United States-Fresh meat.
Is it fresh?
The competing myths about fresh food that have helped to mould the contents of the Western fridge
Jon Garvie
"Is it fresh?" From motorway service stations to the wet fish markets of Hong Kong, the refrain rings out, as nervous customers pore over produce that doesn’t look quite right. This simple question – more often a plea for reassurance – covers a noxious stew of anxieties. It is unanswerable, suggests Susanne Freidberg, because notions of "fresh" have no fixed moorings. Freshness has meant different things to different people at different times. Her book sets out to trace the commercial ventures which have sought to define this shifting quality and, in doing so, moulded the contents of the Western fridge. Freidberg examines beef, eggs, fruit, milk, vegetables and fish, and refrigeration itself. Each commodity gets a chapter, in a set of variations on the theme of how industrial production, from the late nineteenth century to the present day, has changed the relationship between food producers, consumers and workers.
Future social historians will note the extraordinary centrality of food to national discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. Celebrity chefs and lifestyle experts attempt to reform bad habits. Doctors debate the health benefits and risks of modish diets, from raw greens to bone marrow. Class warriors deplore as snobbish dismissals of cheap battery-farm chickens. And the gulping majority grow obstinately fat on salty, sugary, pre-packaged slop, swelling the coffers of the multinationals and delivering fiscal nightmares to those who must foot the bill. But, despite this glut of media coverage, the provenance of most food is little known or understood. Whether at Tesco or farmers’ markets, consumers must take vendors’ avowals of freshness on trust. Few question exactly what knowledge a sell-by date imparts. Societies rely instead on myths, as Freidberg’s double-edged subtitle implies. The numinous meaning of freshness, as with all cults, is apprehended only vaguely by its followers.
Ancient cultures used preservative methods, such as salting and pickling, in order to extend the durability of produce for domestic use. Refrigeration delivered a paradigm shift by removing the site of production from the sight of consumers. The idea of freshness emerged to fill the conceptual ellipsis that resulted. Adam had no need to question the physical integrity of the apple Eve offered him, whatever its moral risks. Self-sufficient agrarians did not define freshness, because they watched their chickens lay and slaughtered their own cows. But fridges, from the outset, posed difficult, potentially lethal questions of age and origin. Extemporized eggs, suspended in cold storage, hatched a new language to answer modern needs.
The first golden age of globalization that John Maynard Keynes looked back on and mourned in 1919 flourished particularly through the food economy. It also powered America towards global supremacy. Chicago grew rich on cows, California on oranges, Alaska on fish. As Keynes wrote, it seemed that a man could "adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages". This was never more true than when applied to beef; "the spirit of capitalism made flesh", according to the journalist and author Upton Sinclair.. In 1889, William Vestey, an Englishman, discovered the export of frozen partridge, during a sightseeing tour of Argentina. By 1921, Vestey’s meatpacking business was one of the wealthiest enterprises in England, with 2,300 butcher shops, a shipping line and packing enterprises in every continent.
Sketches of eccentric entrepreneurs enliven Freidberg’s sometimes dryly factual narrative. Charles Tellier, France’s "père du froid", made it his mission to bring refrigerated beef to France from America. He died penniless and reviled by his countrymen, many of whom have maintained their fervent opposition to imported meat. In recent times, the anti-globalization movement, led by figures such as the French Communist farmer José Bové, has drawn on that disquiet. These two Frenchmen of different eras serve as useful symbols of the reactionary and modernizing impulses that have divided societies since the onset of industrialization. Bové animated older national dissatisfactions in describing the target of his crusade as "malbouffe" – not only junk food, but also the "confused unease that such food provoked".
Men like Tellier suffered no such epistemological queasiness. They saw global food production chains as the rational answer to scarcity, motivated by a self-assumed philanthropic duty to connect the earth’s resources. The nascent advertising industry sold housewives a compelling vision of "nature made simple", in which refrigeration and vacuum packing provided liberation from dirt and toil. But fears of technological advance persisted, particularly among the religious. Fridges meant left-overs and left-overs meant loose morals, said the Puritans. The small-farm lobby replied to the industrialists’ trumpeting of wants over needs by declaring the "moral superiority of meals prepared fresh", as well as the health benefits. Freshness demanded the preservation of immemorial relationships between people, land and animals.
Such romanticism proved incompatible with the demands of urbanization and, later, war. Farms were exiled from Manhattan because New Yorkers wanted to banish the cow slurries that fouled their city. Then two world wars demanded massive economies of scale in which vast out-of-town factories delivered sustenance for the troops. By the time of the Second World War, the "hysterics", as one paper put it, had conclusively lost the argument: "crafty Hitler, cunning Hirohito, crazy Benito – let them be an everlasting reminder that we need eggs, eggs and more eggs", ran the mastheads. Even when one war was over, perpetual mass production would be required to guard against the threat of future conflicts and, of course, to sustain the new economy.
Freidberg tells these stories straight, seldom offering her own perspective on whether this era drove progress or sowed the seeds of social and environmental degradation. She flits between areas and times. The nineteenth-century markets at Les Halles swiftly give way to those in modern Seattle and Hong Kong. In order to link these peregrinations, she requires a unifying narrative, which implies a single historical trajectory, a "cold chain" from the first meatpacker to the modern supermarket. But Freidberg is unclear on whether the industrial societies and markets which emerged were inevitable products of technological advance, or if other visions might have triumphed. In a book so concerned with different accounts of the "good life" and the benefits or otherwise of modernity, these are unfortunate omissions.
Social histories often draw their interest from the villains of the piece against which their polemics are directed. Freidberg quotes frequently from Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel of 1906, The Jungle, which excoriated the working conditions in the Chicago meat-packing industry. She does not, however, share explicitly the clear political agenda characterizing his work, or that of more recent writers such as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation, 2001). She relies instead on stricter reportage.
In some cases, the facts need little authorial elucidation. The sections of the book that deal with consumer and labour relations demonstrate plainly that the mass production of each of her chosen commodities involved often violent recalibrations of society. The American public blamed the massive food price inflation of 1910–11 on speculators using refrigeration to reduce supply and drive up prices. The cold storage of eggs encouraged gambling and the development of informal f
