Fresh: A Perishable History (review)

Refrigeration's omnipresence in our modern lives makes it difficult to imagine a time when the American and European masses considered cold-stored food dangerous, rotten, or otherwise offensive to standards of freshness and economic fairness. But as Susanne Freidberg explains in this highly readable volume, much of the Western world underwent a "radical shift" beginning in the late nineteenth century, as new refrigeration and transportation technologies allowed distributors to defy geography and seasonality in delivering foods that consumers valued as fresh. Refrigerated railcars and steamships opened up a global meat and produce trade after the U.S. Civil War. By the mid-twentieth century, an American home was incomplete without a mechanical refrigerator, and consumers expected unpreserved eggs to be readily available in the dead of winter. Thus, Freidberg notes, the freshness of food today "depends less on time or distance than on the technology that protects it" (p. 5). Refrigerated truck trailers roam highways as mobile cold chains, plastic produce containers are impregnated with patented micropore systems, and commercial airliners are modified to ship "wild" Alaska salmon overnight to the lower forty-eight states. As a result, affluent consumers live in a world of "permanent global summertime" (p. 155).

Anybody who buys a "fresh" peach in a North Dakota supermarket in January presumably knows that this peach could not have been plucked yesterday. Yet the concept of freshness is, according to Freidberg, inherently paradoxical and ambiguous. Every trip to a supermarket involves a complex psychological negotiation. Modern anxieties about being too far removed from the natural world are twinned with the equally modern reassurance that technology provides the comfort and convenience of nature's bounty arrayed in a self-service bin. In the biological world, rotting is natural. In the supermarket world, industrial freshness has been naturalized while rotting has been banned to bins hidden behind the market's back doors.

Freidberg explores these themes in a series of enlightening chapters, each centering on a specific technology or type of food. Most of the chapters focus largely on the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but all of them have sections that range more broadly in geography and chronology, encompassing ancient Rome to present-day Hong Kong. As a geographer specializing in French and African food systems, Freidberg has an especially sharp eye for unearthing fascinating examples of French approaches to freshness. In her chapter on fruit, she draws on the work of historians Steven Stoll and Douglas Sackman to recount how California's factory-style mass production of fruit transformed American diets. Growers in the Montreuil region of France, by contrast, responded to new mass-distribution technologies around the turn of the twentieth century by specializing in selling luxurious fruits to the Parisian upper classes. The Montreuil horticulturists wrapped individual fruits as they hung on the tree to preserve flavor and color, and even used snail slime and sunshine to stencil complex images on the skin via a technique known as marquage or "fruit photography." Today, unsurprisingly, Montreuil is a suburb nearly devoid of fruit trees, and Parisians receive much of their fresh produce from former colonies such as Burkina Faso. Jetliners bring tender, spotless beans daily to Parisian market shoppers, yet the lengthy refrigerated food chain obscures the difficult and underpaid human labor required to make such freshness possible.

Written in an accessible style and aimed at a trade audience, this book will prove quite useful to instructors of courses in history of technology, food studies, and consumer culture. It would fit readily on the shelf next to recent journalistic studies of food systems, including Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma (2006) or Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (2008). In contrast to those works, which employ first-person narratives to attract readers anxious about the political correctness of their food choices, Freidberg's book is objective in tone and based on an impressive array of primary and secondary sources. Her training as a geographer rather than historian occasionally shows...