How People Stored Vegetables Before Modern Refrigeration

Open your crisper drawer and there's a good chance you'll find a bag of carrots that's been sitting there for three weeks, still firm, still orange. We don't think twice about that. But before anyone had a refrigerator, how did people store vegetables through an entire winter without them rotting? In this video, we look at how people stored vegetables before refrigeration, from a practice that predates colonial America entirely, Indigenous peoples like the Iroquois burying corn, beans, and squash in bark-lined pits, to the root cellar dug straight into the earth, the storage clamp built right in an open field, and boxes of carrots packed in damp sand so the roots never touched each other. Some vegetables, like onions and winter squash, needed the exact opposite treatment: dry air instead of a damp cellar, which is why old-fashioned root cellar storage was never a one-size-fits-all system. None of these vegetable storage methods matched what a modern refrigerator can do. But root cellars, sand-packed boxes, and buried root vegetables still work today for anyone growing their own food, and a few of these old food preservation methods are worth knowing the next time the power goes out.