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Food

How a Fridge in an Alleyway Brought a Neighborhood Together

This Montreal guy has opened up his fridge to the city, you just need to trust his dumpster-diving skills.

Do you trust this guy's fridge? All photos by the author

There's a working fridge in a Montreal alleyway with a raccoon on its door.

On a sunny Monday afternoon, the fridge contained some cupcakes, a sandwich-sized tupperware of soup, and 20 individual glass containers of gourmet yogurt. A handwritten note says to freeze the cupcakes.

By dinnertime the cupcakes and gourmet yogurt are gone, replaced by almond milk, apples, and a bag of grapes.

The food in the fridge belongs to anyone in Montreal. That's how Patrick Bodnar, who lives in the Rosemont apartment behind the refrigerator, designed it.

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Le frigo des ratons (or, "the fridge of raccoons," in English), is one guy's attempt at solving household food waste on a micro level. Canadians waste $31 billion [$23.5 billion USD] worth of food annually according to a 2014 study by Ontario consulting firm Value Chain Management International. Households make up half of that.

"Nobody would buy a cabbage that was half-bad," Bodnar said. "It's gotten worse now—nobody buys something if there's a dimple on it."

Bodnar, a regular dumpster diver, came up with the idea when he couldn't find enough people to whom he could give away the food he collected behind grocery stores. Montreal's dumpster diving community already drops off large quantities of unwanted food in public places to share with each other, but that wasn't enough for Bodnar to offload excess food. During the winter, he ended up stocking his car like a fridge.

"I'd give it to friends and neighbors, but sometimes it was too much," he said.

The alley of the free food

Despite the ugly fruit movement, with grocers like Loblaws repackaging less-than-perfect produce for a lower price, a lot of produce ends up in the trash or pulverized so that even divers can't recuperate it.

"It's actually something we did in our family," said Bodnar, whose grandfather worked as a vendor selling farmers' crops at a market. His grandfather's food-salvaging habits included picking up unsellable leftovers to bring home. "Somehow we got boxes of food sometimes from my grandparents, and my mother told me they were getting it from the dumpster."

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Still, not everyone is into the idea of rummaging through alleyway bins, which makes Bodnar's fridge something his neighbors can all get behind.

"It's something that will bring people together," said neighbor Annie Joanisse when she strolled past the fridge.

"I'm confident in people. If you're inappropriate and you want to put something that is impossible to digest, then I'll have indigestion, but I don't think it'll happen," Joanisse added. "You would have to go through a lot of trouble to affect someone you don't even know."

Before dropping off food, a photo needs to be posted in the group to add some level of accountability. Junk food is discouraged and raw meat is banned from the fridge. Residents can use it to subject their neighbors to their cooking skills, pick up leftovers if they're too lazy to cook, or grab ingredients if they're not into shopping. The doors have a list of instructions about what how fast some products expire.

Taking food from strangers requires some level of trust, said Catherine Angers as she picked a yogurt from the fridge for her toddler. The area is home to a lot of young families, and most of the people passing by the fridge Monday afternoon were curious after reading about it in the local press.

"There are always worries," Angers said about the potential hygiene problems that come with leaving food in an alley. But she is optimistic about participating and reducing her own food waste.

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"I'm really surprised by how welcoming the attitude was," Bodnar said. "I thought this food initiative would be surrounded by fear."

On the day of the "launch" of Le frigo des ratons, the fridge was overflowing with produce and baked goods. Quebec politicos, national media, and an alleyway full of locals came to cheer on the project. Its Facebook page popped off and Bodnar even got a nod from Rosemont's mayor at the borough's last council meeting.

Bodnar plans on publishing his designs to get other people into having their own backyard fridge. His fence is set back about eight feet from the alley and the fridge fits in a nook surrounded by a rectangular structure made out of used pallets he found on the street. There are a few benches for people to socialize and a shelf and plastic bin for non-perishables.

This isn't a new concept for Montreal, which, like other Canadian cities, is already using library boxes on the street, where people can leave or take books for free. Similar public fridges already exist in Germany, Belgium, and India.

Montrealers already set up a couple of public fridges inside a park hut and a used bookstore. Le frigo des ratons, Bodnar says, is different because it's open 24/7, it's on his property, and is aimed at serving his block.

Bodnar is clear about one thing, the fridge isn't about charity or solving poverty, but getting a community together through an anti-capitalist food system.

"It's mostly to be able to look each other in the eye and recognize each other, because we share food through this thing," he said.

Follow Michelle Pucci on Twitter.