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chapter 8 The Completion of the Modern Cold Chain “When a housewife returns from the supermarket and whisks things into her refrigerator and closes the door,” wrote Kathleen Ann Smallzried in 1956, “she has closed the door on the springhouse, the milk and butter pantry, the root cellar, the cheese room, the smokehouse, the covered well. At the same time she has turned her back on the preserving kettle, the pickling crock, the pudding bag, the vinegar barrel. As for the icehouse [and] the ice wagon, she has put them behind her too. Ice does not make her storage box cold. Instead, the box makes ice for all her needs.”1 The advent of the global cold chain coincided with post–World War II prosperity in the United States. Now that American families had a place to store the bounty that modern agriculture could produce, nothing could stop them from spending their newfound wealth on perishable food imported from all over the world. Americans also spent a portion of their new wealth on bigger refrigerators. As their refrigerators grew larger, Americans purchased newly available fresh and packaged perishable foods in just about any quantities they wanted, since they now had more refrigerator capacity than ever before. During the nineteenth century, America’s embrace of refrigeration came about as a by-product of its natural abundance. Now the country’s growing dependence upon refrigeration served as a sign of its extraordinary wealth. During the Depression, many people could not afford household refrigerators and had to keep buying ice. Therefore, the iceman survived well into the post–World War II period. After the war, the ice industry still thrived in the cities where it had originated a century before. “No matter where you live in New York,” wrote E. B. White in 1949, “you will find within a block or two . . . an ice-coal-and-wood cellar (where you write your order on a pad outside as you walk by).”2 Since 30 percent of American households still had iceboxes in 1947 (sometimes in conjunction with an electric refrigerator), the Vivian Manufacturing Company of St. Louis still supplied ice companies with all the supplies they needed—including personalized ice picks stamped “Those Who Really Know Prefer Ice” to hand out to customers.3 Some people still did prefer ice, The Completion of the Modern Cold Chain 163 but not enough to keep the industry going for very long. The ice industry in its original form probably went extinct sometime during the mid-1950s. The last days of the ice industry looked nothing like its heyday. Despite its survival, the rise of household refrigerators had a brutal effect upon ice profits. As the quality of electric home refrigerators improved and their price dropped, the total value of manufactured ice in the United States dropped from $211 million in 1929 to $128 million in 1935.4 In 1930, total electric household refrigerator sales exceeded those of iceboxes for the first time.5 Most American icebox manufacturers went out of business during the 1930s. By 1935, there were 1.7 million electric household refrigerators and only 350,000 remaining iceboxes.6 As late as 1940, the great bulk of refrigerator sales still went to people who had never owned a mechanical refrigerator before.7 This suggests that the failure of Americans to take to mechanical refrigeration even faster had more to do with circumstances created by the Great Depression than with a lasting attachment to their iceboxes. American consumers understood the limitations of what ice could do for them and bought mechanical refrigerators in large numbers as soon as they could afford them. Since its beginning, the modern cold chain has offered consumers variety, affordability, and convenience. The introduction of home freezers magnified these advantages, increasing the length of time that food could be preserved. Because of these advantages, consumers in other countries began to develop the same interest in large refrigerators that Americans had had for much longer. That explains why so many new strands of the cold chain have appeared around the globe in recent years. To understand what the future might hold with respect to the use of refrigerators around the world, one must first understand how refrigerators went from common to ubiquitous in the United States. It then becomes possible to explore their movement into other countries. The Stages of Refrigerator Adoption Americans adopted electric household refrigerators much faster than a host of other comparable household technologies, including the clothes washer...

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