Protean Freshness

A few weeks ago I was in the Guanajuato Applebees (I know, seems incongruous, but there you are) waiting for a friend to turn up for breakfast.  Menus are primary research sources for food historians, so I was reflecting on the concessions an American chain makes when it moves to Mexico when I was brought up short.

“All the eggs served in this restaurant are fresh,” said the menu in tiny letters at the bottom of the page.  Well, they’d better be, hadn’t they?  Who wants stale or, worse, rotten eggs?  Ah, but wait.  This couldn’t be the right contrast.  Fresh instead of preserved, perhaps? Fresh instead of dried and reconstituted, fresh instead of eggbeaters.

These are some of the ambiguities that Susanne Freidburg takes on in her new book, Fresh: A Perishable History that has just been published by Harvard University Press.

It’s not Susanne’s first venture into food.  She had already made a name for herself with a pioneering book, French Beans and Food Scares that traced out all the tensions and ironies in French and English consumers buying fresh green beans produced in poor African countries.  Highly recommended, by the way, particularly because the author’s detailed reporting of what green production means in a very poor country such as Burkino Faso is a welcome breath of international air in food discussions that are often focused on the US and Europe.

Fresh is a similarly informed, well written and well researched book, dedicated to understanding our obsession with fresh foods and what the food industry has done to make sure that we get foods that, in appearance at least, are fresh.

To clear the ground, Susanne points out that freshness means different things in different foods and, very important, that it’s not a value that comes from biology, nutrition or taste alone.   So off I went to the Oxford English Dictionary which made it clear that the word itself is a many splendored thing.  Its etymology is complex, appearing to come from Old French and Old English.  And while its root meaning appears to be new or having the appearance of newness, it fans out into not salty (as in fresh water), cool, bright and blooming, full of vigor, sober, drunk, and a rush of water or wind.

To bring order to such a protean idea, Freidburg links the modern history of fresh food with the history of  refrigeration or “the cold chain” beginning in the late nineteenth century.  Then she invites the reader to consider six kinds of “fresh” foods that thanks to this cold chain can be found in every refrigerator: beef, eggs, fruit, vegetables, milk and fish.

Her analysis of each of these foods is well researched and throws up all kinds of surprises. I particularly enjoyed her clear exposition of the science underlying freshness and its opposites, whether stale or rotten or preserved, for each of these different foods.  Other readers may turn more to the historical twists and turns by which cows were induced to produce equal quantities of milk year round, or chickens to lay eggs at a steady pace, or growers who produced peaches so fine that consumers were willing to pay fifty times the price of ordinary peaches.   The huge American exports of nonfat dry milk to other countries, especially Mexico, gives a new international contest to the problems the American dairy industry has been having in the last six months.   All in all fascinating and clear evidence for the protean nature of freshness.

And what also becomes eminently clear is that keeping foods cold is only the beginning of the business of freshness: all kinds of other techniques have been employed in the last hundred years:  artificial insemination to keep dairy cows producing and well as a huge business in feed for the winter, artificial lighting for the ever-laying chickens,  chemical treatments for luscious looking fruits,  railroads, containers and airplanes for dewy freshness, ingenious packaging in specially engineered plastics for those “fresh” salads, for starters.

By the end of the book, the reader is acutely aware of the point that Susanne reinforces in her brief epilogue, namely that freshness comes at a price, that there is no utopia of freshness, and that the ability to enjoy fresh foods is a privilege of the wealthy parts of the world.

And there she stops. Just stops dead in her tracks.  Whoops.

At first I wanted more, I wanted some punchline, some set of easy conclusions, some set of rules.  On reflection, though, I was relieved.  Bookstore shelves are lined with books on food politics that lecture us, telling us in no uncertain terms what we should believe.  What a pleasant change to be left to figure out the morals according to one’s own values.

So for the past few weeks I have been mulling over freshness.   My conclusion is that for all the ambiguities and unfairnesses that it has implied, it has been a worthwhile quest, perhaps a conclusion that differs from Susanne’s.  And perhaps one way of getting at why is to consider a whole range of freshness that she does not consider: freshly cooked or processed things.

Fresh-baked bread or pie is valued just as much as fresh fruit.  My neighbors here in Mexico like their cheese (a fresh cheese) “muy frescisto” (very fresh).  They even like their candied fruit “muy fresco,” still tender and juicy and tasty.  So amid all the protean meanings of fresh, is one reason why we like it that it does promise benefits that go beyond the usual appeals to “fresh is more nutritious?”  Is it that it also offers something that was a huge evolutionary advantage, tenderness and digestibility?

And here I’ll stop because this leads in to the next book I want to talk about at some length, Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire.  In the meantime, for anyone who is interested in figuring out the basic ideas that inspire contemporary eating and food production, Fresh is essential reading.

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