History of Fresh

May 2026 Produce Parable

By Adam Calder, Wheatsfield Produce Manager

What is fresh food? A simple enough question to ask, mind-boggling difficult to answer. In her book Fresh: A Perishable History, author Susanne Freidberg does a thorough job answering that question, and analyzing how that definition has changed over time and history.

The basic premises of the book are that freshness means different things for different foods, and that biology alone can’t define what “fresh” means. Since different categories of food define “fresh” differently, the book devotes each chapter to the history of a specific food. The first chapter is about refrigeration and the profound change it had on food freshness. The following chapters are about beef, eggs, fruit, vegetables, milk, and fish. Freidberg digs deep into each of these food categories. She read many old food industry trade journals, home economics texts, memoirs, technical manuals, cookbooks, women’s magazines, food packaging and advertisements to get a comprehensive understanding of the history of food preservation.

In her book, you learn about the resistance to the first mechanical refrigerators, hard as it may be to envision someone being anti-refrigeration in this day and age. The transition from sawdust-covered blocks of ice for food preservation to gas and electric motor-powered refrigeration was not rapid or universal. It had to first be adopted by shipping companies, and added to their boats and railcars. Then it was food distributors and warehouse managers that had to be convinced refrigeration was the future. Lastly, it was the home cooks and grocery shoppers who had to be conditioned to accept refrigeration in their kitchens.

She moves from refrigeration to beef, as beef was the first product that pushed the concept of maintaining a “cold chain” from farm to consumer to maximize freshness. The formation of fleets of refrigerated British steam ships, Argentinian meat packing plants, and municipal cold storage houses all arose together as refrigerated beef pushed across the globe.

With this cold chain in place, it became possible to also extend the distribution and shelf life of eggs, fruits, vegetables and milk. There are fun facts in each of these chapters, like that the Pink Lady was the first apple developed to not only look beautiful but to still taste good, or that a woman’s group in Philadelphia took to the streets selling cold-storage eggs to convince people they were as good as fresh-laid ones. There are also sobering facts in each chapter, especially regarding what past generations have long known about how certain fresh foods can be deadly. Milk routinely carried tuberculosis. There was dysentery in dirty vegetables, cholera on fruit. Freidberg does a compelling job using these facts, and many more, to answer the question: what is fresh food?