No refrigerator

[Pyonkotchi]

last winter our lights went out and we stuffed the food in a cooler and covered it in snow :B
and again this summer, except with store bought ice
or I could use someone elses fridge.
or I could just go to the store and buy food when I'm hungry, assuming im not too lazy to do that.

[yummy]

In France, people used to have a cellar, where they hung meat after they used salt over them.
In Paris, there used to be ice companies that sent tons of ice to restaurants and common people.
But because of this, diseases were not that uncommon.
You could also use caves, where the temperature is close to 10°C. I remember visiting such a cave in Japan, where there was literally ice while the surface temperature was about 38°C.

As for now, in our modern times, it's pretty hard to live without a refrigerator. Isothermal boxes could alsayw help in a short while but in the end, a refrigerator is best since the cooling process is reactivated regularly.

[Desu_Cake]

Use spices and herbs to cover up the taste of rotten food. (Hey, it's what they used to do.)

[BubbleTea]

Do what the medievals did.. They put their food and stuff into a bag and left it in a lake to preserve it. Just like a refrigerator

[PyTom]

Do what I did. Stay at your parents' house until the power comes back on. Then re-buy most of your food.

[Aleema]

^ The food in your fridge would still be good if your power has only been out a day or even two. So long as you didn't open it, the coolness is usually still in there. (And food is remarkably more tolerant than we think it is.) Living in tornado alley, I'm used to power outages.

[ririruetoo]

@SusanTheCat

Yep! That's what they were called!

[sayuri]

I'd reread Little House on the Prairie and just... do what they did XD