April 30, 2020

The Moral Imagination of a Refrigerator

By Vijaya Nagarajan

It was 1993 and I was living in the beautiful city of Madurai in southern India, filled with the scent of fresh jasmine flowers woven into the hair of Tamil women’s braids. I was there on a Fulbright fellowship studying the kolam, a women’s ritual design tradition, made daily with rice flour on the thresholds of homes, temples and businesses.

Most meals, women would cook one extra serving, so that when beggars would come, there would be extra to give from a household. Young girls and boys were sent out to beg for a beggar to come to their household, so that the food would not go to waste. It was forbidden to waste food, as each kernel of rice was seen as the goddess Lakshmi, who represented abundance and plenty. If you wasted her, you were insulting her and she may not visit you and you could become poor. It was believed that a beggar could be a god or goddess come in disguise. One never knew who was who. The giver of food had as much karmic benefit as the taker of food.

One day, a small refrigerator, that was about a foot and a half high and the same width got delivered to a neighbor nearby. A priest came and blessed the coming of the refrigerator into the household. People came out to see what all the noise was about. I overheard the commotion in the street as it came down the street in small truck. It was the very first one in the neighborhood. I came out, too, and stood leaning over slightly in my balcony on my second floor flat. Everyone who saw it was excited, including me.

A few days later I noticed that when a beggar came to the household with the first refrigerator, the woman inside scolded the beggar, “Shu, shu, shu, go away; we don’t need you anymore!”  I was astonished that the rituals of generosity seeming to be enshrined in daily customary habits could vanish so quickly with the arrival of a tool such as a refrigerator. The refrigerator was a useful tool to keep food cold in that terrible, scorching heat. It saved women’s hard-scrabbing labor of having to cook three fresh meals, so that bodily energy could be used for some other previously unthought of labor. Yet, the moral imagination of a refrigerator-owning woman seems to have circumscribed her landscape to just serving her own household.

What had previously been a porous exchange across the threshold, an intentionality of giving to a stranger, to someone in need, also gave you a chance to give excess food beyond your own threshold, becomes slowly an anomaly, to the point where you can no longer remember when you used to do that. I witnessed the disappearance of a custom that seemed inviolable. I wondered how many other technologies do this to us without us noticing at first, until it is too late to even remember how we may have given excess food to strangers. I heard that this custom was not just in India, but also a different form was practiced in Greece and even as late as the Depression in the United States in the 1930s. Here it was Christ who may test your faith in the form of a beggar at your doorstep.

Let me be clear. I am not against the refrigerator. The refrigerator holds food for many extra days. But what else does it do besides store our excess food?

A version of this story was originally published in an essay of mine called “Rituals of Generosity” in the book Hinduism and Ecology, edited by Christopher Chapple and Mary Evelyn Tucker in the year 2000. Some years later a graduate student found that essay and shared it with Professor Michael Webber, in the Dept. of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Texas, Austin. That essay became a text in a course he taught in Ethics to Engineering students. It was a rare story, he said, when he called me in September 2018, a story that woke engineering students up to their responsibilities of the incalculable, invisible effects of their inventions. He wrote the book, The Power Trip, in which he excerpted this refrigerator story.

Power Trip: The Story of Energy

Food

04/27/2020 | 54m 44s|

Video has closed captioning.

The miracles of energy enable a stable supply in our global food system. But when food goes from farm to table to landfill, that embedded energy is wasted. How do we harness energy to feed our growing population without the downsides of industrialization? “Food” traces a centuries-long journey across Europe, Asia, and the United States to show us the energy it takes to bring us our food.

https://www.pbs.org/video/food-j2takl/

This book also became a PBS documentary film. He said he wanted me to tell the refrigerator story. I did. This story appeared this week on PBS in the six-part series: The Power Trip: The Story of Energy, in the end of the episode on Food.

I am in wonder how a story keeps on having new lives, from my own singular witness into an essay, to now in a film that will speak this story to new listeners, a film that is trying to figure out how we go from the kind of energy that we have chosen to use over the past two hundred years towards building a new moral imagination of energy, A Green New Deal.