Fresh—A Perishable History
added 02/22/10
Book Review by Mary Saucier Choate
Co-op Food and Nutrition Educator
What exactly does the word “fresh” imply? According to author Susanne Freidberg, Associate Professor of Geography at Dartmouth College, the meaning of the word depends greatly on what period of time you are referring to. As she states in the book’s introduction, freshness today depends on “a host of carefully coordinated technologies, from antifungal sprays to bottle caps to climate-controlled semi trucks.” Freidberg goes on to explain that this kind of modern “freshness” would not have been considered to be fresh at all in the past or even today in many other countries.
Freidberg documents the history of the preservation and marketing of perishable food— meat, poultry, eggs, fruit, vegetables, milk, and fish. She leads us back to the time before refrigeration and freezing provided food preservation—back to when fresh foods were either recently picked from your own or a nearby garden or farm or were preserved by canning, drying, fermenting, or pickling. Before refrigeration and freezing were as widely available as they are today, consumers suspected refrigerated perishables of being unnaturally preserved and potentially harmful to health.
The main consumer resistance to refrigeration and freezing was the “disconnect” in time between the actual harvesting of the product and its consumption. How old were refrigerated eggs or frozen beef from a far-away warehouse? How nutritious and wholesome would they be? As more consumers moved from farms to urban settings, this disconnect became less important to them, and the ease of obtaining these foods overcame their resistance.
The scientific discovery of vitamins and minerals in foods, the demand for meat for troops in World War I, and the desires of industry to promote refrigerated and frozen foods, along with new electric refrigerators in which to store them, boosted the popularity of perishable foods even more.
Who could have imagined that the invention of refrigeration signaled the beginning of drastic and permanent changes in our food supply? One cannot help but marvel at the way perishable foods have, over the course of time and technology, moved from a strictly seasonal and local resource to a ubiquitous, season-less one. Competition from far-away markets and off-season products shipped from distant locations have subsequently upset the market serviced by small local farmers and merchants.
Friedberg brilliantly weaves together the consumer marketing and societal pressures that led to our current-day definition of freshness, with all of its often mistaken assumptions about simplicity, nature, and country life while the reality of widely available fresh foods requires massive resources and technology. Her research reminds us that while American consumers must make the complex choice between organic, local, fair-trade, free-range, and grass-fed, etc., these choices exist only if a consumer has adequate money for food and resides in a locale that boasts paved roads and reliable electric power—resources not available world-wide.
The book is a fascinating tour through not just food and food preservation history, but the development of the science of nutrition, food safety, food marketing, food and nutrition magazine writing, middle-class growth, and corporate food production. By putting our current desire for fresh food into historical perspective, Friedberg helps us to develop a fuller understanding about the wide and deep interplay of forces that support our current food system and what kind of changes might be made to improve it. The answers are not simple, easy, or without their own complicated side effects.
Fresh raises many more questions than it answers. Freidberg doesn’t attempt to provide a tidy solution, as if she could. Instead she offers that “any route that seems perfectly simple is probably no solution at all, especially if it proposes going back to an imagined past.” The trick is how to fix one food situation without damaging another, which Fresh shows us is nearly impossible.
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