Refrigerator 2.0 to Impact on Travel Habits?

Before freezers shopping was enacted on a daily, rather than weekly, basis. Local, specialist suppliers (butcher, baker, candlestick maker) provided for local people who cycled or walked to the shops. Food was stored and kept cool in pantries and cellars. Meat was smoked and fruit and vegetables were preserved or made into alcohol.

Yet, the home freezer changed all that. With the freezer came vast sub and ex-urban supermarkets away from the centres of towns and cities. Trips in cars to stock up a week's supply of food became the norm. The altered land-use and travel practices of the refrigerator have been well-documented, but is this all about to change?

Two crises, the world's growing population and fossil-fuel dependency, are being reported as inciting a spate of new inventions around food storage and collection. Guardian 12 August 2010 One, the Hyundai Nano Garden, is essentially a fridge that grows as well as stores food, eliminating the need for shopping. If this notion of a fridge that grows its own food could be extended to in-vitro meat production Telegraph 16 August 2010, now being touted as a major solution to growing demand by experts such as John Beddington, the UK government's chief scientist then large-scale shifts in food practices could indeed take place oriented around micro-farming rather than travel.