Professional Documents
Culture Documents
FRESH: A Perishable History
FRESH: A Perishable History
Introduction 1
Notes 287
Bibliography 347
Acknowledgments 385
Index 387
Introduction
as freshness. Dig a little deeper, and few qualities appear more com-
plex and contested. At bottom, the history of freshness reveals
much about our uneasy appetites for modern living, especially in
the United States. This book traces that history by way of a tour
through an ordinary refrigerator. What is it about the word “fresh”
that makes marketers so keen to put it on every possible label? Its
appeal, I think, lies in the anxieties and dilemmas borne of indus-
trial capitalism and the culture of mass consumption. This culture
promotes novelty and nostalgia, obsolescence and shelf life, indul-
gence and discipline. It surrounds us with great abundance, but not
with much that feels authentic or healthful. It leaves many peo-
ple yearning to connect to nature and community but too busy to
spend much time in either. Above all, it’s a culture that encourages
us to consume both as often as possible and in ever better, more
enlightened ways.
Of all the qualities we seek in food, freshness best satisfies all
these modern appetites. It offers both proof of our progress and an
antidote to the ills that progress brings—at least for a little while.
An ingenious range of technologies now protects our fresh food
supply against spoilage. But the shelf life of satisfaction remains
short. This is the larger perishable history waiting inside the fridge.
It’s the story of all the forces that create both demand for freshness
and doubts about what it means.
illustrate two of the book’s basic premises. The first is simply that
freshness means different things in different foods. At one level, this
is obvious. Everybody knows that some foods last longer than oth-
ers, and that a few actually improve with age. Less familiar is the
biology beneath this variety, and how it has historically influenced
the ways humans preserve and move their most fragile foods. So
each of the chapters about individual foods includes a short section
on the basic science of spoilage. This will explain why, for example,
fresh beef became the first global perishable, and why eggs under
certain conditions can last for months.
The book’s second premise is that biology alone can’t explain
what “fresh” means to people. As part of my research I pored
through mountains of old refrigeration and food industry trade
journals. I read home economics texts, women’s magazines, techni-
cal manuals, cookbooks, and the memoirs of farmers, merchants,
social reformers, and inventors. I spent a lot of time looking at food
art, advertising, and packaging. I also traveled to several coun-
tries and talked to hundreds of people, including both professionals
(among them fishermen, dairy farmers, chefs, and assorted sales-
people) and many strangers I met while writing in cafés and bars
(where I heard every possible bad joke about freshness—repeat-
edly). They didn’t all agree about what particular fresh foods were
supposed to look like or where they should come from. But all these
conversations and written sources made clear that people value
freshness in ways that can’t be boiled down to nutrition or taste.
Each of the following chapters, then, uses the history of different
foods and technologies to explore what else “fresh” means.
Consider the basic rationale behind the refrigerator: keeping
food fresh is good because otherwise it goes bad. Over millennia,
people developed all kinds of ways to keep perishables good. But
most methods were home-based or artisanal, and most transformed
foods into states clearly different from fresh.3 In the late nineteenth
century, the business of stopping spoilage became less visible and
Introduction / 5
erals, and fiber) and for what they don’t (“empty” calories, as well
as excessive sodium and other additives). News that such foods
might also contain salmonella, mercury, or E. coli has left many
consumers confused—for if spinach and tuna aren’t healthful,
what’s left? But past generations knew all too well that perishables
could kill as well as cure. Milk and meat carried tuberculosis, dirty
vegetables dysentery. Fruit was often blamed for cholera and some-
times banned from urban markets.5
With the discovery of first bacteria and later vitamins at the
turn of the twentieth century, scientific opinion about fresh foods
changed dramatically. By the 1910s and 1920s, consumers were in-
undated with advice about the benefits of fresh foods for children,
“brain workers,” and aspiring flappers.6 While some of this advice
came from traditional sources—doctors and social reformers, col-
umns in women’s magazines—more and more showed up in adver-
tisements for the fresh foods themselves. Largely unregulated, ads
for these foods often made bold (if unsupported) references to the
latest scientific findings. Consumers learned that Sunkist oranges
would cure bad moods and indigestion, while the “mystery vitamin”
in iceberg lettuce would melt fat, boost energy, and preserve youth.
Alongside the nutritional claims, advertising stressed that fresh
foods were pure and natural. For consumers in the early twenti-
eth century, this mattered. Thanks partly to the passage of national
food safety laws in the United States and Europe, groceries were
generally cleaner than they’d been even fifty years before, when
staples ranging from tea to flour to milk were either filthy, pur-
posely adulterated, or both.7 But a new generation of industrially
processed foods left consumers wondering about what had been
lost or added inside the factory. The very fact that fresh produce,
meats, and milk needed refrigeration to protect against quick spoil-
age—unlike, say, the canned corned beef immortalized by Upton
Sinclair’s novel The Jungle—added to their credibility as natural
foods. So did their appearance. They looked like they had come
Introduction / 7
bulls, and game meat reinforced the authority of chiefs and feudal
lords. Leaders couldn’t stop these valued foods from spoiling, but
they could control their distribution while fresh.8
Feasts also reinforced ideas about the strength and vitality inher-
ent in the fresh flesh of certain mammals and fish. This meaning
of freshness proved among the most important forces behind the
development of new technologies and trades in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. As the buying power of workers in
the United States and Western Europe increased, so did their expec-
tations. They wanted the fresh butcher’s meat that the better off
enjoyed, not cured pork and beef. They wanted oranges and eggs
in winter, and milk delivered to their doorsteps. Freshness wasn’t
the only food quality associated with the good life; workers also
wanted whiter bread and better coffee. But market demand for
perishables—combined with the belief that national well being de-
pended on the availability of certain perishables, such as red meat
and clean milk—fueled both government and industry investment.
Britain’s fleet of refrigerated steamships, Argentina’s meatpacking
plants, the United States’ municipal cold storage houses: all were
built in an era when the provision of affordable freshness testified
to a nation’s progress. Later in the twentieth century, new wealth in
parts of Asia and Latin America—Hong Kong is one example dis-
cussed later in the book—also brought new markets for once-elite
fresh foods.
So then what happened to the prestige value of freshness? Now
we’re used to perishables that last months and travel half the globe.
Today it’s infinitely easier to buy a single burger than an entire steer.
Yet in certain ways the ubiquity of more-or-less fresh foods has
simply driven the standards higher. The most status goes to who-
ever can find and afford the absolute freshest product, however
fresh is currently defined. Seafood inspires the most extreme spend-
ing, whether on first-of-the-season Copper River salmon, sushi
made from ultra-premium bluefin tuna, or a giant grouper scooped
Introduction / 9
out of a tank in a Shanghai banquet hall. Across the fresh food sup-
ply, though, few labels can top the prestige value of the locally
grown.
For most of human history, of course, perishable foods were by
definition local. They traveled far only if they could go “on the
hoof” (like cattle) or at least be kept alive and breathing. In the
late nineteenth century, refrigeration, steamships, and railroads to-
gether pushed the frontiers of the fresh food supply across conti-
nents and oceans. In rural New England as well as in parts of West-
ern Europe, change came brutally fast. Farmers planted orchards
and bought cows only to find markets flooded with produce from
lower-cost hinterlands. In cities, though, consumers saw little of
this pain. Instead they saw the bounty hauled in from far away.
They read menus of restaurants like the New York chain Schrafft’s,
which in the 1930s listed the mileage traveled by its exotic produce.
The fresh oranges, grapefruit, and strawberries in its fruit cocktail
had cumulatively covered 7,800 miles en route to Manhattan, while
the makings of a vegetable salad together racked up 22,250 miles.9
At the time, such menu options seemed worth boasting about. They
demonstrated technology’s conquest of borders, distance, and sea-
sons; they offered customers fresh foods from the places they grew
best.
Doubts about this sunny view of global freshness came and went.
The experience of World War Two made dependence on faraway
food look risky, especially in countries such as Britain. By the 1970s,
at least some consumers worried that the people producing their
foreign fruits and vegetables might have been subject to abusive
conditions; by the late 1980s many feared that foreign produce
might be tainted with dangerous bacteria. Yet only at the very end
of the twentieth century did local food begin to seem like the cure
for global food’s accumulated ills.
Some of the strongest popular support for food “relocalization”
developed in Britain, where pro-global food policies were blamed
10 / Introduction
beans for export is hard work, and risky, too. Given how quickly
the beans go bad, it takes only one late flight to ruin a season’s
earnings. But the farmers have children to feed and send to school.
They can’t wait around for a trade that makes sense. The global
market’s demand for year-round freshness means, for them, a
chance to earn a better-than-nothing income—something that local
food activists often overlook.
Just off State Street there is a fruiterer and importer who ought
to be arrested for cruelty. His window is the most fascinating
and the most heartless in Chicago. A line of open-mouthed,
wide-eyed gazers is always to be found before it. Despair, won-
der, envy, and rebellion smolder in the eyes of those gazers . . .
It is a work of art, that window; a breeder of anarchism, a de-
stroyer of contentment, a second feast of Tantalus. It boasts
peaches, dewy and golden, when peaches have no right to be;
plethoric, purple bunches of English hothouse grapes are there
to taunt the ten-dollar-a-week clerk whose sick wife should be
in the hospital; strawberries glow therein when shortcake is a
last summer’s memory, and forced cucumbers remind us that
Introduction / 17
we are taking ours in the form of dill pickles. There is, per-
haps, a choice head of cauliflower, so exquisite in its ivory and
green perfection as to be fit for a bride’s bouquet; there are
apples so flawless that if the garden of Eden grew any as per-
fect it is small wonder that Eve fell for them . . . Oh, that win-
dow is no place for the hungry, the dissatisfied, or the man out
of a job.22
ers, but they didn’t keep food very cold. Leftovers didn’t last, let-
tuce wilted, and milk spoiled before its sell-by date.
The dates stamped on cartons of milk, eggs, and other perish-
ables all assume, of course, that the refrigerator is working not just
at home but throughout the entire cold chain. They assume that
farms and trawlers, packers and bottlers, shippers and supermar-
kets all have the machines, energy, and know-how needed to keep
our food cool, whether it’s traveling twenty miles or five thousand.
Admittedly, it’s a fragile system. A few days without power can ruin
an entire city’s food supply. But we take for granted that refrigera-
tion serves a good purpose, in and beyond the home. It allows us to
think about “higher things” than the care of our food.
Yet early refrigeration was not an easy sell, especially outside the
United States. Its backers found it hard to understand why any-
one would oppose such a useful technology. After all, refrigera-
tion let people eat seasonable, perishable foods from wherever they
wanted, whenever they wanted. It had the potential to eradicate
waste, stimulate production, and improve health. It promised an
altogether more rational food supply, at least in theory. In practice,
refrigeration undermined not just farmers’ and merchants’ local
markets but also traditional understandings of how food quality
related to time, season, and place. It threw into question the known
physics of freshness. Refrigeration’s conserving powers, in other
words, threatened radical changes all across the food chain.
from the Alps to the Mediterranean, and from the Andes to Lima.
But this frozen water was a luxury good, used more to chill drinks
than to preserve food.1 Ice first became a mass-market commodity
in the northeastern United States in the first half of the nineteenth
century, at a time when the region’s rivers and lakes regularly froze
solid in winter. The founder of the New England ice trade, the Bos-
ton entrepreneur Frederic Tudor, aimed to ship harvested ice to
tropical colonies. He’d heard it could be done; the English had ap-
parently shipped ice cream at least once to Trinidad, “packed in
pots of sand from Europe.”2 He thought ice would be even more
appreciated, since it could chill everything from cocktails to villas.
The third son of the noted Boston lawyer William Tudor, Fred-
eric was a compulsive weather watcher but not an otherwise cau-
tious man.3 In late 1805, a few months after he got the idea to sell
ice to the West Indies, the twenty-three-year-old sent his two broth-
ers to Martinique to drum up business. He followed soon after,
bringing 130 tons of frozen cargo, harvested from a lake near his
family’s farm. Upon arrival he found that his brothers had failed to
find the promised buyers. It soon became clear that the French col-
ony’s residents had no idea what to do with ice. Few bought it, and
fewer still knew how to store it. Some submerged it in tubs of wa-
ter; others packed it in salt. The results were disappointing, to say
the least. As Tudor’s precious cargo melted on the dock, he made
batches of ice cream, mainly to prove that it could be done.
Tudor lost thousands of dollars, but he remained convinced that
he could make money from New England ice. Eventually he did.
In the 1810s and 1820s, he climbed out of debt and built markets
for ice stretching from Norfolk to New Orleans to Havana. After
the Martinique fiasco, Tudor made sure that his ice shipped only to
ports with well-insulated storehouses. In 1833, Rio de Janeiro and
Calcutta received their first shipments. British expatriates in India
became especially good customers. The Calcutta Courier ranked
Refrigeration: Cold Revolution / 21
ing table. Its appeal seems to have benefited, at least in some cir-
cles, from the fashion of serving salads and other foods considered
lighter, more sophisticated, and more French than colonial fare.10
That said, the icebox itself was not a sophisticated machine. A
metal-lined butter-storage tub patented by the Maryland engineer
Thomas Moore in 1803 remained the prototype for most home ice-
boxes even in 1840. Food stayed colder than it would have in a
cellar or a well (which most city-dwellers didn’t have anyway) but
not necessarily more appetizing. Most early iceboxes stored ice at
floor level, which prevented the steady melting and cool air circula-
tion necessary for effective refrigeration.11 As a result, their interi-
ors quickly grew moldy and rank, and foods absorbed one anoth-
er’s odors. No wonder Miss Leslie’s 1840 House Book recommended
that families buy two iceboxes, one for dairy products and another
for meat.12
Soon the domestic ice demand outstripped the overseas trade.
New York City’s annual consumption increased from 12,000 tons
in 1843 to 65,000 tons in 1847 and 100,000 tons in 1856. Boston’s
consumption leapt from 6,000 to 27,000 to 85,000 tons during the
same period.13 During California’s gold rush, the demand for ice
in San Francisco was so great that a few of the city’s businessmen
founded the American Russian Commercial Company and began
harvesting ice in Alaska’s Kodiak Harbor.14 A crackpot idea half a
century earlier, the frozen water trade now spanned the globe.
Cold on Demand
In 1855 the magazine De Bow’s Review called ice “an American
institution . . . as good as oil to the wheel. It sets the whole human
machinery in pleasant action, turns the wheels of commerce, and
propels the energetic business engine.” The ice habits of Americans
also testified to the country’s democratic character, the magazine
claimed. For while ice was a rare luxury in most of Europe—“con
24 / Refrigeration: Cold Revolution
fined to the wine cellars of the rich”—in America its use appeared
“as widely extended among the people as the heat is, and at a tri-
fling individual cost.”15
The winter that produced this all-American commodity was not,
of course, so widespread. Most years, northern freezes provided
ample supplies of ice for cities in the South. But when the winters
were too warm or too short, poor harvests led to high prices and,
as ice came to seem like a necessity, even fears of summertime “ice
famines.” This was one reason the Florida physician John Gorrie
invented a machine that could make ice regardless of the weather.
His primary goal was to chill cities, not food. Like many mid-
nineteenth–century medical experts, Gorrie thought that too much
tropical heat led to mental and physical degeneration, as well as to
the spread of diseases such as malaria. But since his schemes for
citywide air conditioning seemed unlikely to attract investors, he
designed a machine that he thought would have commercial ap-
peal as well as humanitarian benefit. Essentially it used engine-
compressed air to absorb enough heat from containers of water to
freeze them. A few New Orleans businessmen expressed interest in
Gorrie’s invention, and Scientific American, in an 1849 review, de-
scribed it as “a beautiful and comprehensive system.”
The magazine conceded that the machine was still in the design
stage, and “perhaps unavoidably very imperfect in plan and execu-
tion.” Certainly its size (enough to fill a small garage) made it less
than ideal for use in a home or a small shop. The magazine also
put to rest rumors that Gorrie’s machine froze water instantly. Still,
the reviewer concluded, if countries in the tropics could manufac-
ture their own ice, public health and productivity might improve
enough to “modify the existing relations of the inter-tropical re-
gions to the rest of the world.16 In other words, manufactured ice
would beat not just the heat but also the economic backwardness
that nineteenth-century thinkers often blamed on tropical torpor.
Despite such predictions, Gorrie lost his financial backers, and he
Refrigeration: Cold Revolution / 25
died in 1853 before his machine ever made it to market. The idea of
winter-free ice-making, however, had by then captured the imagi-
nation of scientists and inventors in many countries.17 France’s Fer-
dinand Carré designed one of the first freezing machines to rely on
the absorption of ammonia to drive the cooling process. Although
not exactly a precision technology, the unit was much smaller and
simpler than Gorrie’s compressed air machine. And unlike the Flor-
ida physician, Carré found a market in New Orleans, thanks to the
Civil War’s disruption of the coastal ice trade. By 1865 the ice-
starved city had smuggled in three of his machines. By 1868 New
Orleans was chilling its seafood and mint juleps with the Louisiana
Ice Manufacturing Company’s factory-frozen city water.18
Ice plants went up throughout the U.S. South during the second
half of the nineteenth century; by 1889 Texas alone had fifty-three.
The industry grew more slowly in the North, at least until the pub-
lic began to question the safety of the region’s “natural” sources.
Some Hudson River suppliers, for example, harvested ice down-
stream from where Albany and Troy dumped their sewage.19 This
practice didn’t result in any known epidemics in New York City,
probably because freezing usually kills bacteria such as typhoid.
Still, at a time of growing awareness about how germs work, it’s
not surprising that many consumers didn’t like the idea that they
might be using frozen waste to cool their kitchen iceboxes or per-
haps even their cocktails.20 Ice manufacturers encouraged their dis-
gust and boasted that they themselves used only the purest distilled
water. In response, ice harvesters ran ads suggesting that “artifi
cial” ice lacked the vital qualities needed to keep foods cold. “There
is no life in it,” claimed one such ad, “and like the lazy hired man it
will not work.”21
Especially in the South, ice inspired dreams of easy money. After
all, the main raw material was either cheap or free, and the market
appeared insatiable. Households, grocers, farmers, food shippers—
everybody wanted more ice. Or so the companies selling ice-making
26 / Refrigeration: Cold Revolution