I can still picture the burly ice man using his large metal tongs to carry 25-pound blocks of ice from his truck parked in the alley to the wooden ice box in our court apartment in Chicago. He would lift the ice blocks onto his shoulder, which was protected from the cold and dampness with a thick sheepskin pad.
Nicola Twilley has recently written an informative and provocative book, “Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet and Ourselves.” Modern day refrigeration is less than a century old. Twilley writes refrigeration has changed everything about how and what we eat. It has redesigned not only the contents of our plates but also our bodies, our homes, our cities, our landscape and the global atmosphere. Twilley believes we have “lost diversity and deliciousness for we no longer taste fresh produce.”
Not everything about refrigeration is negative. In the United States at the start of the 20th century, gastrointestinal infections — byproducts of poor food quality — were the third leading cause of death. Within three decades, in part because of refrigeration, the incidence of such conditions has fallen by about 85%.
We are obsessed with refrigerators. We open them an average of 117 times a day. Today, nearly three quarters of everything on the average American plate is processed, shipped, stored and sold under refrigeration. Two thirds of fruits and vegetables are consumed outside the border within which they are grown.
The author partially attributes refrigeration to the increase in women’s participation in the workforce. Households began buying refrigerators, and shopping became a weekly routine rather than a daily one.
Bananas – One of Twilley’s travel stops in researching the book was to New York to meet with Paul Rosenblatt. He supplied a million boxes of bananas a year to bodegas, food carts and grocery stores in the five boroughs of the city. At his warehouse, the bananas are under extreme climate control, requiring monitoring and adjusting precise levels of humidity, atmospheric gases and temperature in order to ripen 2 million bananas a week. Contrary to what Miss Chiquita, who wore a fruit tiara, told us, refrigeration to assist in the ripening process is necessary. Before refrigeration, bananas were expensive and rare except in their tropical homeland. (In fact, historians report that our Mr. Lincoln never enjoyed a banana.) In 1899, “Scientific America” lamented that the banana, with all its nutritious value, did not travel well. It was just a few years later that the banana became common place. Even Charlie Chaplin was slipping on them in his 1915 movie. Today, the banana is the most popular fruit in the world. What enabled this transformation? Steamships with refrigeration equipment allowed bananas to arrive in the U.S. in less than two weeks. A freshly harvested banana has a week or two before ripening begins. The process from solid yellow to brown puree is quick and unstoppable. Thanks to refrigeration, green bananas are now able to survive weeks of transit from harvest to consumption.
Lettuce – Prior to World War I, American salad eaters were a rare breed and primarily ate soft leaf or butter lettuces grown on the outskirts of East Coast cities. Twenty years later, it was all about iceberg lettuce. New York Times restaurant critic Craig Claiborne called it the “lowest most tasteless of salad ingredients.” Because its thick, densely packed leaves were substantially sturdier than the tender, loose head of a Baston Bibb, it had a much better chance of surviving the long train journey from California to eastern markets. Salinas Valley in California is called the Salad Bowl of America because 70% of our nation’s lettuce is grown there. By the late 1920s, Salinas Valley started packing their lettuce in crates with ice, covered with ice and covered with more ice enroute. It was covered with so much ice that it took on a new name of “iceberg.” Over the next decade, American iceberg lettuce consumption doubled, and Salinas Valley ripped out their beans and planted lettuce. By the 1970s, more ice was produced in Salinas Valley than New York City. Now iceberg has lost its popularity, and we purchase bags of lettuce with all the ingredients for a complete salad. As the ingredients in the bag (carrots, lettuce, cabbage etc.) all ripen at different times, scientists created polymer films or plastic membranes. The disposable plastic bag we purchase actually has a permeable membrane that lets oxygen in at one rate and carbon dioxide out at another rate to maintain the ideal atmospherics microclimate around the leaves as they travel the country.
There is a local Springfield connection to this refrigeration story. In 1929, Clarence Birdseye introduced “flash freezing” to the American public. Birdseye first became interested in food freezing during fur-trapping expeditions to Labrador in 1912 and 1916, during which he saw the natives use natural freezing to preserve foods. As it turns out, the grandfather of Robbie Robert from Robert’s Seafood Market knew Clarence, and the retail store was one of the first purchasers of refrigeration equipment. This allowed Robert’s to expand its product line and keep products fresher.
Twilley, in her final chapter, writes that using refrigeration to increase product life has changed everything about how and what we eat. After reading her book, I agree with her premise that we have “reaped the benefits of refrigeration.” However, one of the costs is environmental climate change, and the costs are catching up with us. She asks the question, “Have we forgotten what fresh is?”
About
Lincoln Land Community College offers credit programs in Culinary Arts, Hospitality Management and Baking/Pastry, and non-credit cooking and food classes through LLCC Community Education.
Cooking or food questions? Email epicuriosity101@llcc.edu.