num_pages: 416
description: That rosy tomato perched on your plate in December is at the end of a great journeynot just over land and sea but across a vast and varied cultural history. This is the territory charted in Fresh . Opening the door of an ordinary refrigerator it tells the curious story of the quality stored freshness. We want fresh foods to keep us healthy and to connect us to nature and community. We also want them convenient pretty and cheap. Fresh traces our paradoxical hunger to its roots in the rise of mass consumption when freshness seemed both proof of and an antidote to progress. Susanne Freidberg begins with refrigeration a trend as controversial at the turn of the twentieth century as genetically modified crops are today. Consumers blamed cold storage for high prices and rotten eggs but ultimately aggressive marketing advances in technology and new ideas about health and hygiene overcame this distrust. Freidberg then takes six common foods from the refrigerator to discover what each has to say about our notions of freshness. Fruit for instance shows why beauty trumped taste at a surprisingly early date. In the case of fish we see how the value of a living quivering catch has ironically hastened the death of species. And of all supermarket staples why has milk remained the most stubbornly local? Local livelihoods; global trade; the politics of taste community and environmental all enter into this lively surprising yet sobering tale about the nature and cost of our hunger for freshness.
language: English
title: Fresh: A Perishable History
publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press