There seem to be more and more books on single topics. I read one ages ago on snow. Totally wonderful - -and changed my world view in odd ways. Who'd have guessed snow had a history? Once in a while a new one comes along and there you go, something you thought just WAS has a history and a cultural significance. Sometimes this seems obvious -- like books on curry or even salt. (For my discussion of single topic books in 2006, click here. I remembered I had done it but darn it took me ages to find it on the web. Ought to have better titles maybe!) In this case the topic is
FRESH!
Put another way,this discussion focuses on a book I started ages ago -- and then let drift away and am now reading. Its title? Fresh: A Perishable HIstory and its author is Susanne Freidberg. The book looks to subjects like beef, eggs, fruit, vegetables and fish -- asking such questions as: "What exactly is fresh?" (p. 1) and looks to such paradoxes as the way the culture of freshness "promotes novelty and nostalgia, obsolescence and shelf life, indulgence and discipline" (p. 3). Perhaps the best sentence ever: "But the shelf life of satisfaction remains short" (p. 3).Put another way, freshness emerged, the author argues. as both a sign of progress and an antidote to it. (You know -- it both reassures you and makes you incredibly anxious to see a sell by date on a food product, right? I recently went so far as to drink a whole bottle of orange juice that was past its sell by date. Was it fresh? I did not die.)
A few tidbits from the book: First, did you know there was such a thing as the cold chain? I know about the Cold War, but the cold chain? No, this is not it (despite the generosity of the source):
This is an article on the cold chain and this pdf has some pictures relevant not to food but to vaccines. Trust me, you'll get the point: the cold chain is just that -- the chain of events, institutions, locations, machinery that ensures that a product stays cold -- defining cold however seems appropriate to that product whether vaccine or food (or, being a bit morbid today, perhaps bodies. And therein lies the paradox: the cold chain -- not "natural but industrialized -- defines freshness. So, our fresh food is decidedly not fresh. Or is it?
What else? As the title to this post perhaps implied there is a bit on gender here. If nothing else, there is some discussion of the ways, prior to the industrialization of egg production, raising chickens and eggs was associated with women (I assume in the US/ The West? Globally?) There are some pretty funny -- well, depending on your sense of humor -- bits on why. Women's capacities, it turns out, are superior when it comes to patience and care with regard to eggs and hens. Who knew? (So true?) Perhaps unsurprsingly, the chapter on fruit calls to mind Eve. And famous fruit from Montreuil hung on trees bagged (literally) by women's hands; the quickest, apparently, could wrap the hanging fruit (peaches, for example) at the rate of 3,000 per day (see pp. 184 ff). Also notable, though less gender laden perhaps is the idea of using sunlight to stencil amazing pictures like portraits and others on to fruit -- sometimes called fruit photography. Amazingly weird -- and I would put an example here but it is one of the few things I have ever found impossible to locate via google!
Other topics: beef and tiny vegetables, milk and its transport, fish -- wild and not. All i the making of freshness -- the paradox of industrial nature, fresh packaged. . .
Having said all that, I have to admit it: I just liked the feel of this book in my hand.I liked the cover. I liked the bookiness of the darn thing. Maybe it is the Harvard University Press-ishness of it all, but it just . . . well, was satisfying.
For a blog from Freidberg written around the time of the 2009 release of Fresh, click here. You'll especially like it if you're into eggs. And you can see her prior entries there as well on all sorts of other topics.
Wanna go video instead? Try here.
And, last but not least, want a more chi chi review? Try here for a review from the "Times Literary Supplement"! Hurrah.
