Yep. I lived mostly without refrigeration for years and you'd be surprised how many things really don't need to be refrigerated.

What I missed was ice cream, cold drinks/ice, the occasional frozen product and meat. That's not to say that I couldn't have those things, just that if I did, I'd have to buy them the same day, or eat them at a restaurant, or get them in alternate forms (thermos, "astronaut ice cream", canned food, preserved meats etc.) Much less limiting than you'd imagine. I also realized that I prefer the taste of many foods at room temperature. Everything from butter to sausages is so much better when it's not weirdly cold, and you no longer deal with the strange effects on texture and moisture levels from reheating food.

Of course, refrigeration doesn't prevent things from going bad - it mostly slows bacterial and mold growth. It's not too hard to get a handle on mold - a HEPA filter plus controlling moisture will usually get rid of most mold spores, so things you buy will mold much less quickly. Bacteria is less easy, but smelling + looking, common sense and a knowledge of what's safe will usually tell you enough. Until 1998, the official USDA method of investigating meat in slaughterhouses was the "poke and sniff method" - I am not kidding [0]. If you're skeptical, this guy [1] (who runs a supermarket) got along fine with a similar method, eating only expired food for a year. His thoughts seem to be based off the idea of "the vast majority of the time food starts to lose its taste/texture before becoming unsafe", which is not wrong - but personally, I try to be a bit more safe. So I looked at exactly what will kill or hurt you, statistically speaking. (At 1300ish total deaths a year, most of which are old people, it's unlikely you'll die from a foodborne pathogen, but there are 50x as many hospitalizations, and that is never fun or cheap.)

The main risks are various bacteria (Campylobacter, Clostridium, E. Coli, Listeria, Salmonella, V. vulnificus etc.) Some of these aren't affected by the way you store your food; for V. vulnificus you just need to cook your shellfish; to avoid the scary but uncommon C. botulinum you just need to be safe about home-canning and fermenting. E. Coli thankfully is tested for all over the US, so it's pretty rare to eat something with that. Salmonella is the #1 killer in the US, so make sure to cook poultry _to a safe temperature_ and wash vegetables well (water only, no soap, towel down.) Norovirus doesn't care if you refrigerate your food or not. Of the big killers, the one that slightly unnerves me is Listeria - 255 deaths per year in the US and a high hospitalization+death rate. Just reviewing the news shows in the last week alone it was found in taco dips, various cheeses and turkey sandwiches. If anyone is curious about the exact numbers and risks per pathogen, that's here [2] and a decent summary of how to be safe is here [3]. Keep in mind with the PDF that they give numbers for "total" and "domestically acquired foodborne" - for example 99.995% of Sapovirus cases don't come from food (they come from daycares, mostly) and that's why you see two very different numbers for "foodborne" vs "total".

Reading online guides for food crack me up. Googling "lettuce outside fridge" gives the amusing first result that it "can be safely left out at room temperature for about two hours, one hour [if it's hot]"... Where, exactly, do you think lettuce grows... In a refrigerator? (Side note - cabbage keeps much better and has a more interesting flavor.) My grandparents, and I'd imagine most people's grandparents, grew up without refrigeration and did just fine - I can assure you they had plenty of veggies, milk, butter, etc.

One note is that my time doing this was in Europe. In the US I believe eggs do not last more than a day or two unrefrigerated. Not sure if there are other differences to keep in mind.

[0] https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/07/when-odors-sound-a-wa...

[1] https://scottscompostpile.com/2019/02/11/my-year-of-eating-e...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/pdfs/scallan-estimated-h...

[3] https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/foods-linked-illness.html