7:35 AM 7/25/2014
I was able to get up early (as in, be forced awake by an electronic attack) and pack a bunch of stuff into garbage bags. I’m not sorting through my belongings, I’m just piling everything into bags and taking it all with me to be sorted out later. That means I will have a lot more bags, but that’s okay. I haven’t gotten everything into bags yet, but I am taking a break.
There is something very wrong with the world, and I’m not even joking, if hundreds of millions of people are using refrigerators and keeping them turned to a setting where their temperature is higher than 40 degrees. I came home last night and found that the fridge in the kitchen had been turned back down to number 3 on the dial. My thermometer measured that as being higher than 40 degrees, when I had my thermometer in there. I could feel it was warm when I first came here, and saw that it had been turned all the way down to 2, so that it was up at like, I dunno, 55 degrees or something ridiculously warm and totally useless like that. Maybe it actually says in our lease that we’re required to keep the fridge on that setting when we leave – I vaguely recall seeing something in a previous lease about the fridge at one of my apartments in the past.
But I am actually serious. This phenomenon has huge consequences which may be far worse and far more encompassing than you might think. It might have consequences beyond just individual people getting sick from eating spoiled food every day. It may have influenced
‘scientific’ thinking for many decades now. It may be the reason for harmful popular nutrition advice from the government and the media. It might possibly have had huge social consequences.
When I lived in my tent, I decided to test a block of cheese. I had wanted cheese, but could not just buy one small piece at the convenience store in town, so I just bought a normal block of cheese that most people would put in their fridge. I didn’t have a fridge. I tested what would happen if you kept it at room temperature all night long.
After only a few hours at room temperature, the block of cheese was changed. I ate a tiny, tiny nibble of it, and instantly started having heart problems and a sort of allergic reaction in my mouth, probably to the amines. Protein foods form amines when they spoil, and amines cause many reactions.
Now imagine. People are all keeping their fridges on too low of a setting. That doesn’t mean low temperature, but rather, on too low of a number. The highest numbers are the coolest. Fridges don’t normally have an integrated thermometer that automatically tells you what temperature it is, and their dial is not calibrated to a particular temperature, so you can’t just turn a dial to a number that says ’40 degrees.’ It’s somewhere between 3 and 4 on our fridge here. They *should* have an integrated thermometer, and not only that, they shouldn’t even ALLOW you to turn it to any number that will make it warmer than 40 degrees. You should have to purchase a specialized refrigerator intended for special purposes, such as deliberately growing particular types of mold and bacteria, which might require an exact temperature of 55 degrees or something, maybe for people who are culturing cheeses and other fermented foods and want to keep them at a cave-like, underground-like temperature or something. Nobody else on earth requires their foods to be at 50 degrees for any reason, unless the fridge is full of nothing but beer and non-spoiling liquids like soda. Fruit juices will spoil at that temperature. So people might argue that there are lots of people out there who use their fridges for keeping nothing but beer and soda, and those people ought to be entitled to keep their non-spoiling beverages in a 55 degree fridge.
But so many other people out there are ignorant and/or stupid. Not everyone has worked in a food service industry. Not everyone has taken a nutrition class or studied nutrition for decades as a hobby like I have. Not everyone is good at understanding organic chemistry. People DON’T UNDERSTAND that when food is higher than a certain temperature, there are enzymes and bacteria that start changing the chemical structure of the food so that it gradually becomes toxic to eat.
So, hundreds of millions of people buy fridges and they see that it’s capable of going all the way down to 1. They think, ‘Wow, if we have the option of turning the fridge all the way down to 1, think of how much energy we could save! Why would anyone ever want to keep their fridge on a higher setting than that? That’s just a waste of money! It uses more electricity!’ They assume that just because you CAN turn the fridge all the way down to 1, then it must be OKAY to turn it all the way down to 1! Nobody would build and sell a refrigerator that was capable of doing something that wasn’t okay to do! Nobody reads the manual, or even HAS the manual, especially when they live in an apartment and the fridge is already there. The manual might tell you what the various settings could be used for. How many hundreds of millions of people simply don’t know this at all?
It ought to be a law. It oughta be a law that fridges must include an integrated thermometer which is connected to the temperature setting dial, and that dial must not be physically capable of going to any setting warmer than 40 degrees (or whatever the exact specific number really is – it might be 38.5 degrees or something). You might set it COLDER than that, but not warmer.
Well, this has far-reaching consequences. Fridges were invented many decades ago. Maybe a long time ago they might have had an integrated thermometer that wasn’t capable of going below 40 degrees. I don’t know. Maybe back then people actually knew the right temperature to keep their fridges at. But now, they don’t know. People are buying food at the grocery store – where people *DO* know what temperature to keep food at! and bringing it home, where it spoils in a couple of hours after they buy it – basically, they might as well have just taken it home and set it on the counter instead of inside a fridge. The fridge is just a box or a shelf or a cabinet for putting food in, and it’s just a slightly coolish place.
If millions of people are eating spoiled, rancid fats and proteins, maybe that’s the reason why meats and fats have such a bad reputation. Maybe the government and the mainstream media are reporting that saturated fat is bad for you and causes heart attacks BECAUSE IT REALLY DOES CAUSE HEART ATTACKS if the fats are all spoiled and kept at room temperature, BUT NOT if the fats are fresh. This is just a hypothesis. It may have actually been true that when people ate McDonald’s foods back when the fries were cooked in beef tallow, they might have had heart attacks because the tallow was continuously held on high heat for days at a time, causing it to be destroyed. Fresh tallow may be good for you (I have not yet had a chance to buy grassfed tallow online and test my body’s reactions to it), but maybe not reused tallow being kept on a constant high temperature. This is just a theory. People then concluded that ALL tallow under ALL circumstances is ALWAYS bad for you.
So we’re being told for decades that healthy fats and healthy animal foods are bad for us, due to the fact that millions of refrigerators are on the wrong setting, thereby spoiling the food. For THOSE people, animal products really are bad. Millions of people become vegans and say that they stopped being sick all the time – BECAUSE THEIR FRIDGES WERE TOO WARM. It’s really true – people become vegans and say that they stopped having health problems when they switched to this diet. THAT WOULD BE TRUE if their fridges were causing all of their meats and dairy products and eggs to spoil and produce amines and other unhealthy toxic products of decomposition!!!
Fruits and vegetables and grains survive at room temperature without any refrigeration. This is the key. Meats and dairy products do not. In the grocery store, you can walk around the produce department and see piles of fresh vegetables and fruits kept on tables at room temperature. THIS IS THE KEY to why vegetarians claim that they suddenly stopped being sick all the time when they became vegetarians. Meats and dairy products spoil easily; people are too ignorant and uninformed to know that they have to CHOOSE their fridge setting WISELY, and they blindly put it on too low of a setting – even the ‘recommended’ setting of 3 is too warm!!! You can only find out by putting a thermometer in there. The fridge does not include its own integrated thermometer, and the dial has arbitrary ‘setting’ numbers (1-5) that are not calibrated with temperatures.
It’s not even a joke: people’s ignorance of fridge settings may actually be having global consequences at the social level. It may be misleading hundreds of millions of people to believe bad things about meats and dairy products. It may be causing millions of scientists and government organizations to tell us that meats should be eaten only in small quantities. THAT WOULD BE TRUE if all our meats and dairy products were rapidly spoiling and decomposing after only a couple hours in the fridge. So now we have this huge belief, this ‘fact,’ which is pervasive throughout our entire culture, saying meat and fat and dairy is bad for you – because SPOILED meat-fat-dairy is bad for you!
I’m sorry, but It Oughta Be A Law. Fridges must be physically incapable of going to any setting warmer than 40 (or whatever) degrees. Or 39.5 or whatever that magic number is. All those people who use their fridges for holding nothing but non-spoiling sodas and beers are just gonna have to suck it up and live with it. There are too many stupid people out there harming themselves and others with spoiled foods, causing all of our government and scientific and popular media to believe untrue things about meats and dairy products.
In the past, people *dried* their meats. In foreign countries where people don’t have electricity and refrigeration, that is what they do now. That was the way of preserving meats without a fridge. If only you dry them, they don’t spoil. Organ meats in particular spoil very quickly and have to be eaten immediately after the animal is killed, for freshness. I don’t know what they do with organ meats in foreign countries. I’ve never had the chance to experiment with attempting to preserve organ meats by drying, or preserve fats by rendering them.
I really want to tell the refrigerator manufacturers that they must stop this universal practice of making fridges with a 1-5 setting of meaningless arbitrary numbers. Don’t give people a choice. They are too ignorant to choose. (All the libertarians and Objectivists and anarchists and Ayn Rands out there are rolling over in their graves and/or chairs to hear me say this.) People are safer if they are prevented from having a choice about this particular thing. It ought to simply be a universal way of producing an appliance. People’s safety ought to be a higher priority than their freedom to choose.
All you have to do is make a universal production standard for refrigerators, where all of them are required to go no warmer than 40 degrees (or whatever the magic number is exactly), and to simply be incapable of being set for any warmer temp than that. Then they would sell, separately, a special refrigerator in a different category, called a ‘BEVERAGE COOLER,’ which would be set at 55 degrees or something, or would allow you to use any settings at all, and it would be clearly labeled as being intended for nothing but beer and soda and plain water and NO FRUIT JUICES because fruit juices do spoil at that temperature, and also milk – it couldn’t be used for milk – and if someone for some reason wanted to try growing molds and bacteria and fermenting foods in their fridges at 55 degrees, they could use a specialized Fermentation Fridge or something which was kept at that setting. Just divide the two categories of fridges so that they are clearly labeled and do not overlap, so that people who require a food, meat, and dairy fridge are incapable of purchasing a fridge that has a too-warm setting on it. ‘Fermentation Fridges’ and ‘Beverage Coolers’ would be designed totally differently and would not be for sale in the same location as food fridges.
I know it’s possible that somebody somewhere would want to be capable of using a fridge for some special purpose at 52 degrees (‘OMG! I’m a laboratory scientist, and the species of mold that I am researching must be grown at precisely 52 degrees, but woe is me, my fridge won’t let me keep it that warm!’), but the vast majority of people are clueless and are not using a fridge in that way, and are simply trying to ‘save money’ by keeping their fridges at 55 degrees and spoiling all their food, too stupid to observe that they become ill immediately whilst eating, because that’s how stupid everyone is – they’re swallowing their food and getting sick in the very process of eating, yet failing to observe that it’s happening, and then go around moaning and complaining or being in a bad mood because of how sick they are, and never seeing any connection.
I guess that’s the end of my rant. I actually defrosted my little fridge and threw away everything in it, then plugged it back in and put in a container of cream again so that I have something to drink today and tomorrow. I’m just going to let the fridge in the kitchen sit there at setting 3 (45 degrees or something) and just forget about it and go my own way. Just let it rot! Let it all rot. Let everything and everybody everywhere rot. I can’t do anything about it. All of society, everyone, everywhere, is doing something harmful and I can’t stop them from doing it.
I guess I should start getting ready for work. I’ve successfully packed *some*, but not all, of my belongings into garbage bags, without sorting through any of it. A lot of it must be thrown away, but I will do that later. For now, I will take it all with me.
I’m gonna make it. I’m going to survive. I’m going to be okay. My body will live. This is a stressful experience, and I don’t know where I will make my home yet, and nobody answered my replies to their craigslist apartment ads – probably blocked by hackers. But I need to do a decon. I don’t want to ruin the floor of another apartment. My dearest Jesse may have some on his shoes, but I will allow this, because I want him in my life. He’s not speaking to me at the moment. It was so wonderful and sweet those weeks when he was talking to me, when he’d text me or call me of his own initiative, when I’d text him and he’d answer back instead of ignoring me, when he’d come over for a visit or we’d go out to a movie and see ‘Edge Of Tomorrow’ and he’d do all this spoofing of the movie afterwards, what if this, what if that, creating a whole new story that’s funnier than the original, so that I wanted to record every word he said and make it into a parody of the movie. My dual. I hope, I hope he will see me again when I’ve found a new home. He may be avoiding me while I am in this transition. I think he avoids me when I’m having severe problems in my life because it just makes him feel helpless. I don’t know. Maybe, I hope, we will get it sorted out over the next few weeks. It was so sweet when he was with me. I don’t want to go another couple months fighting the battle of trying to reach him and him avoiding me… I was always so happy to see him.
I’ve got to get ready for work now.
Soon, tonight or tomorrow, I probably won’t have the internet at home anymore. The magic invisible internet will suddenly become
inaccessible. I believe it’s coming from my roommate’s computer upstairs, and when she unplugs her computer and packs it away, the internet will disappear too. I don’t know where else it would be coming from. It’s not, like, inside the walls or something. It’s not provided by the apartment building itself. So, I’ll go back to using the net in other public places instead.
Retmeishka 
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