Whether a
devout vegan or hardcore carnivore, almost all of us want to know how fresh our
food is (or was). But what does it mean
for food to be fresh? How does food
stay- or in some cases, become- fresh? And
what, exactly, does freshness do for us?
Ms. Friedberg kindly agreed to speak with me about some of the early history of modern fresh food, the local food movement and how much our quest for freshness has altered our food system and even our food.
Would
it be fair to say that your book documents part of the story of the creation of
our modern food
system?
In
a word, yes. But many books have told that story. My point in Fresh was to show that freshness—a
food quality that we tend to consider natural and naturally appealing—is in
fact a product of this modern food system. I also wanted to show how freshness
came to be valued as an antidote to the ills and downsides of modern industrial
life. I don’t just mean antidote in the nutritional sense, though I think it’s
significant that in the 1920s fresh fruits, vegetables and dairy products were
called “protective” foods. Freshness also became associated with other
qualities that early 20th century consumers felt nostalgia for, such as purity
and vitality.
What were some of the
concerns about the healthiness of refrigerated and frozen food? Once refrigeration and freezing became
acceptable technologies, what were some of the supposed health benefits of
shipped foods?
In
the early days of refrigeration—meaning the 1870s and ‘80s—consumers often had
good reason to distrust the foods it touched. For starters, the technology
itself was not very reliable, due to erratic temperature control and poor
insulation in cold storage warehouses. But the bigger problem was how merchants
used the technology to store goods that were already bad, such as rotten eggs,
or fish unsold at the end of a market day. It was easy enough to blame cold storage
itself for the poor quality of whatever came out of it. The problem with this
kind of scapegoating was that consumers came to believe that refrigeration
really was the source of harm. They thought that even if the food looked,
smelled and possibly even tasted fine, it might actually be somehow spoiled.
This notion faded after the first decade of the 20th century, but even then
consumers were suspicious of merchants that used refrigeration to manipulate
the availability (and price) of seasonal foods.
Eventually
shipped fresh foods came to be valued for the variety and vitamins they added
to the middle class daily diet. The popularization of vitamin science in the
1920s provided support for the idea that consumers needed fresh fruits,
vegetables and dairy products everyday and ideally all year round. So did
consumers’ growing preoccupation with calorie-counting and staying slender.
You write the story of a
number of different foods: beef, milk, eggs, fish, lettuce and fruits- even, in
a way, the story of ice. I'm guessing a
lot of people reading this will be as surprised as I was to learn that eggs
used to be a seasonal food. Which food
yielded the most surprises for you?
The
history of eggs contained the most surprises, because I also didn’t know they
used to be seasonal. Nor, it turns out, did most people I told about this,
including those of older generations. But if you think about it, other birds
lay eggs seasonally, so why wouldn’t chickens?
It certainly makes evolutionary sense, in that chicks hatched in spring
would be more likely to survive than those hatched in fall or winter.
Similarly, many of the ways that people used to procure fresh foods—walking
beef cattle hundreds of miles to market, keeping dairy cows in the middle of
cities, transporting live fish by barge (still practiced, by the way, in East
Asia)—might now seem surprising to us, or at least extreme. But they were in
fact practical adaptations to the highly perishable nature of highly desirable
foods. Given the constraints, in other words, they made sense. Refrigeration
and rapid transportation have changed what we consider commonsensical about
freshness.
There are things that make
locally grown food attractive (particularly supporting local businesses in a
weakened economy), but is that a realistic option for everyone? Can everyone afford that? If they could, is
that going to provide sufficient food for everyone?
As
a geographer, one of my first questions is always: what scale? If local means
50 or 100 miles from market, then no, an entirely local food supply is not a
realistic option for New England, among other places. Alongside the climatic
limitations (even many ardent locavores would prefer not to give up coffee and
olive oil!) are spatial ones, especially if the average American diet continues
to include a lot of livestock products. That said, increasing the proportion of
fresh foods sourced locally would be viable, given adequate infrastructure and
support for farmers. Such support might include government loans or subsidies
to make farmland more affordable in densely populated regions, because this is
currently a big obstacle (and one of the reasons local food sometimes costs
more).
So
some re-localizing and re-regionalizing of food supply is certainly possible
and— if fuel prices continue to rise—likely. But I don’t think it should be a
top priority for food system transformation (and I say that as a longtime
farmers’ market shopper). For one, there’s now abundant evidence that local
food does not always have a smaller environmental impact. For another, while
it’s appealing to support local businesses—especially businesses run by people we
come to know and care about—it’s not entirely clear why their proximity makes
them automatically more deserving of our support than businesses elsewhere. The
idea that nearby farmers treat their land and workers better than do farmers
elsewhere—well, it may often be true, but it also reflects what we like to
think about an imagined local community, and what we fear about the distant and
unknown. We often hear these days how important it is to know where your food
comes from. Well, I’d prefer to know that I could trust my food regardless of
where it comes from. Or, to put it in less pie-in-the-sky terms: Getting to
know food producers can be educational and socially satisfying. But the health
and wellbeing of people, animals and the environment—wherever they are—should
be protected by laws; they should not depend on our figuring out who seems like
the most trustworthy farmer at the market.
Along
the same lines, measures to promote local food will not by themselves do
anything about the sharp geographic inequalities even within our own country,
not to mention across the world. Would a
more just food system be one in which the immense disposable food income of New
York City only flowed into the Hudson River Valley? That’s an extreme example,
but the point is, I think it’s dangerous to assume without questioning that
“local” means greener, fairer, healthier, or better, period.
What would you like to see
readers do with what they learn from your work?
Question
their assumptions about what they think is fresh, and why that matters.
