New England is cold. But even so, saying ice was one of the region’s largest industries in the early twentieth century sounds more like a joke than reality. Truth is often stranger than fiction, however, and in truth, ice production in New England was not only a huge industry—it was a cross-country and sometimes international one as well. This amusing factoid is one of many presented by Dartmouth professor of Geography, Susanne Freidberg, in her new book, Fresh, In it, Freidberg investigates the history of perishables in the American economic and physical landscape. Fresh explores the curious history of food preservation and transportation, covering how improvements in technology changed the American diet and what people could afford to eat.
Fresh is an informational book in several respects. Freidberg explores ways in which attitudes towards food preservation have changed over time. Some seem jarringly different from what we’re familiar with now—for example, with most foods, it is now unthinkable to not have them neatly preserved in cold environments. Previous generations had a vastly different view, however, and there was a longstanding hostility in American society towards refrigerated food. Part of this hostility can be explained by bad press and marketing; since “fresh” foods went for higher prices, merchants only refrigerated soon-to-spoil (or spoiled) food in a bid to keep them for longer. Thus, anything that came out of a refrigerator was usually already long past its prime.
Another part of the stigma against refrigerated food was suspicion as to what it would mean for the consumer welfare. Eggs, for instance, easily keep in refrigerators, but this wasn’t seen as a virtue for old-time American consumers. They instead saw it was dangerous—after all, how could one figure out if an egg is truly “fresh” if refrigerated eggs keep and are indistinguishable from others that didn’t undergo the “tainting” influence of a refrigerator? Refrigeration also had unintended economic effects as well. Since it allowed certain foods to be available during more times of year than before, consumers just saw this as meaning that merchants didn’t have to sell low during gluts.
Despite all of these misunderstandings, Fresh is effective in showing how similar the fears of consumers back then are to those expressed by American consumers now. Americans didn’t see freshness as simply lack of spoilage or low bacteria counts—they saw freshness as something more, a fantasy where one could imagine, by drinking milk or biting into an apple, the farm next door that grew and produced it. Never mind that the actual business of farming is a messy and difficult one—the image is what the eaters were after.
In the past, freshness meant local. And without the science, that was the only way they could be assured that their food was wholesome. As such, consumers wanted, supported, and took a long time to be convinced that a California fruit was just as good, if not better, than a Vermont one.
Today, locality matters, but for different reasons. We have the science, so instead of vague notions of healthy “stuff” we assert lack of pesticides, genetic-modification, a small carbon footprint, or a host of other qualities that the term “local” appears to imply, whether or not this is actually the case. These aren’t arguments that the early American consumer would have recognized, but the result is one that is all very much the same.
Fresh is an important book because it is a comprehensive history of freshness in a digestible, reader-friendly form. Beyond the factoids, it paints a story that shows us why we are here today—not in the manner of angry diatribes or by invoking exposé-style disgust in readers, as books like Fast Food Nation or other recent investigations about food and the American diet are prone to do. It instead shows us what our food is, and presents the deeper complexities in the messy world of growing our food. From this, we can decide what we truly want to change—and what is merely a fantasy of a time of pure food that never was.
