As if fresh

From a review of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet and Ourselves:

Fridges are boxes in which we put food and forget about it. That is both their wonder and their defect. The Italian sociologist Girolamo Sineri claimed that the act of preserving food is ‘anxiety in its purest form’. The domestic refrigerator allows us to shed much of that anxiety or to transform it into the guilt that comes from scraping yet another bag of slimy, uneaten lettuce into the compost, because we outsourced our worries about preserving food to that chilly box in the corner of the kitchen.

Not all countries are entirely reliant on refrigeration. In the stalls of the souks in Marrakech, fridges seem to be used only for Coca-Cola and water, while everything from haunches of meat to giant pyramids of olives is sold at room temperature. There is a sense of urgency about the selling of food. ....

In Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet and Ourselves, Nicola Twilley argues that at each stage of its development, modern refrigeration has driven us to eat and behave in ways we wouldn’t have chosen if we could design the system from scratch. To take just one example, she explains that refrigeration is the main reason that so many commercial tomatoes are flavourless. It isn’t just that the volatile aromas in a ripe tomato are killed by the cold, or that the ripeness may be generated by ethylene rather than the sun, but that most of the tomatoes grown commercially don’t have the ‘genetic capacity’ to be delicious, as the plant breeder Harry Klee told Twilley. Tomatoes, she writes, are bred for ‘the sturdiness to be shipped and stored under refrigeration’. The important thing is that, at the moment of purchase, a consumer should deem the tomato red and perfect, even if it is left to spoil after it reaches the salad drawer at home. ....

There is nothing new about trying to delay the rotting of food: salting and smoking, drying and fermenting are among the oldest food preparation techniques. There is evidence of dried meat (jerky avant la lettre) from as long ago as 12,000 BCE in the Middle East; salted fish goes back to the Sumerians; fruit was preserved in honey by the Greeks. But modern refrigeration aims to preserve food not in a transformed state – like a plum compared with a prune or milk with cheese – but as if harvest-fresh. ....

...[F]ridges both prevent food waste and contribute to it. Before the cold chain existed, it was normal to lose at least a third of all fruits and vegetables because they perished en route from the field to the eater. Now, a similar percentage of fresh food is wasted, but by eaters in our own homes. .... (more)

Bee Wilson, "Artificial Cryosphere," London Review of Books, Feb. 20, 2025.