Fresh (thoughts on a book)

I recently started this book and have been toting it around with me on the subway reading every chance I get. Susanne Freidberg (who taught one of my favorite courses at Dartmouth College) recently published Fresh: A Perishable History which looks at the history of “freshness” in our global food chain, and I highly recommend it.

I have almost grown accustomed to the San Francisco eating scene where every block is a new restaurant promoting ever more local and sustainably sourced food — big buzzwords in the Michael Pollan indoctrinated food world (I’m not complaining, I confess to be part of the same cohort). So I was ever more surprised to read Freidberg’s account of turn of the century restaurants in New York, that seemed to take the exact opposite marketing approach. About the New York chain Schrafft’s Freidberg writes, “…in the 1930s [Schrafft's] listed the mileage traveled by its exotic produce. The fresh oranges, grapefruit, and strawberries in its fruit cocktail had cumulatively covered 7,800 miles en route to Manhattan, while the makings of a vegetable salad together racked up 22,250 miles. At the time, such menu options seemed worth boasting about. They demonstrated technology’s conquest of borders, distance, and seasons; they offered customers fresh foods from the places they grew best.”

I guess I should not be surprised by the circularity of our relationship with our food. This strategy so diametrically opposed to the food marketing I see today in the Bay Area came at a time when good food was hard to come by, that which you could get quickly spoiled, and much of what you ate made you sick. Just a small part of Freidberg’s book, she illuminates here how ideas about freshness and technological advances in preserving and transporting goods created a climate where exotic foods from far-slung places were things to be revered for the advances they represented. At the same time, she is also illuminating how our relationship with food today is a product of the same kinds of forces of public health and tastes. It makes me wonder which of the tenets I believe in today as part of a sustainable food system are simply passing fads in a larger cycle of our relationship to what we eat.

Fresh is a great read so far, full of new information that sheds a lot of light on the history that has led to our current relationship with all manner of food — “fresh” or not.