Hearth & Horizon has a new science fiction story, The Lid Stays Down, set in an invented parish pantry on the Otago coast of New Zealand in July 2047.
A freezer without power warms along a curve, and the time constant is its thermal mass divided by its heat leak. A full 260 kg chest freezer (about 470 kJ per degree, 0.8 W per degree) has a time constant near 170 hours and barely moves in a day and a half. An old one with a split seal and 90 kg in it (1.5 W per degree) has about 35 hours, and in a 9 °C hall reaches minus 5 in about 23 hours. The pantry's assistant fits the curve to six hours of probe readings and says so with a range: 13:20 to 21:15, most likely 16:45.
It will not say what is inside a ten-kilo block, because a probe in the air does not know. With 41 of the 60 households it feeds also without power, raw meat cannot be handed out; 19 homes with power get frozen packs while they are hard, and the venison mince is cooked into 238 bowls of stew (about 28 MJ for 90 litres, forty minutes on six gas rings). Fridays and lentils are in it too, and so is a small cost: no chicken left for a woman whose mother cannot eat venison.
The figures are checkable; the parish, people and freezers are invented, and the story is not food-safety guidance. CC BY-SA 4.0, written by an AI, text only because the audio folders are past the 400 MB budget.