How fridges set women free
...and could bring Walt Disney back from the dead
CHILLED by Tom Jackson (Bloomsbury Sigma £16.99)
MY FAMILY were retail butchers i n Bedwas, South Wales. W. G. Lewis & Sons (‘Fresh Meat Delivered Daily’) was established in 1868. A hundred years later, during my childhood, what had been the dining room in the flat behind the shop was now the site of a gigantic walk-in fridge.
It used to terrify me: the thought of being trapped in there with the red carcasses of beef in the pitch dark behind the big, padded, chromium door, which did not have a handle on the inside.
This nutritious little book, subtitled how Refrigeration Changed The World And Might Do So Again, could be my family history.
Briefly prosperous when they possessed the only reliable chiller in town, the Lewises felt the pinch once ordinary homes started to acquire fridges of their own.
For no longer did housewives need to go up and down the high Street each and every day with their tartan shopping trolleys, buying perishables and cooing over my grandfather’s prize sausage.
As Tom Jackson says, until the post-war era, fresh produce had to be ‘rushed into cities during the cool of the night to be consumed within hours of its arrival’.
Now, as women’s magazines gushed, by possessing a fridge ‘the housewife sees her labours lightened, sees more hours of leisure’ — though probably not in South Wales, where there was always the vacuuming, dusting and laundry.
HOWEVER, it is true that fridges did set women free to a large extent — what a continual bore and a chore it had always been, gathering ingredients, preparing food, cooking meals, preserving it with smoking or salting, keeping bluebottles out of the milk.
Though in 1965 only a third of British households possessed a fridge, today every single kitchen in the developed world contains not only a fridge but a deep freeze — a quarter of t he American population possesses two of each. That’s because they guzzle $4 billion worth of ice-cream annually.
hence the diabetes epidemic and why their toes drop off.
Kettles, microwaves, ovens: fridges and freezers are the only mass-market products that cool, rather than heat. It is at this point I must warn you that there is a lot of science in this book — about thermodynamics, vapour compression cycles and other excitements.
The intelligent general reader will follow it, but I was forcibly reminded that, in my O-level physics exam in 1976, I gained the duffer’s grade ‘unclassified’.
You used to be able to get higher than that just by spelling your name correctly.
To this day, I can’t change a plug without fusing the street so, when Jackson says ‘ ice absorbs a fixed amount of heat as it melts, so the quantity of melt water produced is a direct measurement of the heat being released inside’, I simply have to take his word for it. To me, science is black magic.
Nevertheless, as early as the 5th century BC, boffins in Persia were developing cooling technologies. I f ound the descriptions of i ce- houses fascinating: the timber-lined holes in the ground where ice from the mountains was ‘buried to keep it cool and secure’.
The domed stores had massive walls for insulation. The dome acted as a cover or lid, with small holes at the apex to release the warm air that rose up inside. ‘This compressed air whistled out of the vents at great speed, taking any residual heat with it.’
In the desert countries, during the night, ‘the low humidity in the air made it easier for ice to form’ — and the air was kept f l owing by slaves waving ostrich-plume fans.
Such ice-houses were used to chill wines and store fresh meat and ripening fruits.
Clearly, they were the preserve of the wealthy few: egyptian pharaohs, Renaissance Borgia princes ( who collected i ce from Mount etna) and the english monarchy. The Royal Ice-house, completed in 1660 by skilled bricklayers from the Netherlands, was in London’s Green Park.
The subterranean chamber was approached through a tunnel, which twisted and turned to ‘block any blasts of warm air from outside’. The ice itself was muffled under straw and sawdust.
WHAT is plain is that the aristocratic f ad f or chilled food was to become a widespread social necessity — feeding the millions in the cities, who lived far from any countryside or the sources of food production.
As Jackson argues, t he development of this tremendous
system of food preservation and transportation facilitated our industrial economy: all those urban dwellers needing to be fed, as, for example, the Monmouthshire miners were by W. G. Lewis & Sons.
Yet until the mid- 20th century, pretty much the best tradesmen could do was to pack fruit and meat in blocks of ice cut from mountain lakes.
Eventually, i t became possible (Jackson explains it, but don’t ask me to paraphrase) to manufacture ice artificially with tubes and pipes and chemicals.
The earliest domestic fridge was a cedar wood crate containing a rectangular tin. Ice was packed in the space between the two layers.
By 1880, oranges could be kept for up to a month using these primitive methods but, before long, industrial refrigerators on board ships could transport butter and lamb from New Zealand to Europe: a journey of 98 days.
The ways and means of controlling temperature and humidity and moving bananas about the globe is a subject in itself.
Inevitably, the moment that businessmen got involved, the economics of chilling was open to abuse.
Like grain in Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, cold storage was used to hoard food in order to push up prices. What was cheap in one location, for example, those bananas, was expensive in another.
On the green front, refrigeration and air conditioning are sucking up to a third of energy consumption in America. Air conditioning units use 5 per cent of the electricity produced in the U.S., filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide — not a good thing, apparently.
Another rather strange development is that the dead may awaken. In 1912, a taxidermist called Captain Birdseye — yes, I, too, was surprised to learn he was a real person — froze fresh fish in the company of an Eskimo and, ‘once thawed, the fish looked and tasted perfect’. In due course, this became the idea behind cryonics, the science of freezing the demised in the hope they can be downloaded from the afterlife by some future technology.
Allegedly, Walt Disney and (as I found when researching his biography) Peter Sellers are in liquid nitrogen tanks awaiting resurrection.
What’s worse? The prospect of more sentimental cartoons or a mad Goon on the loose?
Technology, however, is fast making zombies of us all.
Fridges today can bleep to let us know when food has gone out of date or alert us that we are running low on items. Because, presumably, we are already too stupid and lazy to open the door, sniff and take a look ourselves.