Before the Refrigerator: How We Used to Get Ice by Jonathan Rees (review)

In an age of climate change, coldness seems more fragile and fleeting than ever. Permafrost thaws, and icebergs cave off into the sea. But within American kitchens and supermarket aisles, electric-powered refrigerators hum along steadily, delivering a chill so commonplace that it hardly generates a second thought.

Jonathan Rees's Before the Refrigerator offers perspective on this modern phenomenon. The book reconstructs a time when the chill within American households depended directly on ice's fate. It traces how nineteenth-century Americans carefully preserved, managed, and controlled ice and in so doing lay the groundwork for mechanical refrigeration.

The book begins by elucidating the steps by which natural ice became a commodity. Rees revisits the Maine and New York rivers where workers scraped, marked, and cut ice into blocks. Once harvested, workers heaved ice onto horse-carts, and hauled it across the city. The book portrays ice deliverymen compassionately, replacing the stereotype of deliverymen as burly oafs by explaining the challenges they faced: from slimy butchershop ice boxes that had to be cleaned before being replenished to marauding bands of juvenile delinquents eager to pilfer frosty chunks.

Rees's key contribution is to remind readers that the transition from the icebox filled with natural ice to the electric-powered refrigerator was not immediate. Electricity mattered to the ice trade initially because it provided a reliable power source to manufacture ice economically and efficiently. Mechanically manufactured ice supplemented natural ice by the 1880s. Breweries, food manufacturers, and retailers—especially those who operated in regions distant from reliable supplies of natural ice—preferred the regularity and reliability of mechanical ice to the seasonally dependent natural variety. It also took time for household refrigerators to become safe, efficient, and affordable, particularly in rural areas out of reach from electric lines.

The main significance of the ice trade, Rees argues, was that whether cut from ponds or made in factories, ice proved a critical linchpin in the development of the food chains of an industrializing America. It facilitated meatpacking. It brought ocean fish to landlocked consumers. It enabled lands of the Salinas Valley, California to become lush lettuce fields for the nation's salad bowls, and Rocky Ford, Colorado to source New York City's cantaloupe. Late nineteenth-century Americans increasingly filled their mugs with lager instead of darker brews, for a ready supply of ice helped brewers achieve the low temperatures for cool fermentation. In a short, lively chapter, Rees condenses key insights from classic food histories—from Suzanne Friedberg's Fresh to William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis.

Were he to expand that chapter, Rees could do more to place the growing demand for perishable foods within the context of competing discourses about food quality and access in the late nineteenth century. At the very moment in which the ice industry put perishable food on American tables, other food manufacturers perfected standardized, packaged, and manufactured food. Advertisers of canned foods and packaged goods trumpeted the products' reliability and consistency. Ice paled in delivering such standardized qualities. The food it sent to market was impermanent, variable, and often imperfect. How did the ice trade executives read and respond to food manufacturers' claims? The late nineteenth century also spurred many food reformers to call for working class Americans to economize on food. Such reformers told workers to plan meals that delivered the highest number of calories at the lowest cost. Ice was expensive. How did the ice industry respond to experts who questioned its value? While Rees fully explains the slow transition between icebox and refrigerator, he could do more to explain how Americans developed a taste for fresh foods. Did any holdouts cling to pickled vegetables and salted pork, instead of readily embracing salad and roasts? Such questions reach beyond the cold chain to the food chains it enabled. Still, the book's claims about the significance of ice for perishable foods would be stronger still with broader...