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Fresh: A Perishable History
That rosy tomato perched on your plate in December is at the end of a great journey—not just over land and sea, but across a vast and varied cultural history. This is the territory charted in Fresh . Opening the door of an ordinary refrigerator, it tells the curious story of the quality stored freshness. We want fresh foods to keep us healthy, and to connect us to nature and community. We also want them convenient, pretty, and cheap. Fresh traces our paradoxical hunger to its roots in the rise of mass consumption, when freshness seemed both proof of and an antidote to progress. Susanne Freidberg begins with refrigeration, a trend as controversial at the turn of the twentieth century as genetically modified crops are today. Consumers blamed cold storage for high prices and rotten eggs but, ultimately, aggressive marketing, advances in technology, and new ideas about health and hygiene overcame this distrust. Freidberg then takes six common foods from the refrigerator to discover what each has to say about our notions of freshness. Fruit, for instance, shows why beauty trumped taste at a surprisingly early date. In the case of fish, we see how the value of a living, quivering catch has ironically hastened the death of species. And of all supermarket staples, why has milk remained the most stubbornly local? Local livelihoods; global trade; the politics of taste, community, and environmental all enter into this lively, surprising, yet sobering tale about the nature and cost of our hunger for freshness.
416 pages, Hardcover
First published April 1, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
November 16, 2009
For most of her life, my grandmother kept her milk, eggs, and butter in the spring house on her Missouri farm. Through the 1940s, my mother subscribed to a twice-weekly delivery of ice for her icebox, and in 1951, bought a Crosley "Shelvadore." I have a refrigerator-freezer that makes ice and dispenses cold water, and another freezer for garden vegetables and fruits. Times have changed.
In Fresh: A Perishable History, Susanne Freidberg opens the refrigerator door on a fascinating aspect of our modern American food culture: how the search for "fresh" food has shaped what we buy, cook, and eat. We take the refrigerator so much for granted that it's almost impossible to imagine what eating was like before—and what it is like now for those who can't afford to participate.
But we didn't always have ice on demand and mechanical refrigeration has been around for only a century. In her first chapter, Freidberg's first chapter establishes the technical context for her discussion of the extraordinary changes that have taken place in our diets and eating habits in the last hundred years. The "cold revolution" changed the geography of fresh food, she says, making it possible for perishable foodstuffs to travel around the globe and for seasonally-available fruits, vegetables, and meat to appear on our tables year-round. Refrigeration gives us the ability to consume very old food and still happily imagine it as "fresh."
Take meat, for instance. As hunters, humans have always eaten wild meat, but Freidberg points out that eating domesticated animals has been, until recently, a "seasonal and regional luxury." Most people ate plant-based diets with the occasional addition of locally grown and processed meat. But after refrigerated railcars (chilled first with ice, then mechanically) made it possible to deliver meat from the meat-packing center of Chicago to consumers on the East Coast, "fresh" beef became less of a luxury and more of a perceived necessity. "Mobile meat," dependent on cross-country and global transport, convinced consumers "not only that fresh beef could come from far away, but also that their main relationship to meat—and indeed, to all once-living foods—was as consumers." This helped to create the disconnect that now plagues us,
between cities and their pastured hinterlands, between shoppers and their neighborhood butchers, and between people who bought the meat and those who dressed it in faraway slaughterhouses (p. 65).
But refrigeration didn't affect just meat, and it has created other hidden effects that we don't often think about" Consider this:
* The "cold chain" allows us to have fresh eggs throughout the year and permits egg producers to create larger and larger egg-producing factories with detrimental impacts both on the local environment and on local small-farm competitors.
* Refrigeration (enhanced by huge industry-funded marketing efforts) encourages us to desire beautiful if bland and tasteless out-of-season fruit. Advertising has taught us that "beauty is a mark of freshness," a beauty that is rarely more than skin deep.
* Refrigeration enables us to enjoy fresh vegetables without going to the work of growing them ourselves, and disguises the "hidden dependence" of growers on cheap, often undocumented migrant labor. The value we place on fresh vegetables, Freidberg says, has "contributed to the historic undervaluing of the human labor that produces them."
Fresh makes one thing abundantly clear. Our contemporary American food culture is totally dependent on refrigeration. Without it, we would have no meat, eggs, milk, vegetables, fruit, or fish, except what we could grow ourselves or purchase locally, for immediate consumption. As Freidberg points out, refrigeration enables us to enjoy a richly varied and much safer diet. But because of it, we have become a culture of consumers dangerously removed from the work of managing our food and suffering from the ills created by overconsumption of meat, the injustice of cheap labor, and the depletion of natural resources. The "Cold Revolution" has created a comfortable world that may be too costly to sustain.
In Fresh: A Perishable History, Susanne Freidberg opens the refrigerator door on a fascinating aspect of our modern American food culture: how the search for "fresh" food has shaped what we buy, cook, and eat. We take the refrigerator so much for granted that it's almost impossible to imagine what eating was like before—and what it is like now for those who can't afford to participate.
But we didn't always have ice on demand and mechanical refrigeration has been around for only a century. In her first chapter, Freidberg's first chapter establishes the technical context for her discussion of the extraordinary changes that have taken place in our diets and eating habits in the last hundred years. The "cold revolution" changed the geography of fresh food, she says, making it possible for perishable foodstuffs to travel around the globe and for seasonally-available fruits, vegetables, and meat to appear on our tables year-round. Refrigeration gives us the ability to consume very old food and still happily imagine it as "fresh."
Take meat, for instance. As hunters, humans have always eaten wild meat, but Freidberg points out that eating domesticated animals has been, until recently, a "seasonal and regional luxury." Most people ate plant-based diets with the occasional addition of locally grown and processed meat. But after refrigerated railcars (chilled first with ice, then mechanically) made it possible to deliver meat from the meat-packing center of Chicago to consumers on the East Coast, "fresh" beef became less of a luxury and more of a perceived necessity. "Mobile meat," dependent on cross-country and global transport, convinced consumers "not only that fresh beef could come from far away, but also that their main relationship to meat—and indeed, to all once-living foods—was as consumers." This helped to create the disconnect that now plagues us,
between cities and their pastured hinterlands, between shoppers and their neighborhood butchers, and between people who bought the meat and those who dressed it in faraway slaughterhouses (p. 65).
But refrigeration didn't affect just meat, and it has created other hidden effects that we don't often think about" Consider this:
* The "cold chain" allows us to have fresh eggs throughout the year and permits egg producers to create larger and larger egg-producing factories with detrimental impacts both on the local environment and on local small-farm competitors.
* Refrigeration (enhanced by huge industry-funded marketing efforts) encourages us to desire beautiful if bland and tasteless out-of-season fruit. Advertising has taught us that "beauty is a mark of freshness," a beauty that is rarely more than skin deep.
* Refrigeration enables us to enjoy fresh vegetables without going to the work of growing them ourselves, and disguises the "hidden dependence" of growers on cheap, often undocumented migrant labor. The value we place on fresh vegetables, Freidberg says, has "contributed to the historic undervaluing of the human labor that produces them."
Fresh makes one thing abundantly clear. Our contemporary American food culture is totally dependent on refrigeration. Without it, we would have no meat, eggs, milk, vegetables, fruit, or fish, except what we could grow ourselves or purchase locally, for immediate consumption. As Freidberg points out, refrigeration enables us to enjoy a richly varied and much safer diet. But because of it, we have become a culture of consumers dangerously removed from the work of managing our food and suffering from the ills created by overconsumption of meat, the injustice of cheap labor, and the depletion of natural resources. The "Cold Revolution" has created a comfortable world that may be too costly to sustain.
May 21, 2009
I wrote a review and, not for the first time, exited the d*** page before hitting the "save" button, which is outta sight on my screen. Am I peeved? Yes! Was this a good book? Yes!!
This book is well worth your time, if you are interested in the background of your food. How did we come to our current obsession with Fresh Food? And what does that mean, anyway? Ms. Freidberg provides answers to these (producers and shippers had a lot to do with it, and it means what you want it to mean!) and many other questions. She covers the role that refrigeration has played in our definition of freshness - it's major! She also pays attention to the human cost of freshness. It also can be major.
At the end of chapter five (of seven), which is about vegetables, is this statement: "Yet it's worth considering how our very ideal of freshness in vegetables - as a natural, even evanescent quality - has contributed to the historic undervaluing of the human labor that produces them. It's an ideal encouraged by supermarkets and other dealers in fresh produce, because it permits them healthy mark-ups for qualities that cost them little or nothing. The real cost has always been borne by the people whose work we don't see."
That cost is borne not just by vegetables, but also by the subjects of the other featured food groups: beef, eggs, fruit, milk and fish. She devotes a separate chapter to refrigeration, the "cold revolution" and it's fascinating.
I think this brings to a close my Reading About Food streak for now. I have to go to my garden and look for other local sources. I am more than ever before aware that I want to have a connection to the people that produce the food that I eat. That will never be a 100% deal, but I can up the percentage considerable just by making the effort.
This book is well worth your time, if you are interested in the background of your food. How did we come to our current obsession with Fresh Food? And what does that mean, anyway? Ms. Freidberg provides answers to these (producers and shippers had a lot to do with it, and it means what you want it to mean!) and many other questions. She covers the role that refrigeration has played in our definition of freshness - it's major! She also pays attention to the human cost of freshness. It also can be major.
At the end of chapter five (of seven), which is about vegetables, is this statement: "Yet it's worth considering how our very ideal of freshness in vegetables - as a natural, even evanescent quality - has contributed to the historic undervaluing of the human labor that produces them. It's an ideal encouraged by supermarkets and other dealers in fresh produce, because it permits them healthy mark-ups for qualities that cost them little or nothing. The real cost has always been borne by the people whose work we don't see."
That cost is borne not just by vegetables, but also by the subjects of the other featured food groups: beef, eggs, fruit, milk and fish. She devotes a separate chapter to refrigeration, the "cold revolution" and it's fascinating.
I think this brings to a close my Reading About Food streak for now. I have to go to my garden and look for other local sources. I am more than ever before aware that I want to have a connection to the people that produce the food that I eat. That will never be a 100% deal, but I can up the percentage considerable just by making the effort.
November 3, 2018
Ever since reading about the history of refrigeration, I look at my produce differently. My husband bought this book for me as a birthday gift and I really enjoyed it.
October 25, 2020
What to be wary about when choosing a non-fiction book to read?
1. Too extensive a bibliography: 37 pages of sources this author claims to have consulted. That is a lot of stuff. How would it be humanly possible to compose anything even remotely concise from such a plethora of... stuff? I found myself just trying to finish one page without succumbing to confusion... and frustration.
2. Too long of an "Introduction": An "Introduction" should be something like a first greeting, a short preliminary concerning what the author intends to go into more detail in later actual chapters;
17 pages make up the one in this mess! That's not an "introduction"; that's an actual meal with someone, a commitment demanded by the author who has no right in demanding such.
1. Too extensive a bibliography: 37 pages of sources this author claims to have consulted. That is a lot of stuff. How would it be humanly possible to compose anything even remotely concise from such a plethora of... stuff? I found myself just trying to finish one page without succumbing to confusion... and frustration.
2. Too long of an "Introduction": An "Introduction" should be something like a first greeting, a short preliminary concerning what the author intends to go into more detail in later actual chapters;
17 pages make up the one in this mess! That's not an "introduction"; that's an actual meal with someone, a commitment demanded by the author who has no right in demanding such.
September 17, 2018
This book really made me think about the concept of "fresh", where food actually comes from, and how history has shaped our diets. It's been really interesting to go into supermarkets and to food festivals with this background knowledge. I originally bought this for a Political Ecology class I was taking but decided to finish reading it well after I graduated and it was worth taking the time to learn.
February 12, 2014
Freidberg is a great writer, which is not a given in scholarly prose, even scholarly prose like this book, which is clearly designed to sell to a popular audience as well. To give you a sense of Freidberg's wit and enviable economy of expression, a line from her chapter on milk: "The great diversity of such products (France alone famously boasts several hundred cheeses) shows that milk is as fertile a medium for human inventiveness as it is for microbial growth." I mean, read it and weep, all you scholars whose sentences are as clogged as curds in a butter churn! (see? not nearly as witty)
Her central argumentative insight is also so rewarding. While we may look at the revolutions in our food technology over the past century and a half from the perspective of urban industrialism, the consumer values that these changes have been designed to encourage actually reflect some of our pastoral dreams. In other words, a lot of new food technology (whether harvesting, shipping, or packing innovations) has developed around the ideal of "freshness," or conversely, it has urgently adapted to combat the accusation of *not* being fresh. She draws attention to some of the historical-cultural contingency around this ideal of freshness; fresh fruit, for example, was always a seasonal and often an elite treat, and then orange growers banded together to form Sunkist and market to the vitamin-mania of the 1920s.
Freidberg is a geographer, so while her history of perishables centers on the U.S., the origin point for many of the industrial systems and technological strategies for keeping food "fresh," she allows her network to grow global, reflecting the transportational complexity of the modern food industry. Her history of refrigeration is fascinating, documenting the turn-of-the-century marketing battle between the ice box (dirty layers of ice melting away) and the refrigerator debated the gustatory and nutritional benefits or detriments of different forms of cold. I didn't know what cow country tended to cluster around urban centers until the development of the railroads and that "swill dairies" became notorious in the mid to late nineteenth century, as breweries and distilleries kept malnourished cows barely alive on their waste products.
The historical detail, geographic range, and economic and political context is richly drawn in this study. Freidberg connects consumers, manufacturers, and laborers, as well as the culturally symbolic dimension of our foodstuffs: fruit as elite art (photographs imprinted on light-deprived fruit from a special orchard outside of Paris), lettuce as year-round convenience food (low prep for the postwar wife and even lower prep once it was plastic bagged), wild, live fish as a Chinese symbol of abundance and vitality.
I'm hoping students would find this book as accessible and engaging as I do.
Her central argumentative insight is also so rewarding. While we may look at the revolutions in our food technology over the past century and a half from the perspective of urban industrialism, the consumer values that these changes have been designed to encourage actually reflect some of our pastoral dreams. In other words, a lot of new food technology (whether harvesting, shipping, or packing innovations) has developed around the ideal of "freshness," or conversely, it has urgently adapted to combat the accusation of *not* being fresh. She draws attention to some of the historical-cultural contingency around this ideal of freshness; fresh fruit, for example, was always a seasonal and often an elite treat, and then orange growers banded together to form Sunkist and market to the vitamin-mania of the 1920s.
Freidberg is a geographer, so while her history of perishables centers on the U.S., the origin point for many of the industrial systems and technological strategies for keeping food "fresh," she allows her network to grow global, reflecting the transportational complexity of the modern food industry. Her history of refrigeration is fascinating, documenting the turn-of-the-century marketing battle between the ice box (dirty layers of ice melting away) and the refrigerator debated the gustatory and nutritional benefits or detriments of different forms of cold. I didn't know what cow country tended to cluster around urban centers until the development of the railroads and that "swill dairies" became notorious in the mid to late nineteenth century, as breweries and distilleries kept malnourished cows barely alive on their waste products.
The historical detail, geographic range, and economic and political context is richly drawn in this study. Freidberg connects consumers, manufacturers, and laborers, as well as the culturally symbolic dimension of our foodstuffs: fruit as elite art (photographs imprinted on light-deprived fruit from a special orchard outside of Paris), lettuce as year-round convenience food (low prep for the postwar wife and even lower prep once it was plastic bagged), wild, live fish as a Chinese symbol of abundance and vitality.
I'm hoping students would find this book as accessible and engaging as I do.
October 2, 2013
It's imossible to read about food without tripping over an article lauding the local, fresh food movement. Know your farmer, know your food. Know your food, know yourself. It's some kind of 21st century zen koan. Heck, Subway sells sandwiches loaded with sodium and fat with the motto "Eat Fresh". Fresh is good.
But what does "fresh" mean? It's easy to picture: Leafy greens, crunchy fruit, vibrantly colored meat. But investigate that food some, and you learn uncomfortable truths: Our food depends upon a lot of cheap labor and a lot of expensive technology (i.e. transportation and refrigeration.) Fresh A Perishable History looks at the evolution of the food supply chain through preservation of meat, eggs, fruit, vegetables, and fish.
The bulk of the book focuses on preservation itself. Refrigeration is something that is necessary to haul apples from Washington to Florida and shrimp from New Orleans to Las Vegas, and it's taken for granted. I think nothing of the refrigeration state of my salmon filet or chicken breast so long as it doesn't smell awful. But, refrigeration and freezing was not always a trusted technology. Food companies, icebox manufacturers, and refrigeration magnates fought for public approval of their technology, using arguments that seem quaint today. (French consumers had a phobia of consuming "cold" foods; my mom tells me that, to this day, French buildings lack air conditioning because cold is unhealthy.)
Advertising seems like a sideshow compared to the miracles of food production and storage, but much of the book follows the drive to get consumers on board with technology. These technologies didn't show up overnight, and they weren't adopted with glee like an edible iPhone.
I could probably review each section in depth, but I'd just end up re-writing the book. It's a good mix of basic food science, media studies, and public opinion. The evidence comes from all sides, which means it's not a simple book with a narrow argument. But really, that's the message of Fresh: The food we take for granted is the product of a lot of hard work, and "fresh" is really hard to define. But it's interesting, it's well-written, and it points out that reductive food movements have always existed and been paved over by the next fad.
But what does "fresh" mean? It's easy to picture: Leafy greens, crunchy fruit, vibrantly colored meat. But investigate that food some, and you learn uncomfortable truths: Our food depends upon a lot of cheap labor and a lot of expensive technology (i.e. transportation and refrigeration.) Fresh A Perishable History looks at the evolution of the food supply chain through preservation of meat, eggs, fruit, vegetables, and fish.
The bulk of the book focuses on preservation itself. Refrigeration is something that is necessary to haul apples from Washington to Florida and shrimp from New Orleans to Las Vegas, and it's taken for granted. I think nothing of the refrigeration state of my salmon filet or chicken breast so long as it doesn't smell awful. But, refrigeration and freezing was not always a trusted technology. Food companies, icebox manufacturers, and refrigeration magnates fought for public approval of their technology, using arguments that seem quaint today. (French consumers had a phobia of consuming "cold" foods; my mom tells me that, to this day, French buildings lack air conditioning because cold is unhealthy.)
Advertising seems like a sideshow compared to the miracles of food production and storage, but much of the book follows the drive to get consumers on board with technology. These technologies didn't show up overnight, and they weren't adopted with glee like an edible iPhone.
I could probably review each section in depth, but I'd just end up re-writing the book. It's a good mix of basic food science, media studies, and public opinion. The evidence comes from all sides, which means it's not a simple book with a narrow argument. But really, that's the message of Fresh: The food we take for granted is the product of a lot of hard work, and "fresh" is really hard to define. But it's interesting, it's well-written, and it points out that reductive food movements have always existed and been paved over by the next fad.
September 28, 2016
Do you long for crisp, juicy apples in January? The perfect peach in December? Fish so fresh they're still swimming in a tank? Lobster from Maine or French cheeses all year long? Or maybe you'd like haricots verts (green beans to most of us) perfect in length and greenness, grown for you in Burkino Fasso. Or are you a "locavore" and you wish to eat from your own "foodshed". You may want to drink your milk as close to the cow as possible without having the cow in your own backyard. You can have them all. Today, just about anything you could wish for in food can be yours for the right amount of money whenever and wherever you'd like it. Your desires for these things have been carefully manufactured for you through advertising, displays in grocery stores, and the expectations of modern life. Technology has developed to bring almost anything to you looking like it still has the morning dew of the field on it. The food we now consider ordinary and normal all year long are fairly priced and even luxuries on occasion won't break the budget in Western societies and major cities all over the world. Fresh: A Perishable History is the story of how they get to us, the things we give up to have them, and sometimes, the dangers we face in eating them.
January 29, 2010
I wrote a review of this book for PopMatters:
here.
Here's the beginning...
Freidberg sets out two premises that played a large role in directing her inquiry into the changing meaning of freshness. First, there’s no one-size-fits-all definition of freshness. Second, people from different backgrounds, cultures, and geographic regions value freshness in ways that are hard to predict or understand. Increasingly, marketing plays a distressing role in this shifting value system, changing that definition of freshness and undermining longstanding habits of preservation and seasonal snacking....
here.
Here's the beginning...
Freidberg sets out two premises that played a large role in directing her inquiry into the changing meaning of freshness. First, there’s no one-size-fits-all definition of freshness. Second, people from different backgrounds, cultures, and geographic regions value freshness in ways that are hard to predict or understand. Increasingly, marketing plays a distressing role in this shifting value system, changing that definition of freshness and undermining longstanding habits of preservation and seasonal snacking....
November 19, 2010
I found this book interesting. Freidberg looks in-depth into our cultural notions of freshness and highlights particular foodstuffs in her exploration: beef, fruit, vegetables, eggs, milk and fish. I'd never really thought about the fast array of factors that figure into the concept of "freshness" -- time, temperature, cultural expectations, government policy, transportation, market demands, advertising, public health... It's a lot to digest (ahem) -- any one of those topics would have been fodder for book-length treatments in and of themselves.
I found the historical descriptions of early food preservation and transportation methods in each chapter the most interesting. The discussions of more modern trends and policies didn't grab my attention as much.
I found the historical descriptions of early food preservation and transportation methods in each chapter the most interesting. The discussions of more modern trends and policies didn't grab my attention as much.
September 25, 2016
A competent, well-researched account of how food gets to our tables. The book is divided up into chapters based on type - Beef, Eggs, Milk, etc. Freidberg then takes us through a history of how the various food used to arrive at market, the challenges involved in transportation and the technologies and techniques developed to combat them. A very readable book, I learned a lot of interesting facts, but for some reason, perhaps the lack of a unifying thread through the chapters, it never rose above a three star rating for me.
August 15, 2009
Abandoned. While I thought I was ready to chart the territory covered in "Fresh", I kept nodding off. This is an important, sophisticated account of food history, labor practices, technology, corporations, and consumer food choices; I'll have to come back to it to gain a fuller understanding of 'how the advent of cold storage subverted ideas of freshness, shifted power from consumers and producers to middlemen, and virtually eliminated seasonality'.
July 31, 2009
Very well done--includes some photos/ads which help make the author's information even more relevant. Who new what terrific health benefits were claimed to have come from iceberg lettuce? What is fresh, really? Should eggs be refrigerated? I loved the old "modern" refrigerators. Can you imagine waiting for that block of ice? From Dairy to produce to meats--we've come along way, baby. Or have we?
October 11, 2015
Freidberg provides a fascinating history of how refrigeration, and the subsequent expansion of the industrial food system's reach, forever altered not only the world's food supply, but also how consumers view freshness and conceptualize its meaning. She tells this story through a series of mini-histories focusing on specific foods: beef, eggs, fruit, vegetables, milk, and fish.
October 7, 2013
Fascinating book on how we evolve notions of what's proper to put into our bodies.
You'll learn about how refrigeration was viewed suspiciously around the year 1900, and
Extrapolating from this book, we can expect that society will get over it's irrational fear of GMO foods someday and more technologically advanced foods will be widely accepted by the year 2100.
You'll learn about how refrigeration was viewed suspiciously around the year 1900, and
Extrapolating from this book, we can expect that society will get over it's irrational fear of GMO foods someday and more technologically advanced foods will be widely accepted by the year 2100.
April 18, 2009
Fascinating, well researched history of refrigeration and its effects on how we perceive what "fresh" actually is.
June 15, 2009
Ethicurean review: Chilling out: A review of "Fresh: A Perishable History"
May 9, 2011
An interesting read. I finished it over a year ago. It didn't really leave an impression.
Read
January 8, 2011Thesis adviser. I liked French Beans book much more.
November 3, 2012
I definitely think twice about prepackaged baby lettuce...
March 22, 2013
It's a fascinating journey that Susanne took - The concept of 'freshness' and how it has morphed with time and technology.
Read
March 4, 2015White braed? what f[k
November 6, 2015
Very interesting insight into the food system that has come to be and how fresh over the years has changed.
February 1, 2016
good topic for a book, but the chapters lacked any real cohesion and seemed like a bunch of random thematic articles 26many points were not original
November 4, 2016
read for political ecology seminar.
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews