Posted 4/19/2009 02:50:00 PM by Douglas

This sounds like an interesting read about the "freshness" of food, what that means, and how refrigeration has changed the world food markets for good, but not necessarily the better.

Ancient cultures used preservative methods, such as salting and pickling, in order to extend the durability of produce for domestic use. Refrigeration delivered a paradigm shift by removing the site of production from the sight of consumers. The idea of freshness emerged to fill the conceptual ellipsis that resulted. Adam had no need to question the physical integrity of the apple Eve offered him, whatever its moral risks. Self-sufficient agrarians did not define freshness, because they watched their chickens lay and slaughtered their own cows. But fridges, from the outset, posed difficult, potentially lethal questions of age and origin. Extemporized eggs, suspended in cold storage, hatched a new language to answer modern needs.

I like the take on the 'morality' of refrigerated (vs. "fresh", i.e., beef you saw mooing a few minutes ago) food, too. Leave it to the fucking Puritans to suck all the joy out of life, this time with frozen chicken:

But fears of technological advance persisted, particularly among the religious. Fridges meant left-overs and left-overs meant loose morals, said the Puritans. The small-farm lobby replied to the industrialists’ trumpeting of wants over needs by declaring the “moral superiority of meals prepared fresh”, as well as the health benefits. Freshness demanded the preservation of immemorial relationships between people, land and animals.

There's something to be said for the fruits of your labor and raising, killing, and cooking your own food. But the world where that was the norm is 1700, with only the wealthy and royalty enjoying such luxuries as fresh fruit and meat that may or may not kill you. But guess what? I can go out in the dead of winter and buy a lemon the size of my fist and fresh, disease free meat, things the King of England wasn't afforded 300 years ago.

So where does that leave us? The cities of the world today simply can't exist without the refrigerated food they depend on, not to mention the trucks that deliver them:

In 1931, a US trade paper suggested that without refrigeration “our present daily existence would become unworkable. Cities with thousands of inhabitants would fade away. We would probably turn into beasts in our frantic struggles to reach the source of supply”.

Cut the food, the fuel, or the refrigerant that feeds the world's hungry, and there'll be blood in the streets.