TLS: on Fresh Food

Is it fresh?
The competing myths about fresh food that have helped to mould the contents of the Western fridge

a review of Susanne Freidberg FRESH
A perishable history
383pp. Harvard University Press.
£20.95 (US $27.95).
978 0 694 03291 0


"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.
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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 futures markets. Refrigeration made risky economics from risky foods. Freidberg admits that “questions of freshness and fairness were rarely far apart”, but she does not take sides. Considering the meticulousness of her research, it is curious that she provides no opinion as to whether speculators were to blame for the food crises of those years.
No matter the advances in technology, farming, particularly of fruit and vegetables, continued to require large reserves of “unskilled”, generally back-breaking, labour. In early twentieth-century America, farm labourers were referred to as stoops, because of their posture. Mechanized fish cleaners became known as “iron chinks”, after the nationality of the workers they replaced. In 1936, reporting on striking Filipinos in the farmyards of Salinas, California, John Steinbeck declared that “there was tension in the valley and fear for the future”. Until the Depression, the perishability of crops had allowed organized labour a certain power over employers. But, in Freidberg’s narrative, the “Battle of Salinas” proved a watershed. Local militias combined with antiCommunist army reserves to overcome the strikers violently. While the industry complained of negative publicity – not least through Steinbeck’s novel, The Grapes of Wrath – their victory demonstrated that more labour could always be found.
Freidberg notes that this triumph of consumers’ desire for freshness over workers’ rights occurred just at the time when “organized labour enjoyed greater popular legitimacy and legal protections than ever before”. This is perhaps her most political observation. Then, as now, the material effects resulting from greater public awareness of human rights, or even their formulation in international law, are questionable. As at Salinas, the news cycle focuses briefly on one heart-wrenching inequity, before swiftly moving on. In its wake, companies envelop their activities within promises of corporate social responsibility and greater self-regulation. But the consequences of this attention are as nothing compared to international consumer demand for “permanent global summertime” in which all fruits and vegetables are made available all of the time. The universal impulse to fetishize the (increasingly) rare and the beautiful leads back unerringly to inequity and despoliation.
Freidberg comes closest to anger when describing the social outcomes of contemporary global food markets for countries such as Burkina Faso. As with many postcolonial outposts, it functions effectively as an export processing zone for its former masters, in this case supplying haricots verts to France (the trade in which was the subject of Freidberg’s previous book, French Beans and French Scares, 2004). International merchants target rural areas at some distance from the capital Ouagadougou, so that the small producers have no alternative market to turn to if a dispute over pay or conditions arises. The remoteness means many crops perish en route (the Sahel lacks refrigerators and roads), but, in the harsh logic of global supply chains, fragility increases profit.
In 1931, a US trade paper suggested that without refrigeration “our present daily existence would become unworkable. Cities with thousands of inhabitants would fade away. We would probably turn into beasts in our frantic struggles to reach the source of supply”. Freidberg observes in her epilogue that, during the book’s composition, the word “locavore” emerged, providing a loose banner for a range of food movements which oppose supermarkets, free trade and carbon intensive industries.
This new scramble for ethical nourishment has not yet turned beastly. In fact, as the market responds to this fast-growing demographic, more sustainable definitions of freshness which hark back to pre-industrial times have emerged. Susanne Freidberg clearly approves, but, as is typical in her enlightening but frustrating account, the big questions remain unanswered. Do middle-class, pastoral idylls of food production provide a business model by which to feed the world’s poor? Should governments intervene to push unwilling electorates towards more ethical food choices? How can global supply chains be regulated towards a more equitable distribution of profit? Finally, in a book based on debates over naturalness, the absence of any discussion of genetic modification is startling. Fresh frames a wealth of provocative debates, but it lacks a sense of conviction.





Jon Garvie is a freelance writer living in London. He is currently completing a research project at the University of London on globalization.