Something green and gooey in the fridge is usually a bad sign. I say that with solemn deference to my mother’s yummy lime JELL-O mold Passover staple, complete with magically floating mandarin orange slices (which, despite its annual holiday role, still seems to me to be distinctly non-Jewish in appearance). I’ll go so far, though, as to call my mother’s (and her mother’s before her) trembling creation an exception to the rule and return to my original premise: Green goo + fridge = bad.

Aha, but not necessarily so! At least not necessarily so in Electrolux’s goofy future world where Yuriy Dmitriev’s Bio Robot Refrigerator serves up a non-sticky, odorless biopolymer gel (yes, it’s green – in the pictures anyway) that’s not only not a bad thing to have in your fridge, it actually pretty much is your fridge.

The (very) experimental design was one of 25 finalists in the Electrolux Design Lab 2010, a competition that asked industrial design students to “create home appliances that consider shrinking domestic spaces.” Winning ideas were required to “shape how people prepare and store food, wash clothes, and do dishes in the homes of 2050 when 74 percent of the world’s population are predicted to live in an urban environment” dictating a need for greater space efficiency.

Four times smaller than a conventional refrigerator, Dmitriev’s Bio Robot’s biopolymer gets its food-preserving coolness through luminescence. All you do is grab your eggs (or whatever) and shove “˜em in the goo, which morphs around your foodstuffs creating “a separate pod that suspends items for easy access.” There’s no doors or drawers or motor, so more than 90 percent of the device is doing the good work you need to keep your eats fresh – if not appetizing. The thing can be hung vertically, horizontally, or “even on the ceiling.” Quite the space saver.

Inhabitat’s Britt Liggett, provides us with a few more details, noting that the cooling agents are the “bio robots” inherent in the gel that use luminescence. The device uses zero energy for cooling (it just needs energy for its little control pad), compared to the typical modern fridge, which uses about eight percent of a household’s energy.

Oh, and I love this little kicker from the Electrolux site: “Products in plain view and easily accessible.” Oh yum.

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What’s cool and green and seen all over? Eco-themed television! Green programming is a growing niche in entertainment, and each week, we’ll look at shows that make us shout out “I want my green TV!”

“˜Future Forward’ Inspires Cooks to Recycle Kitchen Scraps

Planet Green’s “Future Food” executive chef, Omar Cantu of the world-renowned Moto restaurant in Chicago, shocks viewers and diners alike with his unusual culinary creations. This week, he was even more eco-friendly than usual, when he challenged his crew to recycle discarded food.

After rendering innocent bratwursts inedible via an incident with a flamethrower, he repurposed the still usable bits instead of tossing them in the trash.

Inspired, he ordered his staff to recycle the potato skins. Success?

First, they made chili cheese fries out of frozen pureed potato skins, crinkle cut, coated in potato starch to stiffen and fried in beef fat. For the chili, they pulverized deep fried peels into a ground beef texture. The “cheese” sauce was even more creative – juiced carrot scraps, eggs, salt, and truffle oil. The final result looked just like regular chili cheese fries, and yes, according to diners, they were delicious.

We viewers may not have the culinary creative skills, or proper kitchen gear, to go this far outside the box. But hopefully the show will inspire a few people to think twice before throwing away their scraps.

Stephen Colbert’s Global Warming Smackdown

The global warming “debate” escalates further between meteorologists and climate scientists this week. A New York Times article reported that 90 percent of climatologists believe global warming is man-made while only 31 percent of meteorologists agree. Sadly, the same article says most Americans trust weathermen for their climate information more than politicians like Al Gore. Aren’t we talking about the same job where it’s OK to be wrong over 50 percent of the time?

On this week’s “Colbert Report,” fake conservative news anchor Stephen Colbert brought the “Science Catfight” to his desk. In one corner was Joe Bastardi, the chief Accuweather forecaster, and in the other corner, Brenda Ekwurzel, a Union of Concerned Scientists climatologist.
Neither got much of a chance to defend their argument in the presence of Colbert. One of our favorites? “The sea levels rising… could that just be because… Americans are getting fatter and going swimming?”

Join us next week – same time, same channel – for more of the latest highlights in green TV.

Jesie Lee

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