Agricultural History Review, Volume 58 Part 2 (2010), p. 294

The human victory over enzymes, miasmas, and bacteria was preceded by a protracted and extremely rocky road. All the highlights, extremities, disillusions, and blind alleys, which characterize the pursuit of freshness, warrant a breathtaking story – and even more so if the author (as in this instance) is wellequipped to write it.

The basic premise of Susanne Freidberg’s monograph is that freshness is a qualitative rather than a quantitative category. In other words, freshness is not a quality that can be grasped or caught by measurement or exact labelling, it is – to put it in the words of a food lobbyist – ‘a state of being’ (p.2). By revealing the deeper layers of this notion, Freidberg – professor of Geography at Dartmouth College – manages to analyse the very cultural sediments of a classification which (during our daily food shopping expeditions) is usually taken for granted. But readers of this book are likely to come away with their attitudes to freshness and shelf-life revolutionized. The obsession of consumers and marketers with freshness is symptomatic of the pathological way in which modern societies deal with food, especially in the United States. In particular, Friedberg illustrates the systematic denial of the alienation of consumers by food producers that has continued since industrialization. This growing rift between the origin and presentation of food ensures that modern appetites sometimes look like exercises in mental acrobatics, as they attempt to reconcile extremities such as novelty and nostalgia, convenience and authenticity, high-tech and unprocessed products (such as milk or dairy items) that represent real freshness in the original sense of the word.

Friedberg shows that freshness became a manipulated category relatively recently, as consumers began to seek labels to distinguish fresh from cold-stored foods. This paradise of ‘real’ freshness is no more, because in most cases so-called ‘fresh’ foods also turn out to have been processed and stored. It is an unmistakable merit of this book to have unearthed this original sense of freshness and its gradual erosion. After an introductory chapter on the history of refrigeration, Freidberg retraces the different fronts on which this silent revolution took place, by presenting case studies of a wide and well-chosen variety of perishables, namely beef, eggs, fruit, vegetables, milk, and fish.

Although the book focuses on the United States, it also offers detailed discussions of other countries and continents, and the bibliography incorporates European sources and research literature. Nearly all chapters are enlivened with personal impressions and telling anecdotes. Usefully, each case study not only contains technical–chemical information on the specific spoilage characteristics of the particular perishable item, but also highly instructive inside information about industry practices, gained from fieldwork or from interviews with lobbyists and other representatives of the respective food sector. This firm grip on the practical dimensions enables the author to offer more than a mere historical analysis, by providing critical reflections on the moral, social, economic, and ecological implications of the daily pursuit of freshness in the Western world. The shiny patina of freshness commonly obscures the systemic disruption of natural and human resources, but Freidberg mercilessly unveils the collateral repercussions of purchasing, say, for example, ‘fresh’ haricots from Burkina Faso. It is this wide scope, and the critical (but not moralistic) tenor, that indicate the strength of a book in which great scholarship is combined with a remarkable gift for observation and a superb writing style. In this sense, Freidberg’s study presents an excellent example of what humanities and social sciences are, and should be able to do: to offer sound, enjoyable, and thought-provoking analyses of omnipresent cultural phenomena that are usually received unquestioned, and therefore deserve a critical examination.