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Book Cover
E-book
Author Freidberg, Susanne, 1966-

Title Fresh : a perishable history / Susanne Freidberg
Published Cambridge, Massachusetts : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009

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Description 1 online resource (408 pages)
Series ACLS Fellows' Publications
Contents Introduction -- 1: Refrigeration: cold revolution -- 2: Beef: mobile meat -- 3: Eggs: shell games -- 4: Fruit: ephemeral beauty -- 5: Vegetables: hidden labor -- 6: Milk: border politics -- 7: Fish: wild life -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Acknowledgments -- Index
Summary From the Publisher: That rosy tomato perched on your plate in December is at the end of a great journey-not 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 inside: 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 change: all enter into this lively, surprising, yet sobering tale about the nature and cost of our hunger for freshness
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 347-384) and index
Notes Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on March 3, 2021)
Subject Food -- Quality.
Food handling.
Food -- Labeling.
Perishable goods.
TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING -- Food Science.
SCIENCE / History
Food handling
Food -- Labeling
Food -- Quality
Perishable goods
Lebensmittelqualität
Frischware
Haltbarkeit
Livsmedel -- historia -- Förenta staterna.
Konservering -- historia -- Förenta staterna.
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2008052221
ISBN 9780674053854
0674053850
0674032918
9780674032910