretty much right on, guys.

Additionally, another unfortunate situation is that, where there is a meth lab, typically there are children. One of my meth labs was also home to seven kids. It's a really sad sight to see. Yeah, remember that one episode of Breaking Bad? Which one? The one where Pinkman basically gets kidnapped

by those meth addicts who robbed, like, stole a whole ATM machine, and there's a little kid there. And typically, you will find that the parents have little interest in their children and pay them very little attention in general. Of course, because they're all interested in using meth. Sure. It's kind of a one-track mind situation.

So it makes you appreciate non-meth users is what Andy says. So thanks, Andy, officer. Yeah, he wrapped that up at the end, didn't he? Spanked it on the bottom. He had another part, so it might have read awkward, a suggestion, which I cut out. But I took the suggestion, but just didn't read it. Is it a mystery suggestion, then?

Yeah, maybe, I'll surprise you. Well, if you want to send us a mystery suggestion, we are welcome to those. You can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K Podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuffyshouldknow. Or you can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works.

For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker

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Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life.

Tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.