refrigerator 9781628924329, 9781501314261, 9781628924350

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A book series about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Series Editors: Ian Bogost and Christopher Schaberg

Advisory Board: Sara Ahmed, Jane Bennett, Johanna Drucker, Raiford Guins, Graham Harman, renée hoogland, Pam Houston, Eileen Joy, Douglas Kahn, Daniel Miller, Esther Milne, Timothy Morton, Nigel Thrift, Kathleen Stewart, Rob Walker, Michele White.

In association with  

Books in the series Remote Control by Caetlin Benson-Allott Golf Ball by Harry Brown Driver’s License by Meredith Castile Drone by Adam Rothstein Silence by John Biguenet Glass by John Garrison Phone Booth by Ariana Kelly Refrigerator by Jonathan Rees Waste by Brian Thill Hotel by Joanna Walsh Tree by Matthew Battles (forthcoming) Hood by Alison Kinney (forthcoming) Dust by Michael Marder (forthcoming) Shipping Container by Craig Martin (forthcoming) Doorknob by Thomas Mical (forthcoming) Cigarette Lighter by Jack Pendarvis (forthcoming) Bookshelf by Lydia Pyne (forthcoming) Bread by Scott Cutler Shershow (forthcoming) Hair by Scott Lowe (forthcoming) Blanket by Kara Thompson (forthcoming)

refrigerator JONATHAN REES

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

N E W YO R K • LO N D O N • OX F O R D • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

1385 Broadway 50 Bedford Square New York London NY 10018 WC1B 3DP USA UK www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 © Jonathan Rees, 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rees, Jonathan, 1966Refrigerator/Jonathan Rees. pages cm. – (Object lessons) Includes index. Summary: “Shows how the refrigerator, quietly humming in the background of our kitchens and our lives, reveals more about our culture, our society and ourselves than you ever imagined”– Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-62892-432-9 (paperback) – ISBN 978-1-62892-434-3 (ePub) – ISBN 978-1-62892-435-0 (ePDF) 1. Refrigeration and refrigerating machinery– Popular works. 2. Food–Cooling–Popular works. I. Title. TP496.R38 2015 621.5’6–dc23 2015011081

ISBN: PB: 978-1-6289-2432-9 ePub: 978-1-6289-2434-3 ePDF: 978-1-6289-2435-0 Series: Object Lessons Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents

Introduction  1 1  How refrigerators work  7 2  How to make your refrigerator stand out  25 3  Are the benefits of refrigeration worth the costs?  47 4  Waste and wants  65 5  Freezing and freezers  85 Conclusion  103 Notes  109 Index  119

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Introduction

“It’s lunchtime here in Stockholm. Let’s take a look at a random Swede’s fridge.” That particular Swede was named Heather Jonasson, and the fact that she had control of the official Twitter account of her entire country on February 24, 2015, made her more than just a random citizen of Sweden. Before too long, people from around the world following the Swedish feed began tweeting her pictures of their fridges and a new website was born: Fridges of the World. “Send me your fridge!” is her blog’s tagline.1 The refrigerators in the pictures that Jonasson received, like the one of her own fridge that she originally posted, are almost all open. It seems natural to focus on the food inside the refrigerator since, as we all know, you are what you eat. When The Atlantic noticed the huge volume of convenience foods in everyone’s kitchens, its reporter noted “the one universal truth” that “mankind really does not like to go grocery shopping.”2 Look on the Internet and you can find people willing to offer dating advice based on photos of the inside of your potential mate’s fridge. But what about the refrigerators themselves? What do our refrigerators tell

us about the societies in which we live and about the times that we are living in? Judging from the pictures on Jonasson’s website, the answer to these questions is a great deal, even when we can only see the fridges while they’re open. Judging the scale of these appliances by comparing their size relative to a carton of milk, it becomes immediately apparent that a refrigerator in Aberdeen, Washington, USA, is a lot bigger than a refrigerator in Singapore. This seems obvious, as there is a lot more space in Aberdeen than in Singapore, but even a fridge in crowded Brooklyn holds more stuff. This serves as excellent anecdotal evidence for a point made later in this book: Americans have the largest refrigerators in the world. American refrigerators also seem far more tricked out than other refrigerators from across the planet. The insides of American refrigerators have adjustable shelves, vegetable crispers, and complicated thermostatic controls. A European fridge, on the other hand, appears more likely to be simply a container with fixed shelves and a light inside. Jonasson herself was surprised to learn that American refrigerators have double doors.3 For all their external similarities, refrigerators are designed very differently in different countries. Where electricity and kitchen space are scarce, for example, refrigerators tend to be small. American refrigerators, on the other hand, are indeed the largest in the world. This in turn determines how often Americans shop, how much they’ll tend to eat at a single meal—even the kinds of things they like to eat, since some 2

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foods stand up to refrigeration better than others. Different refrigerators in different countries enable different lifestyles. Despite such variations, a refrigerator ultimately serves one purpose: It is a container that keeps food fresh. Even though refrigerators can become highly personalized through the things we stick on their outsides or the kinds of foods we place in them, their most important role in our lives does not go beyond this basic function. A refrigerator that does not keep food fresh is completely worthless. However, the ways that people use their refrigerators reveal much about how we live today. Because refrigerators are practically universal among industrialized societies, they have a tendency to get taken for granted. Humming quietly in the background, few of us ever imagine what it would be like to live without a refrigerator because refrigerators are now so reliable that very few ever break down. Once mere wooden boxes filled with ice, these now expensive appliances have become mundane. Even the first refrigerators hooked up to the Internet have failed to get most Americans interested in these appliances because refrigerators that have literally been around for decades can still fulfill their basic function well. Reliably keeping perishable food fresh seemed like a miracle when the first refrigerators debuted back in the 1910s and 1920s. While other preservation techniques exist, none has proved better than refrigeration at stifling decay while simultaneously maintaining the taste of the food it protects. The effects of

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this achievement have changed the lives and diets of people around the world. The word “fresh” used to mean straight from the source when applied to food, but today it is generally a synonym for “not rotten.” As anyone who’s discovered mold on the leftover couscous they accidentally lost behind a carton of orange juice for two weeks can tell you, food still decays when refrigerated—just more slowly than it would have had it been left out on the counter. Even freezing perishable food cannot prevent it from decaying eventually. What refrigeration and freezing can do is give us more time to enjoy the perishable food that we buy. This, in turn, has allowed food producers to make more perishable food and to charge more affordable prices, which means that we can keep more food fresh in our own kitchens. You don’t need a stove in order to cook. You don’t need a dishwasher in order to wash dishes. However, only a refrigerator can keep perishable food fresh for an extended period of time. Our refrigerators stand as symbols of the improvement in our lifestyles and diets over the last century, enabling access to a wider range of fresh foods and making it easier for us to obtain the necessary nutrients. Similarly, refrigeration has made it possible to defy seasons, to eat things produced locally in the warm months during the cold months and to consume perishable foods shipped in from places where the weather is always warm. Americans value the advantages of convenience and year-round availability so

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much that even the poorest people in the United States have access to these appliances. Besides its role as a container for perishable food, a refrigerator is also a mechanical device that works under principles few of their owners ever consider, let alone understand. This book examines the past, present, and future of the electric household refrigerator. Don’t worry, though. It isn’t a manual for fixing a broken fridge. The technical information about how refrigerators work will be kept to a minimum. However, it is worth noting that the basic technology behind the household refrigerator hasn’t changed since 1930. What has changed is the number of bells and whistles that refrigerator manufacturers have included with their products. Hydrators, French doors, automatic ice makers—none of these things help your refrigerator preserve food better. Instead, they conspire to convince us to replace our old refrigerators with new ones even if the old models still work fine. While the basic function of this appliance hasn’t changed with the times, its insides, outsides, and contents have. These changes reflect broader changes in society, and have sometimes enabled them too. Think of a related technology that almost always accompanies the modern refrigerator: the freezer. Without freezers there could be no TV dinners or frozen foods. In this case, the refrigerator created changes in society rather than merely reflecting them. In other cases, we refrigerate products that don’t really need refrigeration (like

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peanut butter, for example) just because we have grown to like them cold or because they will last a little longer that way. Since refrigerators have to keep perishable food fresh in order to live up to their name, they can also serve as constant reminders of all the effort that goes into producing, storing, and transporting perishable foods. The real cost of fruits and vegetables have increased by 25 percent since the 1980s.4 These foods are expensive for a reason. They require labor to produce, refrigeration to preserve, and enormous effort to transport halfway across the earth so that we can consume them. Therefore, a full refrigerator is a sign of prosperity. A near-empty refrigerator, on the other hand, is a sign of food insecurity for people who don’t know from where their next meal will come. Our refrigerators are important conveniences of modern life. They save us time searching for and preparing food, even as they have improved the overall quality of the food we eat by expanding the boundaries of what we can consume regularly. Yet our refrigerators also come at an economic, environmental, and cultural cost. They improve our lives even as the sheer abundance of the food they preserve contributes to shortening them. Because of such tensions, the stories that can be told about the household refrigerator are much more complex than its eminently practical, straightforward purpose suggests.

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1  How Refrigerators Work

There are other ways to preserve food besides refrigeration. However, the only way to keep food fresh for an extended period of time without affecting the taste is to own a refrigerator—that accounts for the tremendous popularity of these appliances. The fact that it is extremely difficult to explain how they work, probably explains why so many of us take our refrigerators for granted. Cold is the absence of heat. Lighting a fire under any substance will make that substance become hotter, but chilling something is much more complicated. That’s why the invention of cooking dates from prehistoric times, but mechanical refrigeration is only about 150 years old. Before that, humans had been cutting ice on a small scale and using it to chill drinks or keep perishable food fresh for centuries. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Mesopotamians all threw ice and snow imported from mountaintops into their wine in order to chill it. This gave rise to the practice of chilling fruity

beverages into ices. Thomas Jefferson had two icehouses at Monticello and had one built at the White House when he served as president. Jefferson also liked to put ice in his wine. However, none of these activities gave rise to a refrigeration industry because ice, of course, melts. Melting prevented anyone from using ice anywhere very far from the place where it was cut until it could be harvested at scale. The first person to do this was the Massachusetts merchant Frederick Tudor in 1806. He was known as the “Ice King” for the long trade routes he developed between New England and places as far away as India, but he failed utterly when it came to shipping perishable food at distances that far because ice could not provide a reliable enough cold to keep food fresh for the whole duration of those long journeys. Only the invention of mechanical refrigeration raised the prospect of perishable food surviving anywhere at any time of year, but this technology required decades to develop and perfect. Working in London, the American Jacob Perkins invented the first rudimentary mechanical refrigeration system in 1834. Alexander Twining of Yale University created the first commercially viable mechanical refrigeration system in 1847. Unfortunately, these machines were either too large or too inefficient to serve as the basis of the electrical household unit. Some of the later ones built during the 1870s through the 1890s weighed as much as five tons. Shrinking the mechanical refrigeration process down into an appliance that could fit into people’s homes simply wasn’t feasible because this destroyed the system’s efficiency. Creating a successful 8

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household refrigerator also required developing new kinds of machinery. A truly successful household refrigerator also had to be consumer-friendly. This meant that it had to be fully automatic, capable of running without the services of the engineers who tended the giant industrial machines all day and night. Of course, paying an engineer to sit with each unit was not a viable option for home refrigerators. These early industrial machines also ran on ammonia, a substance too unsafe for household use. In the meantime, despite its many limitations, Americans kept their perishable food fresh by using ice. The appliance in which they stored their ice and their food was known as a refrigerator. Today we would call it an “icebox.”1

The icebox era The word “icebox” did not come into common usage until the electric household refrigerator compelled people to create a new term to distinguish between two types of refrigerator, electric and ice-enabled. While you might think that consumers would have flocked to new electric refrigerators quickly, iceboxes survived all the way into the 1950s because of their many advantages. Iceboxes were boxes made of wood, steel, or sometimes porcelain that kept perishable food fresh thanks to the presence of ice in them. They generally had one How Refrigerators Work

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compartment for the ice and another for food. The cold from the ice circulated through the openings to keep perishable food fresh, but not nearly as fresh as the electric household refrigerators would when they debuted a few decades later, since a wet cold is not good for many kinds of foods. The advantages of iceboxes were that they were usually cheap to buy, generally cheap to supply (since ice was often cheap in major cities) and easy to use. Besides the obvious downside of needing to be constantly resupplied with ice, iceboxes also lacked storage space. The interiors had to be particularly big since consumers needed to store both the food that they wanted to preserve as well the ice that did the preserving. It also helped if an icebox had enough space inside to physically separate the food from the ice, as direct contact with ice could damage many kinds of foods, especially meat. Besides these serious problems, if you opened your icebox too often, heat got inside. As a result, the ice would melt and the food would spoil. Obtaining the ice required to keep an icebox cold could also be very inconvenient. Customers had to contract with icedelivery companies, which generally delivered throughout the neighborhood via horse-drawn cart. If there had been a warm winter, prices could escalate quickly. Even when ice was plentiful, many suppliers did their best to consolidate so as to avoid competition. If the ice-delivery man ever skipped a day (which happened fairly often if the service had little competition to keep them reliable), the food inside could

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Figure 1  Ice boxes were the only way for consumers to keep perishable food fresh before the coming of the electric household refrigerator. This particularly elaborate one was in the home that Woodrow Wilson lived in during his post-presidential years.

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easily spoil. Many housewives complained about icemen tracking dirty feet through their houses. Others complained about icemen shortchanging them on their daily rounds. Even when iceboxes lived up to their full potential, they did not do their job particularly well. Because ice never goes below freezing, the temperature inside never got below the mid-forties on the Fahrenheit scale. (Most people keep their refrigerators today in the high thirties.) And after that ice melted, the leftover water had to be disposed of somehow. Sometimes it drained into pans that the homeowner had to remember to remove and dump; sometimes the water drained through drainpipes which were very difficult to clean. In fact, the entire icebox was very difficult to clean. Maria Parloa of the famous Boston Cooking School suggested that an icebox needed cleaning once a week. To do that, all the food had to be removed. Then, “the shelves and racks should be washed in hot suds, rinsed in hot soda water, and finally in clean hot water.” After wiping them dry, the shelves and racks had to be placed in the open air in order to dry further. “Next,” she wrote, “wash the interior of the refrigerator, first with soap and water, then with mild soda-water, and finally with clean hot water, using a wooden skewer to clean all the grooves and ledges.” Once a particular smell permeated the wood container of an icebox, it became very difficult to remove. That’s why Parloa advised her readers that “it will be infinitely better to live without [an icebox] than to use one that is not in perfect condition.”2 12

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Yet despite their many drawbacks, iceboxes became particularly popular household appliances in America. As difficult as they could be iceboxes were still vastly superior to every other food preservation alternative. They cut (but certainly did not eliminate) food waste. They made it possible to keep leftovers for the first time. Even the poorest Americans paid the often- high costs associated with keeping an icebox because of their obvious value. Electric household refrigerators offered the prospect of eliminating all the drawbacks associated with iceboxes while keeping, or even improving upon, their benefits. That’s why so many inventors wanted to perfect this technology. They knew the public demand would be huge for an appliance that could create a clean, reliable cold that didn’t require constant monitoring or frequent cleaning.

Enter the electric household refrigerator The first successful household refrigerators hardly resembled the giant five-ton refrigerating machines used for industrial purposes since the mid-1870s at all. Different, more reliable machinery required a safer refrigerant. Even more importantly, a successful household refrigerator had to be affordable enough so that ordinary consumers could buy one. The process of achieving these goals took about thirty years. How Refrigerators Work

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While a few companies took out patents before this, the Automatic Refrigerating Company of Hartford, Connecticut, put the first electric household refrigerator on the market in 1905. While it managed to sell their appliances to butchers, soda fountains, and other commercial establishments, their refrigerators remained too expensive for household consumers. Fred Wolf Jr. of Chicago tried to make his machines affordable in a different way. He created a small device that could be inserted on top of an ordinary icebox so that it would no longer require ice to keep perishable food cold, but his venture failed when he ran out of money. During its early years, the refrigeration industry was teeming with entrepreneurs with big dreams but with little practical understanding of how to make household refrigerators commercially viable. A General Electric (GE) executive named Alexander Stevenson Jr. surveyed and tested the potential competition for a GE refrigerator in 1925. His memo reporting on his findings suggests the many reasons why he wasn’t particularly impressed by the competition. One refrigerator that GE bought and tested leaked sulfur dioxide, a gas then in common use as a refrigerant and that smelled like rotten eggs. While the smell had the advantage of alerting consumers to the existence of a leak, few consumers would have wanted their homes to smell like rotten eggs.3 Frigidaire, a firm that would eventually succeed, did not look like particularly strong competition at that time either. “After the machine is sold,” a correspondent reported to Stevenson, “two adjustment calls and three other service calls 14

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are necessary, making a total of five calls during the first year. They [Frigidaire] expect the present design of the machine to last about ten years and that the gas will have to be replaced every five years.”4 Frigidaire obviously had to right their ship fast in order to survive. The one successful refrigerator manufacturer at the time that Stevenson wrote that memo was Kelvinator. Formed in 1914 by two Detroit natives who had extensive experience in the automobile industry, Kelvinator created the first successful electric household refrigerator that had any resemblance to the models we know today. An icebox, yours or one supplied by Kelvinator, was installed in the kitchen. The tank full of refrigerant went where ice would normally go. The electric motor and all the machinery went in the basement. The two sections of the machine were attached by a drive that went through a hole cut in the floor. Yes, this was expensive, but customers who were rich enough to enjoy getting rid of all the inconveniences associated with iceboxes willingly went to the trouble to install these units. What made Kelvinator different from those giant industrial machines was that the company utilized a refrigerant safe enough for household use, which didn’t leak. While service calls were often a necessity in early refrigerators, this one ran reliably. Indeed, Kelvinator developed the first successful temperature control in the process of making it easier for consumers to operate their own appliances. Compared to all the inconveniences associated with ice refrigeration, the convenience of this kind of cold seemed like a revelation. How Refrigerators Work

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By 1925, Kelvinator began to sell its first self-contained refrigerator, which made it no longer necessary to cut holes in the floor in order to install it. This also improved the efficiency of the refrigerator, since many of the iceboxes in which the Kelvinator machinery got installed were not particularly well insulated. Since old, wooden iceboxes often warped and fell apart, these new machines also lasted longer. While such improvements made Kelvinators more popular than they had been before, the first really modern refrigerator was the Monitor Top from GE, introduced in 1927. GE commissioned Stevenson’s study in order to investigate the market for this appliance, and it found one very quickly. Given the name “Monitor Top” because someone thought it resembled the gun turret of the Civil War-era battleship the Monitor, this refrigerator was safe, reliable, and comparatively cheap because GE massproduced it on an eight-million-dollar assembly line.5 Unlike other firms, including General Motors (which backed Frigidaire), GE had held back development of an electrical household refrigerator in order to make sure that they could do it right. Even then, explained Stevenson, the company “should not enter this field in the hopes of immediate profits from the sale of these machines. For some years to come, the development and complaint expenses will probably eat up all the profits.” Ultimately, GE only started to build refrigerators in the hopes that the power they consumed would help the firm’s electrical utilities division.6 Much of its initial success came about as the result of a one-million-dollar advertising 16

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campaign. The rollout was also closely coordinated with hundreds of new refrigerator dealers in towns and cities around the country. The firm even produced a Hollywood movie about their new product, which may actually have been the first filmed commercial.7 All this hype was directed at an appliance that had many excellent selling points compared to the traits of earlier refrigerators. The company’s assembly line was particularly efficient so the price was lower than the competition. In fact, the Monitor Top was cheap enough so that the middle class could afford to buy it. Because the Monitor Top’s machinery was encased in oil, it made very little sound. Because the sealing on the mechanism was airtight, there was no chance of the refrigerant leaking out and it never required oiling. GE continued to manufacture this model for the next ten years. It remains the most recognized and—thanks to its machinery on top—most recognizable antique refrigerator to this day. Thanks to the success of the Monitor Top, refrigerators proved profitable faster than anyone expected because the market was so large. Electric utilities sold them at a discount in order to encourage customers to run up higher electric bills in the future. As late as the 1920s, many of these power plants made much more electricity than they could ever hope to sell. Therefore, they gave huge discounts to consumers who bought refrigerators from them in the hopes that they would more than make up the difference over the long run. Since refrigerators ran all night and all day, they ate up far How Refrigerators Work

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more electricity than any other appliance in the house. Once electrical utilities got behind these appliances they played a major role in the eventual acceptance of the refrigerator by the general public. Once GE established that a market for affordable household refrigerators existed, many other competitors jumped in—some short-lived, others more successful. The earlier category included companies like Mayflower, Ice-OMatic, and Jomoco. The convenience and price leadership that large companies such as GE and Frigidaire could bring to an electric appliance eventually drove most smaller refrigerator manufacturers out of business. The larger competitors that survived included companies like Crosley, Philco, Sears, and Norge (the first two companies actually being better known as radio manufacturers). Once these firms became well established, it was very difficult for other companies to break into the market. Because refrigerators were such an obvious improvement on iceboxes, there was a huge increase in the number of people buying them as soon they became affordable. In 1920, the average refrigerator cost $600. In 1930, it cost $275. By 1940, it cost only $154.8 That last price drop spurred huge sales, even during the Depression. Over the course of the 1930s, the percentage of American households with refrigerators grew from 8 to 44 percent.9 It also helped that firms such as GE instituted consumer credit options so that their customers could pay for their products over time. Similarly,

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FIGURE 2  General Electric’s Monitor Top, introduced in 1927, was the first refrigerator for which all the machinery was attached directly to the appliance. Used with permission from ASHRAE.

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companies like Sears and Kelvinator put out stripped-down loss leaders in order to convince people into buying their first refrigerators. This happened because the electric household refrigerator became increasingly standardized over time while the way that refrigerators worked remained exactly the same, and continues to work today.

Creating the cold “What ordinary people once made, they buy; and what they once fixed for themselves, they replace entirely or hire an expert to repair,” writes Matthew B. Crawford near the beginning of his book Shop Class as Soulcraft, an ode to the spiritual enlightenment possible through skilled manual labor.10 Crawford cites his work repairing both automobiles and motorcycles as evidence for this point. A 1963 Volkswagen, for example, was simple enough that Crawford could repair it while still a teenager. New cars, on the other hand, are so weighed down by computerized gizmos that you have to take them to an expensive mechanic in order to fix just about everything. While people could once build reasonably effective iceboxes out of barrels, electrical refrigerators were born complicated. From their earliest incarnation, these appliances were so complicated that consumers not only passed on the opportunity to fix them, they did not understand how they worked in the first place. 20

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While you can adjust the temperature or humidity in some models of refrigerator, very few of us are qualified to try to repair a broken fridge. Therefore, all the machinery is accessed from the back, and since refrigerators are most often placed against walls, they are very hard to reach. Does anybody even bother to clean back there? Of course, most people don’t care how their refrigerator works as long as it keeps their perishable food cold. It doesn’t help that the exact way that a refrigerator “creates” cold is a difficult process to understand. Yet this very important process is responsible for so much good stuff in most people’s everyday lives that it deserves at least some attention. Nevertheless, even what follows is a significant simplification. Mechanical refrigeration draws heat away from an adjoining space through the compression, condensation, and expansion of a refrigerant inside a closed system. The refrigerant acts like a sponge, taking heat away from the inside of the refrigerator and discarding it somewhere else, usually out the back. Household refrigerators, in other words, are both hot and cold by definition. The compression refrigeration cycle that powered both large industrial machines of the late nineteenth century and the household appliances that debuted during the 1920s dates from the 1850s and remains the basic underpinning of most refrigeration systems today. In the first and most important step of artificial cooling, the refrigerant in its gaseous state must be compressed into a smaller space so that gas can travel through the condenser coils. There the How Refrigerators Work

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gas gets condensed into a liquid. These coils are where heat escapes the machine. When the refrigerant is drawn through the evaporator coils, it expands into a gas. This process makes the coils cold. The resulting removal of heat in the surrounding area lowers the temperature in the food compartment. The next stop in this cycle is the compressor, which converts the gas back into a liquid. Because refrigerants cost money, all refrigerating machines recycle the same gas and liquid so that they can undergo compression and expansion over and over again. Unlike most appliances, household refrigerators run continuously. Not only that, you can both see and hear them in operation. “Refrigerators do seem to breathe,” explains Deborah Smith-Shank, who studies semiotics—in other words, symbolism—at Northern Illinois University. “They make gurgling noises, like your tummy rumbling. Of all the appliances we have, that’s the one that’s most alive.”11 When a refrigerator is broken, as when something gets caught in a fan or the compressor’s motor runs down, it will sound sick. However, most of the sounds that a refrigerator makes are a sign that everything is running smoothly. Early refrigerator manufacturers used to advertise how quietly their appliances ran, but they could never eliminate all noise. How can you tell the noises that a functioning refrigerator makes from those of a refrigerator that’s broken? GE offers a helpful guide to explaining the sounds that a working refrigerator makes, presumably so that worried customers can tell the normal sounds from the abnormal ones. For 22

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Figure 3  The compression refrigerator cycle that makes a

household refrigerator work operates the same way that all refrigeration systems have for about one hundred and fifty years. A refrigerant draws heat away from the container as it changes its state.

example, “A click can be heard when the temperature control unit turns the unit on and off.” Similarly, “A hissing, sizzling, buzzing, or arching noise may be heard on selfHow Refrigerators Work

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defrost models. This is produced when water drips on defrost heaters.” Lastly, GE notes that “a boiling, gurgling, or knocking sound can be heard when the unit is running”; this is the one that Smith-Shank noticed. It “is caused by the circulation of refrigerant.”12 Refrigerant has to circulate— otherwise the compression, condensation, and expansion cycle detailed above could never happen. Unlike Smith-Shank, most of us never notice our refrigerators unless they stop running. That’s a shame because refrigerators really are one of the most elaborately designed objects in our households. Every visible part of a modern refrigerator has been put there for a purpose: to make you buy one even if your existing refrigerator works fine. Since any functioning modern refrigerator can keep perishable food fresh, refrigerator design became an important way for appliance makers to differentiate their product from all the similar models available. Nothing about how a refrigerator looks makes a difference when it comes to whether that refrigerator can perform its most basic function. However, the incremental changes in refrigerator design over time as well as the differences between different refrigerators on the market today say a lot about the status and values of the consumers who purchase and use them—the subject of the next chapter.

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2  How to Make Your Refrigerator Stand Out

“Refrigerators and freezers have changed little in their basic design in decades,” began a New York Times story from August 1992. “Shoppers have grown to expect them to be exceptionally durable and trouble free. Instead manufacturers have competed on the basis of new features like through-the-door ice water and special storage bins.”1 While energy efficiency has become another important point of competition for refrigerator makers over the last couple of decades, this basic point remains true today. Like their basic function, refrigerator design hasn’t really changed in over fifty years. Despite that long-term stability, the lack of change in the way that refrigerators work masks enormous changes in other, less obvious aspects of these appliances. Refrigerators reflect the eras during which they were built. The history of

the time any refrigerator was built shows in the size, color, and outward appearance of that appliance. In those eras that valued convenience, refrigerators had many features designed to save time. In any era of austerity, at least some models had fewer features so that more consumers could afford to purchase them. As the centerpiece of so many people’s kitchens, the outside surface of every refrigerator has always had to blend in with the kitchen aesthetics of the time of their manufacture. The basic difference in refrigerators has always been between those targeted at people from different income groups. High-end refrigerators have more amenities than low-end ones do. Many of these expensive appliances have features that serve no purpose related to keeping food fresh, like sparkling water dispensers or a hidden third door. With such features, refrigerators have become important tools for conspicuous consumption, a way to broadcast your economic status to guests in your home. Nevertheless, many aspects of refrigerators that were initially amenities have become standard features over time. Those features illustrate what every class of consumer has come to expect from these appliances. From their earliest days, refrigerators were always expensive compared to other household appliances. After all, few people could afford to cut a hole in their kitchen floor to connect the cabinet with the machinery in the basement. Well into the 1920s, refrigerator advertisements often depicted servants, rather than the homeowners, opening 26

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the doors. People making such large purchases undoubtedly put careful thought into every aspect of the refrigerator they bought because they knew they would likely live with it for many years. Refrigerators are not impulse purchases today, either. Customers with lots of cash burning a hole in their wallets can easily spend between $8,000 and $10,000 on a high-end model. Luckily for consumers, refrigerators have also always been particularly long-lasting appliances. In 1920, the average American refrigerator lasted six years. By 1938, that number had increased to fifteen years.2 Today, the average refrigerator will last between fourteen and seventeen years. Even then, many last far longer than that. Unable to manage successful planned obsolescence, refrigerator manufacturers have had to rely on other tactics in order to drive sales. Probably because of their longevity, 22 percent of American homes have more than one refrigerator in them.3 After all, who wants to get rid of their old fridge when it still works fine?

How to stand out in a crowded market The most common way for refrigerator manufacturers to attract new customers—even customers with refrigerators at home that worked perfectly well—has always been to offer new features. Like the marketing of automobiles during the 1950s, their goal was to convince consumers to buy a new How to Make Your Refrigerator Stand Out

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refrigerator even if they really didn’t need one. And like automobiles, it was little things about the refrigerator—the shelving, the color, the style of the doors, things which had nothing to do with the basic function of the item—that attracted the most consumers. Offer enough amenities and your refrigerator would stand out even in a crowded market. In the early days of household refrigerators, just having one of these appliances was enough to impress your friends. As electric household refrigerators became more commonplace, buyers accepted all the problems that early refrigerators had because of the benefits of household refrigeration. Once refrigerators became commonplace, amenities like adjustable shelves and better temperature controls helped consumers deal with any problems that remained. Refrigerators also became more customerfriendly over these years and the decades following World War II as the number of amenities that came standard with every fridge gradually expanded. The first slide-out shelves, foot-pedal operated doors (for homemakers who had their hands full) and automatic inside lights became available during the 1930s. In 1930, Frigidaire introduced the first high-humidity drawers for fruits and vegetables, and in 1937, the first all-metal ice trays with a central handle to make getting the cubes out of the trays easier. That same year, a company tried to distinguish its refrigerator by building a radio into it. After the war, the widespread use of plastics changed the way refrigerators looked forever. Door liners, breaker strips, evaporator doors, 28

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plastic ice trays, and plastic control knobs became standard features. While none of this really changed what refrigerators do, it did make refrigerators look modern. During the 1950s, refrigerator manufacturers pioneered an incredibly important new feature that we all take for granted today: frost-free technology. Refrigerators accumulate frost in the places where water in the air freezes both inside and outside the refrigerator. In the early days of the appliance, people had to periodically turn the refrigerator off and remove the ice without puncturing the pipes that carried the refrigerant around; usually, this could be done overnight. Starting in the early 1950s, refrigerator makers began to introduce new technologies that could defrost refrigerators automatically using the heat generated by the same electricity that powered the unit. In 1958, Frigidaire introduced the first frost-proof refrigerator that used heat to prevent frost from forming in the first place. By the 1970s, refrigerator manufacturers wanted to obscure the fact that all refrigerators were mass-produced so that they could differentiate their products from others that had flooded the market (including different versions of their own models). As a result, almost all the features inside a refrigerator became highly customizable, even if the base unit remained the same for every purchaser. For example, the Philco-Ford Cold Guard had “adjustable pick-off door shelves” and an “optional magnetic blackboard” that could be “attached to the freezer door to turn the refrigerator into a message center.” Frigidaire’s seventeen-cubic-feet model How to Make Your Refrigerator Stand Out

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from the same year had a door that “can be hinged from the right or left” and a “Conversation Piece message center” that resembled a telephone answering machine. It could “be installed on any Frigidaire three-door model.”4 Through such features, even a mass-produced appliance could become highly personalized. Another way to attract new customers without changing the basic function of the refrigerator was to make it available in a larger size. In 2002, the average American refrigerator was 28.6 cubic feet in volume and getting larger.5 In 2011, Consumer Reports touted “the biggest refrigerator we’ve ever tested”—the inside capacity measured 31 cubic feet.6 Amazon.com now allows you to sort the inventory of the refrigerators it carries into a category called “30 cubic feet and above.” While this development undoubtedly helped sell more refrigerators, the growth in the size of these appliances takes on greater significance if you consider the many effects of this change.

Why do Americans have such big refrigerators? In 1985, a 335-pound rookie defensive tackle named William Perry entered the National Football League with the Chicago Bears. He became famous on that Super Bowl-winning team not just for his defensive play, but also for running the ball or 30

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Figure 4  Hydrators were one of many features that refrigerator manufacturers added in the hopes of making their appliances stand out in a crowd. Within a few years they became standard features. Used with permission from ASHRAE.

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Figure 5  Refrigerators that defrosted automatically left women with one less thing to do around the house. Used with permission from ASHRAE.

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blocking on offense during goal-line stands. His nickname was “Refrigerator,” a term of affection that only makes sense in an American context. Before the government tightened energy efficiency requirements in 1995, refrigerators in the United States could weigh as much as 250 pounds or more. Today, the average refrigerator will likely weigh about 200 pounds, far less than what “Refrigerator” Perry weighed in his prime.7 However, today’s models remain just as bulky. Because refrigerators are so bulky, they are hard to move anywhere but down. This explains the great American ritual of moving the old refrigerator to the basement, where it probably keeps beer or soda cold rather than the kinds of foods that families consume every day. Bulk, however, is not the way that refrigerator size is measured. The most important statistic for consumers about refrigerator size is volume: How much food can they hold? An old refrigerator that is merely heavy or bulky might have particularly dense walls to keep the cold inside. Consumers want refrigerators with large volumes in order to keep more food in them. As the size of American refrigerators has increased, so has the size of refrigerators worldwide (but not fast enough to surpass the size of refrigerators in the United States). What’s particularly interesting about this trend is that the size of refrigerators worldwide continues to grow despite the obvious possibility of diminishing returns. The thirtyfirst cubic foot of volume should be much less valuable than the twenty-first, but the rate at which the space inside How to Make Your Refrigerator Stand Out

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refrigerators is growing appears to be accelerating, so there is little reason to believe that this trend will end anytime soon. Americans need large refrigerators in order to take full advantage of the enormous, efficient infrastructure that we have created to supply Americans with perishable and frozen foods. After all, food producers of all kinds had little reason to go through the trouble of bringing all that food to supermarkets in the first place if consumers had no place to keep it fresh. This enables the average modern American family to go grocery shopping only once a week; a gigantic refrigerator is required to keep all the perishables they acquire on that trip fresh. While consumers have grown used to making fewer trips to the grocery stores over time, this particular habit was not their idea alone. Refrigerator manufacturers have been pushing large refrigerators on American customers for decades, as this served as an important reason for households to buy new ones. After all, any working refrigerator can keep food cold. Size, therefore, became an important arena for competition between brands. The 2014 version of the GE Appliance Guide suggests that “a typical family of four is likely to be fine with a refrigerator that measures 25 cubic feet or more,” a number that is eight cubic feet bigger than the volume of the average American refrigerator just two decades ago.8 The only refrigerators on the market today that could be described as small in the historical sense of that word are the compact models that are made for dorm rooms and other limited spaces. 34

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How the space inside a refrigerator is arranged also matters to some buyers. French doors, a relatively new refrigerator style that allows you to open the food compartments the same way you might part a curtain permits “wide refrigerator shelves and split door design,” explains the 2009 Lowe’s appliance guide. This, in turn, makes “the latest in storage flexibility and convenience” possible. “Perfect for storing large platters.”9 You never know how often you’ll need the capacity to host a party or help your friends move between apartments, but that’s been enough to create something of an arms race with respect to the size of American refrigerators and American cars. As with automobiles, it’s easy to explain the size of American refrigeration in relation to the country’s extraordinarily rich natural resources. The United States has always had lots of available land, which means it’s easier to build bigger houses with bigger kitchens in them. That same surplus of land makes it harder to get to the market when towns and cities in the country are more spread out. Big refrigerators mean fewer long trips to the grocery store. They also make it more likely that you can find something that you can cook for dinner in them, whether you planned that meal in advance or not. While Americans don’t really need all this space inside their refrigerators, the more space they have the more likely it becomes that consumers in the United States will buy larger quantities of mass-produced food. The sheer amount of food available not only explains the size of American How to Make Your Refrigerator Stand Out

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refrigerators, it explains the reason for an important negative and unintended consequence of that size. Families that have more space to store food also tend to make and consume more food, too. Much of that food then gets dispersed as bigger portions during meals, which is a significant reason that so many Americans are obese. As the size of the refrigerators in other countries grows, their waistlines grow too. Although the worldwide trend is toward bigger household refrigerators everywhere, that size still differs greatly from country to country and no country’s refrigerators have caught up with the giant refrigerators found in the United States. The characteristics that citizens in other countries want in their refrigerators reflect their cultures too. “Even in one region, demand can be very heterogeneous,” explained the head of marketing for a German refrigerator manufacturer in 2003. “Appliances have to fulfill very carefully the consumer needs in each region and even each country.”10 Making these kinds of generalizations is a crucial skill for every appliance manufacturer that aspires to serve worldwide markets. With respect to differences in culture, people who care more about flavor than convenience are more likely to go shopping every day and therefore have no need for a large refrigerator. Similarly, since many Europeans want to know the people who provide their food to them, they look at going to market as a social experience. Americans, on the other hand, are often content with going only once a week for the sake of convenience. While Americans want storage capacity, Europeans are generally more concerned with 36

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energy efficiency or the cost of operation. Since Americans have always had abundant natural resources (like food), a large refrigerator has become closely identified around the world with the American way of life. In today’s global economy, more people around the world aspire to emulate America’s lifestyle and that means an increased demand for refrigeration and refrigerators. In China, it is widely believed that cold drinks are bad for the stomach, yet Chinese refrigerators are still growing in size with that country’s increasing affluence. As recently as 1985, there were only 2.6 refrigerators for every one hundred Chinese homes.11 In 2005, 12 percent of rural Chinese families owned refrigerators, but in urban areas that figure was 80 percent.12 This leaves plenty of room to expand the reach of refrigerators, even in China’s developed areas.

The exterior While it makes sense that China would embrace refrigeration, they have also embraced western-style refrigerators. While not as large as the ones available in America, the refrigerators in urban Chinese kitchens have helped make those spaces resemble other kitchens found throughout the developed world. Refrigerators at the center of a western-style kitchen offer the largest open surfaces in many households, but you can’t hang a picture on the exterior since it would puncture the insulation in the door. Nor can you tape a poster to even How to Make Your Refrigerator Stand Out

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the largest refrigerators, since it would likely curl up when exposed to the cold air leaving the appliance when members of the household open the door. Refrigerator magnets solve this problem well. Parents can post Johnny and Suzie’s artwork and report cards on the front for everyone to see, covering the blank space while simultaneously using the pictures on those magnets to show visitors the many places they’ve visited throughout the world. But what’s under all that paper? Early refrigerators were overwhelmingly white in color because Progressive Era reformers had so linked that color with hygiene in the public mind. Keeping white things white was a challenge to housewives to meet modern sanitary standards. Unfortunately, those white refrigerators had a tendency to yellow, irrespective of how well housewives cleaned them, until Du Pont perfected a special white refrigerator finish during the mid-1930s. When manufacturers started making refrigerators more customizable after World War II, color choice finally became a real possibility. Starting in the late 1950s through the 1960s, pastel refrigerators became all the rage. Popular colors included “Avocado Green” and “Harvest Gold,” a shade of dark yellow. With so many American households having disposable income, appealing to housewives on aesthetic grounds convinced many to buy new refrigerators that they didn’t need. In the 1970s, many refrigerators were produced in earth tones for the same reason. Now these colors are making something of a comeback for nostalgic Baby Boomers and 38

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post-Baby Boomers, but they are nowhere near as popular as stainless steel models. One appliance company, Electrolux, officially declared a “War on White” in 2006. This included the first patterned refrigerators as part of its efforts to “allow people to individualize more.”13 Steel exteriors had once been reserved for commercial refrigerators, but they became a consumer trend starting during the early 1990s. Frigidaire introduced the first successful steel home models in 1992. Since it started as a trend with commercial and then high-end refrigerators, this exterior has become a form of conspicuous consumption. Even someone who hates to cook will still likely spend time foraging in the refrigerator, so steel became a color that appealed to kitchen-averse men, too. While it is hard to gauge the popularity of refrigerator colors, it is worth noting that steel is now so much in demand that it is both a color and a building material. In other words, refrigerator manufacturers are building models that look like they have steel exteriors but don’t in order to make this surface affordable to the low-end market. That’s why the average American appliance store has refrigerators in just three colors; steel, white, and black. If you don’t like any of these choices, you can now buy a refrigerator that’s “panel ready,” which means you can buy exterior panels that fit over its existing interior in order to make it any color you choose. Throughout all these changes in color, the basic shape of the household refrigerator has remained the same. Why are household refrigerators almost exclusively upright How to Make Your Refrigerator Stand Out

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rectangles? While a triangular refrigerator might have design flaws that are impossible to overcome, certainly in theory the household refrigerator could lay on its side like the refrigerator cases in grocery stores or some separate freezer units do. The answer to this question depends upon room. While American kitchens are large, they are not infinitely so. Therefore, refrigerators have to pack in the greatest capacity possible while simultaneously taking up the smallest amount of floor space. Even the tops of refrigerators play an important role in many households. While GE’s Monitor Top refrigerators sold very well, consumers were not very happy with the top of the unit. Yes, it was sealed. Yes, it was quiet. Unfortunately, having machinery on top of the refrigerator prevented women from storing anything up there. Yet space was not the only issue. Customers “would much rather not have the mechanical part of the device in evidence,” explained one GE employee to her supervisor in 1932 with respect to complaints that she had heard from other women. “The machine itself is the very thing that the woman buying it wants to keep out of sight and out of mind.”14 Similarly, the Sub-Zero company of Madison, Wisconsin, pioneered built-in refrigerators during the mid-1950s. A big trend starting in the post-World War II years, these were designed to match the depth of the refrigerator to the counters in the kitchen in order to maintain a stream-lined look throughout the room. Under these circumstances, consumers almost had to take their operation for granted 40

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Figure 6  Since all refrigerators had essentially the same features, manufacturers started trying to distinguish their models by making them different colors during the early 1960s. While this picture is black and white, it is easy to imagine the perfect avocado of this avocado green Kelvinator, especially with a refrigerator full of avocados right in the advertisement.

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Figure 7  The current rage for steel exteriors on household refrigerators derives from the appearance of industrial refrigerators like this one.

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since placing a refrigerator in one of these spaces made getting at the moving parts of the appliance even harder than usual. A modern trend, the “fully integrated” refrigerator/ freezer, is designed to fit in a cabinet itself which can be closed, blocking the refrigerator from view entirely. Such expensive models are obviously for people with kitchens who don’t need to reveal their refrigerators in order to show off. The same cannot be said of the interior of our refrigerators, which everyone in the household likely sees every day.

The interior The interior of the refrigerator is empty space, but since that’s where the perishable food goes it is by definition the most important part of this appliance. As sizes have increased and insulation has shrunk, there has increasingly been more inside space. More frequent design changes on the outside serve to cover up the fact that the space inside all refrigerators is essentially the same: cold and empty. In this sense, they are no different than air conditioners except they have only a limited space to refrigerate instead of an entire room or house. No selling point is too small when the cost of the appliance is so large. Refrigerator manufacturers have even gone so far as to argue over which appliances are made from the most environmentally friendly substances, and to brag that

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their brands are packaged in recyclable materials. One LG refrigerator model has a thermometer on the door that tells you the temperature inside. Another LG model has a “Blast Chiller” inside the refrigerator compartment that will cool a warm can of beer or soda in just a few minutes. A particularly large Samsung refrigerator has an Automatic Sparkling Water Dispenser—not a water dispenser, a sparkling water dispenser. Another model Samsung refrigerator will dispense hot water for tea or coffee, thereby practically defeating the whole purpose of the refrigerator in the first place. Another whole series of these appliances has door alarms that will alert you if someone has left the refrigerator open. So-called “Smart Refrigerators” have exterior touch-screen monitors that consumers can use to program the fridge. Walk down the refrigerator aisle of your local appliance retailer and you’ll see that the control pads on the front of higher-end refrigerators have started to resemble the faces of a typical smart phone. None of these models controls the temperature any better than the dials inside the refrigerators built during the 1970s—the electronic screens simply make them look more modern. All of the cheapest models available do a fine job keeping food cold compared to their predecessors. If refrigerators could think and talk, they would likely be proud of all the features they have that their ancestors didn’t. “Most refrigerators today come standard with adjustable and split shelving, pullout bins, and detailed temperature controls,” explains PC Magazine’s 2014 refrigerator buying guide. 44

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“Depending on the type, through-the-door water and ice dispensers are common, and usually are only left off of very basic full-size models, or when exterior design trumps the convenience of the dispenser.”15 Only the smallest refrigerators (the kinds made for dorm rooms and similar spaces) are stripped-down appliances, nothing but a compressor and a storage compartment. While energy efficiency is important to many customers judging from the reviews posted online, little mention gets made of the insulation materials in different refrigerators, yet the inside of refrigerators has drawn particular scrutiny from regulators because of its effects upon energy efficiency. Good insulation is a must in order to give buyers the greatest amount of interior space without taking up too much room in the kitchen. The earliest iceboxes had no insulation at all, then graduated to sawdust or slate. Fiberglass insulation, common to the early electric household refrigerators, often failed to do its job; you could tell because the refrigerator walls flexed under pressure since it wasn’t particularly stiff. Good insulation has to be thin, but also dense and strong. Polyurethane insulation fulfilled all these requirements. It first became common during the 1980s. The polyurethane is contained inside a polystyrene liner. These rigid foams made it possible to get greater energy efficiency while simultaneously thinning the walls of the appliance, thereby leaving more space inside for food. First injected as a liquid, polyurethane quickly expands to over thirty times its original volume, filling every nook and cranny of the refrigerator. Because it’s How to Make Your Refrigerator Stand Out

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an adhesive, it even sticks to the inner walls of the unit. These insulation improvements are what have made it possible for refrigerator manufacturers to hit energy efficiency targets imposed by governments around the world. Until recently, the insulating foam used to fill refrigerators has been made with HCFC, a greenhouse gas so bad that it is 1,000 times worse, molecule for molecule, than what carbon dioxide is for the environment. The manufacturers use such gases as a blowing agent to turn the foam into a liquid that, like polyurethane before it, hardens inside the spaces of the doors and walls of the appliance. Only now are manufacturers beginning to replace environmentally damaging blowing agents with environmentally neutral replacements. Unfortunately for refrigerator manufacturers, the energy that refrigerators consume and the environmental effects of that consumption have attracted much more public attention than the kind of insulation contained inside of them. That attention is the subject of the next chapter.

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3  Are the Benefits of Refrigeration Worth the Costs?

Since a good refrigerant can absorb lots of heat, finding the best refrigerant became an important part of making the electric household refrigerator a viable commercial product. Many different substances can absorb heat well, but not all are affordable or can absorb it efficiently enough to serve as refrigerants. The earliest refrigerants were ether and ammonia. Ether exploded too easily to be used in commercial refrigeration of any kind. Ammonia is very efficient (and remains the most important industrial refrigerant on the market), but it is too caustic for use inside the household. Early household refrigerators included sulfur dioxide and methyl chloride, which just happens to be incredibly poisonous. Therefore, the household refrigerator could never take off until someone found a safe, cheap, and efficient refrigerant for use in homes. That refrigerant turned out to be Freon.

Freon, better known now as chlorofluorocarbons (or CFCs), now exists in many varieties, but originally there was only one kind. Thomas Midgely, the inventor of leaded gasoline, led the joint venture between General Motors and DuPont which eventually perfected it. People hailed Freon as a breakthrough at first, and it was widely adopted by refrigerator manufacturers of all kinds (particularly since DuPont gave them all discounts in hopes of capturing future sales). Unfortunately, scientists later discovered that CFCs destroyed the ozone layer in the earth’s atmosphere, which protects us from getting sunburn and even skin cancer. Before that discovery, the apparent safety that Freon provided greatly contributed to making electric household refrigerators popular. The Montreal Protocol mandated the gradual removal of the original, ozone-damaging kind of Freon from appliances of all kinds in 1987. The United States banned the continued manufacture of that type of CFC in 1995. Unfortunately, these older forms of Freon remain in many refrigerators, particularly since refrigerators can be so long lasting. Models made after 1995 still contain HCFCs, which are not hazardous to the ozone layer but are hazardous greenhouse gases that will contribute to global warming if released into the atmosphere. The removal of Freon from the environment has been one of the greatest successes of modern environmentalism. Indeed, thanks to the Montreal Protocol and later ­ agreements, the hole in the ozone layer that so many people once feared is now healing and might even fully recover by 48

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the year 2050.1 However, whatever the world does to restore the ozone layer has no effect upon the impact of refrigeration on global warming. Are the benefits of refrigeration worth the cost if they contribute to the environmental disaster that a warmer ­climate can bring? Certainly refrigerants and the non-­renewable energy used to power refrigerators of all kinds around the world contribute to the climate crisis, but the benefits of refrigeration outweigh the costs because the unique contributions of refrigerators and refrigeration to global warming is comparatively small (and getting smaller all the time), while their benefits are so great. Just imagine trying to live without a refrigerator for any significant time and you too will likely try to save the planet in other ways besides ditching your fridge.

Powering the cold Even before refrigerants became an environmental concern, the refrigeration industry faced a problem finding a reliable power source for the gigantic multiton industrial refrigerating machines that first made mechanical refrigeration possible. At first, these machines got their power from huge steam engines. Indeed, the greatest single expense for the ice manufacturers who stocked people’s iceboxes was energy (as machines that generally ran themselves had very low labor costs). It is no coincidence that the first mechanical household refrigerators and near-universal home electricity Are the Benefits Worth the Costs?

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came about around the same time. Early electrical plants produced a tremendous amount of excess capacity. Since refrigerators ran around the clock, they became a gold mine for electrical utilities (which explains why so many of those utilities sold refrigerators at a discount during the 1920s). As the electrical grid expanded, people worried less about how much power their refrigerators used, particularly as they started running more electric appliances in their households. Today, lots of available energy—mostly from coal—means cheap electricity, which in turn means lower costs for operating a larger refrigerator. People in countries with less space and fewer natural resources need to be more thoughtful about how they shop and how much that they can refrigerate, because of both space and costs; people in countries that don’t have a reliable electrical grid worry about whether buying a refrigerator is a worthwhile investment. After all, if your food spoils when the power goes out, and the power goes out a lot, why do you need a refrigerator in the first place? America’s attitude toward the power needed to run refrigerators first began to change with the energy crisis of the 1970s. Worried about the cost of energy in general, California became the first state to impose energy efficiency standards on refrigerators sold within its borders, in 1978. As a result, manufacturers redesigned all their models in order to meet those standards for every refrigerator sold in the United States. Despite these standards, the volume of the average refrigerator in America increased from fifteen to twenty-two cubic feet during the years immediately 50

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after they took effect.2 That means that engineers basically designed refrigerators that were more energy efficient than they had to be so that consumers could get more space. Countries around the world have imposed mandatory or voluntary energy standards on refrigerators since then, but the greatest improvements in refrigerator efficiency have come more recently, even as the lessons of the energy crisis have been largely forgotten. Hoping to benefit from those lessons again, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began its Energy Star program in 1992. It is a voluntary program that helps consumers to identify appliances that are most energy efficient, so that they can both help the environment and save money. The EPA estimates that there are 170 million refrigerators and refrigerator-freezers in use in the United States; of that number, over 60 million are over ten years old. The relative inefficiency of these older models costs consumers approximately $4.4 billion in energy costs each year. Consumers who replace those old models with new Energy Star refrigerators can save between $150 and $1,100 on energy costs over the lifetime of the appliance. They can also help the environment at the same time. If every refrigerator sold in the United States met the EPA’s Energy Star criteria, consumers would save $1.4 billion in energy costs and 19 billion pounds of greenhouse gas emissions would not occur. That would be like taking 1.8 million automobiles off the road.3 Besides these voluntary standards designed to create consumer awareness, there have also been Are the Benefits Worth the Costs?

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greater energy-efficiency mandatory regulations imposed upon U.S. refrigerator manufacturers. First introduced in 1990, these restrictions ended with refrigerators shipped in 2014. The energy savings associated with these efforts will prevent 295 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from escaping into the atmosphere, which will be like taking 57.8 million automobiles off the road.4 You can see the effects of the Energy Star program and increasingly stricter regulations by looking at the performance of refrigerators over time compared to that of other appliances. As late as 1998, household refrigerators used more energy than any other home appliance— approximately twenty percent of an average household’s consumption.5 That has changed in recent years, thanks to these programs. A refrigerator bought during the early 1990s uses two-to-three times as much energy as the models on a showroom floor today.6 These new models use 75 percent less energy than they did at the turn of the twenty-first century. As a result, cable TV-set boxes now consume more power than refrigerators do. Indeed, those boxes consume more energy than everything else in the house except air conditioning.7 Such comparisons are not intended to serve as an excuse for using any appliance that hogs energy. Rather, they simply make it possible for people to put the power consumption of a typical Energy Star refrigerator in proper perspective. While it would be great to make refrigerators even more efficient in the future, focusing your environmental outrage on this appliance alone is counterproductive. 52

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Even locavores should love refrigerators Despite such tremendous environmental improvements (especially compared to the lack of improvement in other household mainstays), refrigeration remains a target for locavores. Locavores (sometimes spelled “locovores”) are people who advocate eating most or all food from local sources because of the positive effects that this would have on the environment. The various ways that refrigeration and refrigerators throughout the world adversely affect the environment has become one of many arguments that locavores use to make their case. Certainly local food often tastes better because it’s fresher. However, attacking refrigerators and refrigeration for their effect upon the environment requires an extremely narrow perspective. The typical refrigerator consumes 9,000 calories per week and twice that if it’s not a newer, energy-efficient model. While that may sound like a lot of energy, a ten-mile round trip to the farmer’s market will consume 14,000 calories if you drive.8 Perhaps more importantly, all the food that refrigerators prevent from spoiling does not have to be grown again, and growing food often has a greater impact on the environment than transporting it, especially if that food is resource-intensive like meat. A cold chain is a special kind of food chain designed to handle perishable foods. All along the cold chain, from Are the Benefits Worth the Costs?

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production to home consumption, refrigeration is just one of many aspects of food chains that expend energy or release greenhouse gases which can adversely affect the environment. Consider bananas: Despite being the furthest possible thing from “local food” in much of the world, bananas are still rather environmentally friendly overall. Grown in natural sunlight, they do not require energy-wasting hothouses to produce. Bananas keep well when transported thousands of miles by boat, a form of transportation that is cheaper and much more energy efficient than airplanes. This fruit even provides its own packaging, thereby cutting down on the overall amount of garbage produced by the people who eat them. Furthermore, they are usually displayed and stored with no refrigeration at all.9 Bananas aren’t considered a local food—unless you live in a tropical zone—but a sustainable lifestyle could still conceivably include bananas. The same is true for household refrigerators. Trying to determine what constitutes a sustainable lifestyle is always an extremely confusing proposition. “The calculations required to assess the full environmental impact of how we live can be dazzlingly complex,” noted a 2008 New Yorker article on the British retailer Tesco’s efforts to do precisely this. “To sum them up on a label will not be easy. Should the carbon label on a jar of peanut butter include the emissions caused by the fertilizer, calcium, and potassium applied to the original crop of peanuts? What about the energy used to boil the peanuts once they have been harvested, or to mold the jar and print the labels? Seen this way, carbon costs 54

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multiply rapidly.”10 The broader your focus when assessing that impact, the more confusing the process becomes. Some environmentalists target refrigerators just because their impact is simple to understand and easily measurable. Today, 99.5 percent of Americans own or have access to a refrigerator.11 While some people might consider this statistic proof that even the poorest people in the United States live well, it is undoubtedly a testament to the many benefits of controlling cold. Refrigerators make it possible for us to have a wide range of perishable foods any time of year. They also allow us to limit the amount of time we spend shopping for and preparing what we eat by making it possible to stock up on convenience foods. Through such benefits, refrigerators save consumers both money and time. The half percent of Americans who own no refrigerator demonstrate that having this appliance is not a necessity, but these people who go against the grain face extraordinary inconveniences as a result. For example, without a refrigerator, it becomes almost impossible to save leftovers. If you live near where you shop for groceries, you can go shopping every day. In this situation, not owning a refrigerator will have little impact on your life beyond needing to be careful not to cook more than you and your family can eat at one sitting. This remains a popular strategy in many European countries whose citizens are rich enough to own refrigerators and whose markets are often in walking distance from their homes, because they are unwilling to sacrifice the superior flavor that the freshest foods possess. Are the Benefits Worth the Costs?

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Not interested in shopping every day? The fridge-ophobic can tailor eating habits to exclude highly perishable foods in order to avoid refrigeration, perhaps by only eating foods that have preserved in other ways. Salting, drying, pickling, controlled fermentation—these are just a few food preservation techniques that predate the invention of mechanical refrigeration by many centuries. These practices remain in wide use throughout the world because they produce some really unique and tasty foods such as beef jerky and cheese. However, dried fruit, to offer one example, doesn’t have quite as many vitamins and nutrients as the fresher alternative.12 Refrigeration, on the other hand, is the only preservation technique available to mankind that does not affect the taste or the nutritional value of the food being preserved, at least when used properly. In most cases (things that congeal being the obvious exception), refrigerated foods also maintain their original appearance when refrigerated. Without refrigerators, it would be difficult to think of anything but the freshest food as being “natural,” as it would probably taste and/or look much different once it arrived at the table.

Life without a refrigerator Life before refrigeration came along was full of hardships. Twenty-five percent of grains, fruits and vegetables in seventeenth-century Europe would rot in the fields before 56

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they could be harvested.13 Refrigeration failures led to “summer complaint,” diarrhea caused by intestinal bacteria; an 1838 report from Philadelphia claimed this was the second leading cause of the death in that city.14 Eggs and milk spoiled particularly quickly. Producers would lose a significant amount of perishable food whenever they tried to ship it beyond the immediate local market. As a result of the difficulty people had in obtaining fresh meat, fish, or fruits and vegetables, these foods made up a much lower percentage of people’s diets than they do today. Oranges, common now, were rare enough during the nineteenth century to be given as Christmas presents. As useful as they are, refrigerators do not have a monopoly on controlling the cold. It is possible to gain at least some of these benefits of refrigeration without owning a refrigerator because plenty of other devices that fall far short of the term “appliance” can help you preserve food. A simple insulated box can keep food up to twenty degrees colder than the surrounding air. A cooler full of ice can meet some refrigeration needs—especially if you’re on a picnic. Even a basement can serve as the modern equivalent of a root cellar. Place food in clay jars, bury it in the sand, and it will decay slower than it would otherwise. (This method of preservation is the origin of kimchi, the popular Korean condiment.) These innovations came of necessity before refrigerators came along. Today, however, it is best not to learn about alternatives to refrigeration out of necessity. Should your electricity go out, Are the Benefits Worth the Costs?

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taking your refrigerator with it, as happened to the people of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina struck, the results become very unpleasant very quickly. Katheryn Krotzer Laborde explains what happened in her book about all the refrigerators that the people of New Orleans discarded after that storm: Ask anyone who has ever experienced what it is to open the door of a refrigerator filled with spoiled food, and he will tell you: it’s not something you need to experience more than once in a lifetime. Some who realized how nauseating the stench and repulsive the view would be simply kept the door shut, choosing instead to bind the fridge tightly before moving the appliance, shove by shove, to the curb. Others were initiated through all their senses in a wave of instant revulsion.15 Such experiences suggest how much most people take refrigeration for granted. Only when it’s gone do you understand all the benefits you’ve lost. Yet some environmentally minded people still want you to live without a refrigerator. “Refrigerator lust is one of the things driving huge energy-use increases in the developing world,” wrote one blogger quoted in a 2009 New York Times article about living without a refrigerator. “A great deal of what’s in your fridge absolutely does NOT need to be there.”16 While technically true, it is difficult to imagine life without meat or ice cubes or cold milk—or cold anything for that 58

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matter. Imagine never being able to preserve perishable packaged food once it’s opened. Certainly many people around the world live without refrigeration today, but their diets are not nearly as varied and sophisticated as those with access to the end of a cold chain. More importantly, refrigeration all along the cold chain helps prevent food waste, a huge contributor to global warming all by itself. Instead of trying to live without a refrigerator—a lifestyle that precious few will ever embrace—concerned environmentalists might try to convince consumers to buy smaller refrigerators instead. Smaller refrigerators could still preserve the foods that require preservation, and not make a significant impact upon the western food-centric lifestyle that so many people crave. In fact, going to the market more often might actually improve the quality of what people eat. The key to understanding the entire impact of refrigeration on the environment is to put it in the full context of modern life. To throw the baby out with the bathwater could be tragic in this instance, since it could conceivably eliminate some of the most extraordinary advantages of this particular lifechanging technology. Plenty of places around the world cannot support their own large-scale local food production without mechanical refrigeration. It is unreasonable to expect the people of the American Southwest, for example, to move en masse to a more fertile area of the world. Similarly, compare the damage to the environment that refrigeration can bring to the nutritional advantages of having access to fresh fruits Are the Benefits Worth the Costs?

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and vegetables all year round. Thanks to refrigeration, every American can now afford to eat foods out of season— and foods of all kinds shipped in from far away. The omnipresence of refrigerators in the United States is an indicator of the value of refrigeration both for preserving the food we buy and for the convenience that comes when such huge machines are stocked. The fact that we put perishable food in the refrigerator (even sometimes when it doesn’t belong there) suggests that we still remember refrigeration’s fundamental purpose: to prevent food from spoiling before we can consume it. Refrigeration even benefits people who don’t own refrigerators because the ability to preserve food in transit is enough to open up new food possibilities, and the nutrients that go with them, to people who don’t have the money or whose societies don’t have the infrastructure to support electric household refrigerators. As was the case during the nineteenth century, non-local fruits and vegetables can be shipped to places where it is either too cold to produce them or the climate is never right to produce them at all. Lesserdeveloped countries can also benefit from exporting these same fruits and vegetables to places where refrigerators are common. Produce now accounts for as much as 20 percent of exports in such places, thereby generating wealth for agricultural workers who might otherwise be poorer.17 Even people with little hope of ever duplicating the American lifestyle can benefit greatly from gaining access to refrigeration. Three quarters of all the homes on the 60

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planet have a refrigerator. When a BBC reporter followed an Indian man who purchased the first fridge in his entire village, the man had a clear idea of how it would change the life of his family. “I can focus on finding more work and not worry about buying food for the family,” he said. “My wife will get more free time and perhaps she can give me a hand as well.”18 During the first half of the twentieth century, the spread of reliable refrigeration in the United States was one factor in the decrease in death rates from food-borne disease by a whopping 90 percent.19 Only a person who takes their refrigerator for granted could ever imagine denying these kinds of benefits to people still in such need. As useful as refrigerators can be to people who have never owned one, the kinds of refrigerators they buy are sometimes very different than the ones in nearly every kitchen in the United States. When the Indian company Godrej studied rural consumers in that country, the firm saw that they needed a place to store milk, leftovers, and to chill water. As a result, the Godrej chatukool refrigerator is small and light so that it can be moved around the house. It also runs on batteries since the power grid—when present in rural India—is not always reliable. In other words, it is still possible to provide refrigeration to consumers without building what most people think of as being a “traditional” refrigerator. But aren’t the stakes involved here more important than just some people’s convenience? Needing to go shopping only once a week may seem petty in the great scheme of things. After all, what’s another day at the market compared Are the Benefits Worth the Costs?

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to the fate of the earth? Luckily, the sustainability-versusconvenience dilemma is not an either/or proposition. New technologies are making household refrigerators (and refrigeration in general) more efficient all the time. Therefore, it is now possible to achieve sustainable growth in refrigeration that can offer the people of the world maximum benefits with limited impact on the environment. With other ways for modern humans to save energy, why mess with something that improves the quality of life for so many people so dramatically? Societies can maintain the maximum level of convenience for people while preserving as much food as possible. Thanks to improved technology, a wide variety of perishable food, readily available around the world, is possible without forcing consumers to give up too much for the sake of the environment. As household refrigerators become more energy efficient over time, any sacrifices that need to be made will decrease. Unfortunately, the trend toward keeping a second or even a third refrigerator in a household which is far less energy efficient than new ones has seriously mitigated the positive effects on the environment that new efficiency standards and regulation have brought. The solution to this problem is not just greater energy efficiency standards, but incentives to get people to recycle their old refrigerators and discourage still bigger refrigerators in the future. As environmental awareness spreads further throughout the world, decreasing the carbon footprint of refrigeration will become a more desirable public good in its own right. If people understand 62

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the importance of refrigeration to their daily lives they will also work toward mitigating its impact so that they can continue to experience those benefits. Exactly what those benefits are is hard to recognize when consumers take their refrigerators for granted. The same is true for many of the profound social, economic, and cultural effects of this incredible technology.

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4  Waste and Wants

For all the benefits of keeping perishable food fresh, freshness itself is a fleeting concept. Even the best refrigerators will not keep food fresh indefinitely. In fact, refrigerators do not always perform the one basic purpose for which they are designed particularly well at all. Some foods will last for months in the fridge. Sometimes foods will last just a matter of hours before spoiling. Even when perishable food doesn’t spoil inside a refrigerator, refrigeration hides the manner in which its flavor degrades before it ever reaches spoilage. We continually eat refrigerated foods beyond their peak moments of freshness, but before they’re obviously spoiled, and never know what flavors we’ve missed. At the root of the problem is the fact that undifferentiated artificial cold is not the best environment to store a wide range of perishable foods in. Ordinary household refrigerators can only maintain a single temperature. Unfortunately, different perishable foods are best kept at different temperatures. Forty degrees Fahrenheit or below will keep milk tasting fresh for weeks, for example, but unripe avocados do best between forty-five and fifty degrees. That’s warmer than your

Figure 8  During the 1950s, kitchen appliances such as refrigerators freed up women’s time to do other things. The same is true today for women all over the world, especially those gaining access to refrigeration for the first time. Used with permission from ASHRAE. 66

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refrigerator, but still cooler than the inside of most people’s houses. Tomatoes, on the other hand, do best with no refrigeration at all. Ideal conditions for one perishable good are often less than ideal for another inside your fridge. It’s as if consumers can’t win. To add insult to injury, the temperature inside any refrigerator will always vary. Since heat rises, the coldest portions of the fridge will always be on the bottom. The warmest place of all is the shelves in the door since the food there is exposed to most of the warmer outside air whenever you open it. Put the wrong food in the wrong place and it will inevitably spoil quicker than it should. It’s also important to leave space between the foods inside your refrigerator so that the cold air can circulate better. Another problem inside a refrigerator is the possibility of cross contamination by smell. Cheeses, for example, when stored near each other can affect each other’s tastes. Butter has a tendency to pick up smells from products kept around it, which explains why so many modern refrigerators have separate butter trays. Some of the newest expensive refrigerators have air purification systems that can capture ethylene gas given off by some produce. This prevents other fruits and vegetables from premature ripening and spoilage. Like ethylene gas, few consumers ever consider the problem of humidity inside their refrigerator. The crisp, dry cold that mechanical household refrigeration could create served as one of its most important advantages over iceboxes Waste and Wants

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filled with regularly delivered ice, but even that cold was far from perfect at keeping the different kinds of perishable food fresh at the same time. Fruits, for example, do better with no humidity at all. Humidity is generally outside of your control. Vegetable crispers are designed to combat this problem and high-end refrigerators may have humidity controls, but just opening the door too often will affect the humidity inside, controls or not. New higher-end models have more than one evaporator so that consumers can set different humidity levels for different parts of the refrigerator that need them. Plenty of things in your refrigerator probably do not have to be there, but we gain a benefit from keeping them there anyway. Natural peanut butter needs to be refrigerated so that the oil and the butter won’t separate, but processed peanut butter requires no refrigeration at all. Regular dairy butter can stay fresh for a week or more without refrigeration, but keeping it in the refrigerator will help it last longer since keeping anything perishable in the refrigerator slows down the speed at which it decays. For this reason, refrigerators and refrigeration cannot prevent food waste, but they can help limit it. Refrigerators have helped make it possible to eat foods of all kinds out of season. They have also made women’s lives easier. These effects stem from the refrigerator performing its basic function of keeping food fresh. If this appliance could not perform that function at least marginally well, modern meals would not only taste totally different—we’d all have to spend 68

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a lot more time scrounging for food, and we would feel absolutely terrible if we wasted any of it at all.

More food, more waste In 1917, the U.S. government estimated that Americans wasted 36.25 percent of their food before it could be consumed.1 That figure had dropped to 27 percent by 2008. But since the amount of food produced in this country has shot up, thanks to improved production techniques, the total amount of food wasted is much larger now, even though widespread access to household refrigerators should have, at least in theory, cut the amount of food waste down.2 Much of that waste now occurs at the household level not just in spite of refrigeration, but also because of it. Refrigerators can make food waste more likely because so many of us tend to take their success at preserving food for granted. We buy more than we could ever eat because it all fits in our huge refrigerators. Then, as one English scholar explains, “the food can always keep longer, goes the thinking, except that suddenly one finds it has gone off.”3 An American expert on food waste says that our home refrigerators “serve as cleaner, colder trash bins.”4 Yet we still eat out of them. The way that our refrigerators have changed what we deem edible only compounds this problem. Have you ever sniffed something you left in the refrigerator too long and thrown it out anyway, even though it smelled fine? Expiration Waste and Wants

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or sell-by labels indicate when a food’s quality will begin to decline, not when it becomes unsafe. Indeed, there is a whole subculture of dumpster divers who survive on nothing but food that grocery-store chains regularly throw out because it does not meet the standards for freshness and the appearance of freshness that they believe their customers insist upon. Cheap foods brought to consumers by elaborate cold chains are what make that behavior seem economically rational. It isn’t. That behavior needs to change, even if the food system that enables it doesn’t. But to blame the entire food waste problem on people’s refrigerators is obviously unfair. While throwing out edible perishable food is obviously a concern, between a third and a half of all wasted food is disposed of before it gets to the consumer.5 Better infrastructure, not better consumer education, is the way to solve that problem, and this will require more refrigeration, not less. Indeed, the most efficient way to feed people who don’t have enough to eat would be to give them higher wages rather than sending them other people’s bruised fruits. Despite the fact that the problems in our food system go well beyond refrigerator-induced food waste, the benefits of at least limiting this practice should be obvious. Since the food that refrigeration preserves for consumption without spoiling makes it unnecessary to grow food to replace it, refrigeration and refrigerators have limited the need to produce more food overall. That leaves more food for everyone around the world to eat and saves the need to burn 70

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more fossil fuels to produce and transport the replacements. Furthermore, food waste itself emits methane—a particularly potent greenhouse gas—as it rots, so refrigerators can help in that way too. Despite encouraging enough wasted food to feed the population of some underdeveloped countries, refrigeration makes it possible to produce and preserve enough food to meet most Americans’ needs. Without refrigerators, the mass production of perishable foods of any kind wouldn’t work because consumers wouldn’t have enough space to store all that cheap food. People once assumed that highly perishable foods like milk had to be produced locally, otherwise they would spoil before we could consume them. Refrigeration changed this assumption because most of the food created by more efficient production methods can stay fresh for as long as it takes to find a market, since it can be safely transported anywhere in the world. Refrigerators serve as the end point for such cold chains, which are more than efficient enough to conquer both space and time: specifically, seasons.

Recreating the winter Eggs were once a springtime crop. Hens generally lay them then, but their taste suffers over time without proper means to store them. The same was true to some extent for less perishable crops like apples. If something grows near you Waste and Wants

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during part of the year, it can be placed in cold storage and taken out in mid-winter. If it grows in more temperate climates, it can be shipped in from afar and displayed on grocery-store shelves at any time of year. Ship fruits, vegetables, or any other food for that matter by airplane, as happens often these days, and the effect of time on taste might not be noticeable at all. Our refrigerators are simply the last place where all such well-traveled foods come to rest before we put them in our mouths. These practices desensitize our taste buds. They undermine the intimate relationship that people have with what they eat. Neither fruits nor eggs reveal their origin in time or place by their appearance. You’ll never know how far an apple is from fresh until you bite into it. In this manner, refrigeration broke a bond between producers and consumers. The farmers who grew or raised perishable food had to hand it over to middlemen, who may or may not have been trustworthy enough to protect its freshness on the way to market. Similarly, the people who ate that food lost some confidence that the food they purchased that looked fresh, actually would be.6 Once consumers got used to tasting perishable foods that had been refrigerated on their way to their local markets, it became easier for them to leave that food in their refrigerators a little longer. This is how so many Americans began to prioritize convenience over taste. Today when you buy perishable food produced far away or out of season, the food will never taste the same as it did when it was first 72

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picked or packed, because all perishable foods break down over time. While an old melon might taste fine, it won’t taste quite as fine as it would have if you ate it at the farm. Keep it in your refrigerator longer and it will degrade even further. However, keeping a food at its optimum temperature for freshness will maintain something like its fresh-picked or freshly produced taste until nature takes over. Forgetting the unique taste of fresh perishable foods only feels like a sacrifice if you have access to the kind of foods that our ancestors once ate. Most people don’t bother or can’t afford to eat locally, so they never know what they’re missing. Too many people around the world feel lucky to get access to any perishable foods at all. The key to understanding what refrigeration does is to look at preserving perishable food not as an either/or situation, but on a sliding scale. All perishable foods ripen until they reach an optimal point, and then slowly begin to decay. This optimal point is culturally determined. As a result of decades of exposure to advertisements touting the benefits of refrigeration for killing germs, most Americans dislike decay, except perhaps in those instances in which the fact that a food is decayed has been forgotten because that decay is controlled, like beer or salami. On the other hand, people in cultures other than the United States sometimes embrace decay: Hákarl, a popular dish in Iceland, is shark meat hung out to rot for four or five months. Other foods—like cheese, for example—need some controlled fermentation but benefit from refrigeration since Waste and Wants

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that technology helps it from becoming too fermented. Different kinds of beer become possible when they are brewed at different temperatures. Human beings made use of the cold in preparing and preserving foods before the invention of mechanical refrigeration, but the refrigerator has made it possible to preserve more of these foods than our ancestors would have thought possible. Once a novelty, refrigeration is now the standard way to preserve perishable food in situations where it is not strictly necessary. Consider all the places in the world where the weather outside often gets colder than the inside of a refrigerator. (Since the ideal temperature for a refrigerator is above freezing but below forty degrees Fahrenheit, this constitutes a large portion of the planet.) Why not just unplug the fridge and keep the food outside? Inspired by the success of solar energy, the food scientist Robert Zall has proposed harnessing winter coldness in order to provide refrigeration.7 This solution isn’t all that different from what so many people once did by keeping a root cellar to preserve winter vegetables when they could no longer depend upon picking anything out of the frozen ground. The obvious reason why people prefer the inside of a refrigerator to outside the house is control. The temperature inside a modern refrigerator does not fluctuate. Summer or winter, hot or cold—you know that your food is being preserved. If there is a particular cold snap it won’t freeze. If it gets particularly warm one day, you don’t have to pick up 74

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all your food and bring it back inside. The historian William Cronon has described the mid-nineteenth-century practice of packing ice into railway cars to preserve meat traveling from Chicago to the east coast as “storing the winter.”8 That’s what made it possible, for the first time, to ship alreadyslaughtered meat at any time of year. Household refrigerators don’t so much “store the winter” as recreate it for you every day of the year. “Winter weather is never a safe substitute for refrigeration,” explained one early refrigerator advertisement. “Outdoor temperatures change from day to day. . . . With Frigidaire Refrigeration in your home you will be protected against every change in the weather.”9 This does not mean that refrigeration has allowed man to somehow conquer nature. Refrigeration, and especially refrigerators, has simply bought consumers more time to enjoy perishable foods. In doing so, refrigerators have become a potent symbol of the American consumer’s changing relationship with the natural world. Before refrigeration, most Americans still worked on farms. They knew where their food originated and how to make it. By the mid-twentieth century, household refrigerators offered a way to travel back to the land without leaving your suburban home. Filled with images of farms and meadows, refrigerators offered all the benefits of “natural” food with none of the hard agricultural labor required to produce the food that you intended to consume. A wellstocked fridge demonstrated that you did not have to do the same kind of work that your ancestors did. Waste and Wants

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“Her Kitchen . . . and Your Good Judgment” The primary beneficiary of refrigerators and the cold chains that culminated with them have always been women. Before household refrigerators, simply preserving the food that families had took a huge chunk of an American housewife’s time. Both genders enjoyed the benefits of refrigerated food, but only women saved time and labor thanks to these appliances. In the same way that refrigeration has freed women to do other things besides pickle and can, in many cultures at many times it has helped limit them to a life centered around the kitchen and the house. Women could control the foods the family purchases, for example, but they have traditionally had trouble trying to control the family purse strings. In the early days of household refrigerators, these appliances were seen as an exclusively female domain. Men may have paid for them, but manufacturers designed and marketed refrigerators almost solely to appeal to the women who would serve as their primary users. After all, when women were practically the only family members who prepared meals, they were the ones who cared the most about how their refrigerators looked and what features the refrigerators had. Yet targeting women consumers was harder than it looked. Refrigerator manufacturers often had a difficult time determining exactly what their mostly female 76

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consumers wanted in their appliances. That’s why they hired female home economics experts during the mid-twentieth century to serve as cultural brokers between male executives and female consumers. The course of this conversation has helped shape the way that refrigerators look to this day. The refrigerator company Servel’s 1942 decision over whether to include a butter tray in the doors of their refrigerators that year represents the tensions expressed during such conversations. The company’s designer, a woman named Lurelle Guild, thought the butter compartment in the door was a brilliant idea because housewives wanted their butter soft and the door was always warmer than the rest of the refrigerator. But the company’s Director of Home Economics argued that butter remained a luxury item for most families, so housewives would view the butter tray “with disfavor.” Servel went without the butter tray that year.10 Of course, with butter now a staple, butter trays are in nearly the same place in every household refrigerator for the exact reason that Guild specified. Today, men who don’t cook still use refrigerators for non-cooking related reasons. Therefore, refrigerators are no longer the gendered objects that they once were. However, the history of the electric household refrigerator reveals a great deal about the history of gender in twentieth-century America. Refrigerator manufacturers used the promise of refrigeration to manipulate women’s hopes and dreams in order to sell them (and their husbands) their appliances, and mostly succeeded in that goal. You can see these cultural Waste and Wants

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struggles in the texts of American refrigerator advertisements, particularly ads from the mid-twentieth century. Refrigerator manufacturers often used status anxiety as a tool to convince women that they needed this new appliance. Servel, for example, called their models “the stamp of up-todateness in the modern kitchen.”11 The Leonard Refrigerator Company, which actually sold iceboxes (that often had refrigerator machinery installed in them), suggested that “the modern kitchen is no place for antiques.” In his book Advertising and the American Dream, the historian Roland Marchand noted that many refrigerator advertisements from the early days had groups of people huddled around an open refrigerator, staring at it in awe as if they were the Three Wise Men viewing the Baby Jesus for the first time. “Without directly competing with religion,” he writes, “advertising had appropriated the imagery of the sublime.”12 This awe came not so much from the magnificence of the refrigerator, but from the fact that during this era it was still possible for you to own such an appliance and for your guests to be without one. Marchand also observed that no husband ever appeared in a refrigerator ad without the presence of his wife, and his job was invariably to marvel at the technological wizardry involved in making household refrigeration possible. Another important theme in early refrigeration advertising was food safety. Since household refrigeration kept food colder than ice could, buying a refrigerator was a way to keep your children safe from food-borne 78

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illness—perhaps the only kind of family safety responsibility that fell entirely within a woman’s domain. “It watches over the welfare of baby,” explained an ad for refrigerators from an industry trade group in the early 1930s. “It guards the health of growing youngsters—keeping their milk and food fresh and safe.” Of course, grown-ups need safe food too, but that appeal lacked the ability to play upon a mother’s obligation to protect the health of her children. “You, as a conscientious mother,” began an advertisement for the Monitor Top from the early 1930s, “buy the best food for your children, prepare it with scrupulous care and cook it correctly. Yet, in spite of all, you may be giving your children food which is not wholesome—possibly dangerous!” Only “correct refrigeration” from GE could eliminate that problem. Even firms that made iceboxes needed to convey the image of healthiness to contrast their product with ice, which could never do as good a job as mechanical refrigeration at keeping perishable food fresh. As refrigerators became more commonplace, manufacturers began to appeal to women’s desires rather than their obligations. What kinds of longings could a refrigerator satisfy? “Save time, energy and money,” an ad for the Monitor Top implored a woman with a maid. “Don’t market every day.” Another thing that refrigerators could save women was worry: “I’m sorry. I was thinking of something at home,” says a card-playing woman with a distracted look on her face in a Kelvinator advertisement from the mid-1930s. Kelvinator’s solution to this problem was its fully automatic Waste and Wants

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operation—buy their fridge and it will eliminate tasks for women to do, rather than create more. Less work for mother, which reflects how much work she had at that time. The men’s roles in the refrigerator market reflected their roles in housework in general. They bought the appliances that saved their wives time. “Let Frigidaire Glorify Her Christmas . . . Her Kitchen . . . and Your Good Judgment,” read a Frigidaire ad from the 1930s with a rather belligerentlooking Santa in the face of one husband. The good judgment referred to the savings men could enjoy since these refrigerators used so little electricity. Under this assessment, any control that husbands ceded to their wives was supposed to be worth it. Women’s control over all things refrigeratorrelated, at least as depicted in refrigerator advertisements, only increased over time. By the 1950s, the dad in the family from one Kelvinator ad appeared in a small box near the bottom, grabbing a beer: “Extra roomy bottle space,” that box read, as if that would be the only thing men cared about. Whether or not that was true, refrigerator advertisements certainly conveyed that men’s interest in refrigerators was extremely limited at best. By telling families that refrigerators were places that women should control, appliance manufacturers could make the limited role of housewives in the household seem like a form of feminism. This was particularly true for one manufacturer, International Harvester, which used the brand recognition for its tractors to sell refrigerators to rural women in the years after the New Deal brought electricity 80

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Figure 9  Household refrigerators were appliances that men bought and women used during the 1930s and beyond. While seemingly liberating, this kind of division of responsibility highly restricted women’s roles in the household. Used with permission from ASHRAE. Waste and Wants

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to parts of the country that didn’t have it yet. International Harvester gave their all-woman refrigerator sales force cars and sent them throughout the Midwest. They even created a character, Irma Harding, who like Betty Crocker or Aunt Jemima didn’t really exist, but whom women customers came to trust.13 During the 1950s International Harvester boasted that its refrigerators had been “femineered.” Their ad told women, “You not only dreamed them—you actually created them! Because your needs inspired these new, improved, featurefull International Harvester Refrigerators. Because of you, experienced IH home economists planned with a purpose— to give you the space, storage and service you’ve dreamed of!” Refrigerators had indeed changed in many ways since they first debuted during the 1920s. Yet in one fundamental way they remained the same as they had always been: containers designed to keep perishable food fresh. This is what women wanted most, but since every effective refrigerator performed this function it could not be used to distinguish one refrigerator from another. Manufacturers had an even bigger problem distinguishing their freezers from one another since all that really mattered about them was that they could keep food even colder. Early refrigerators had no freezer compartments. (It was simply cold enough to freeze water near the machinery inside the container.) However, the ability to make your own ice cubes carried a great deal of appeal to early buyers, as it made the iceman unnecessary 82

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Figure 10  Women were the primary market for household refrigerators through most of the Twentieth Century. This explains why manufacturers like International Harvester wanted them to believe that the design of its refrigerators reflected their needs. Used with permission from ASHRAE. Waste and Wants

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for both refrigeration and the ice that he provided. As refrigerators grew in size, freezers grew with them, and a whole new infrastructure for frozen foods appeared to service those spaces. Similarly, the entire ice industry changed once ice cubes made at home became a reality. The next chapter considers both these developments.

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5  Freezing and Freezers

Ben Bradlee Jr.’s biography of the Boston Red Sox Baseball Hall-of-Famer Ted Williams begins with a horrifying scene that occurred shortly after the slugger’s death in 2002. Temporarily preserved by ice, Williams’ body traveled from where he died in Florida to a facility in Arizona where parts of it were frozen. Bradlee describes exactly what happened to the body in the process of preparing it for long-term preservation. While all of the exact details need not concern us here, by far the most surprising fact Bradlee reports is that the body was beheaded. How could anybody ever hope to come back to life if one’s body is decapitated? The idea behind this procedure is not to preserve the body intact for later re-animation, but to keep enough of it intact long enough so that science can learn how to regenerate tissue. “Alcor,” Bradlee explains, the company that runs the place where this procedure was performed was then, and remains today, the leading practitioner of cryonics, a fringe movement that freezes people after

they die in the hopes that medical technology will be possible to stop or reverse the aging process and cure now-incurable diseases. At that point cryonics—not to be confused with cryogenics, the mainstream science that studies how various materials react to extremely low temperatures—aspires to thaw out its frozen charges. 1 That’s why people planning to go through this procedure are so concerned about their heads. Regenerating tissue presumably couldn’t reintroduce old memories. Talk about the science behind freezing people and things, in order to thaw them out later, has been part of American culture for decades. For example, the memorable Batman villain Mr. Freeze first appeared in a comic book in 1959. The author of that book, Bob Kane, made the character an accomplished cryogenic scientist whose need to wear a special cold suit came about from a terrible accident which occurred during an experiment which was supposed to save his dying wife. Mr. Freeze’s weapon of choice, a freeze gun, suggests the inner fear that most people have of being frozen: of being rendered immobile, or even of being put in suspended animation. All of this, however, is based on a terrible misreading of the science of freezing. Since the 1970s, scientists have been trying to determine the effects of freezing things at very low temperatures. In 1985, for example, the physicist (and future Obama Administration Energy Secretary) Stephen Chu used lasers to slow atoms down to 240 millionths of a degree above 86

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Figure 11  Before the late 1950s, refrigerators had to be ­manually defrosted otherwise they would work badly. Even the temperature of the freezer had to be set manually, otherwise housewives could face problems. Used with permission from ASHRAE.

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absolute zero, thereby making them easier to study. Working at such low temperatures allows scientists to eliminate outside influences on matter, like radiation or vibration. The average temperature of a home freezer, on the other hand, is much, much higher—between −9 and 0 degrees Fahrenheit. Ordinary freezing does not place organic material in a state of suspended animation. It simply slows the process of decay down, the same way that refrigeration slows the process of decay, only more so. The colder the temperature in the freezer gets, the slower that decay becomes, but it occurs nonetheless. It is no coincidence that the only organisms successfully reanimated from a long-term frozen state have been bacteria, the simplest forms of life, as they have few functions that require them to consume anything to live. While nineteenth-century scientists correctly assumed that freezing could purify ice blocks infected with typhoid, those bacteria did not freeze to death, they starved. Freezing is much more useful for preserving foodstuffs than dead bodies because people feel no need to store food all that far into the future. An uncooked steak, for example, will last about six to twelve months in a freezer. Ice cream, a food that could not exist in its modern sense without freezing, will only last two months. Kept too long inside a freezer, however, food will still decay. Freezing simply lengthens its natural life, although that process will likely affect its taste before it spoils. (Food spoiling inside a freezer is not the same as freezer burn, a condition brought on by dehydration and oxidation when air reaches frozen food.) 88

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Freezing affects different food products differently. Freezing meat, for example, can change its physical structure, making it less moist and rupturing small blood vessels in the muscle fiber. If the tortillas you just bought were frozen anywhere on their journey from the point of production to your grocery store display case, they may stick together even if they’ve been defrosted by the time you buy them. Unlike refrigerators, which are so useful because refrigeration doesn’t affect the taste of most foods, freezing can, which is why freezers ought to be fully understood and used wisely.

Top or bottom? Freezing as a way to preserve food dates from prehistory in areas of the world that had ready access to natural ice, particularly ice from glaciers. However, it became a particularly important means of food preservation only in the mid-twentieth century because few people had access to home freezing units before then. That changed with the spread and increased sophistication of the electric household refrigerator—which increasingly included more freezer space as the overall appliance grew larger. An entirely new infrastructure for freezing, transporting, and storing food had to develop for the freezer to have anything for consumers to keep in it. The technology behind the electric household refrigerator and the technology of the modern freezer are exactly the Freezing and Freezers

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same, but one creates an environment that remains over thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit; in the other, the temperature remains below. In the earliest refrigerators, the area closest to the evaporator coils was cold enough to freeze water. Therefore, that’s where the (then very small) ice cube trays went. In today’s refrigerators, there are usually two separate refrigeration systems, one for the refrigerator and one for the freezer, each set for a different range of possible temperatures. Refrigerators themselves had to be perfected before manufacturers could work on popularizing freezers. The key to that development occurred in 1939, when the first “two temperature” refrigerators appeared. That meant that there was a separate freezer compartment, with evaporator coils inserted directly into the walls of that compartment so that it was easier to make that area colder. This not only provided more space for frozen foods of any kind, it meant that anything kept there (especially ice cubes) would not change taste as a result of exposure to the smellier foods left in the warmer chamber of the appliance. The freezers on these early models were invariably located at the top of the refrigerator. Since heat rises, that was the place that had to be kept coldest. The same thing was true for ice and iceboxes. Therefore, in the very early electric household refrigerators made by inserting equipment into iceboxes, the machinery (and therefore the freezer) tended to replace the part where the ice once went. That tendency has carried over long after the icebox has been mostly forgotten. 90

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Bottom freezers became possible when the appliances started being made with two separate systems for generating cold. The name for a refrigerator with the freezer on the top is a “top mount.” A refrigerator with a freezer on the bottom is a “bottom mount.” Starting during the 1980s, it became possible to resolve the “top or bottom?” tension by buying a side-by-sides refrigerator that divides the refrigerator and the freezer vertically down the middle of the appliance. This makes it easier to access either compartment. It also means that your freezer is about as big as your refrigerator, which is only convenient if that reflects your lifestyle already. These appliances, in turn, have been replaced by French-door models that have two doors to the fridge and a freezer on the bottom. Of course, each new style change has made the refrigerator more expensive and doesn’t keep your food any fresher, but it does explain how refrigerator makers can convince consumers to spend more money than absolutely necessary on their products. Since the first refrigerators had very little freezer space, people with substantial freezing needs had to go outside the household to keep their perishable foods. Starting in the late 1930s, ice manufacturers, trying to compete with household refrigerators, had lots of extra space in their refrigerated warehouses. Locker plants—frozen food lockers in ice manufacturing facilities—were the result. These places were particularly popular with hunters who needed lots of freezer capacity to store what they killed, but really freezer lockers were just a transitional phase. Sub-Zero of Madison, Freezing and Freezers

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Wisconsin, built the first stand-alone freezer for home use in 1943. Similarly, as household refrigerators got bigger, so did freezers. Now the people who sold freezers—both as part of refrigerators and as separate units—needed to teach consumers what they could do with them. Most people who owned the first substantial-sized freezers used them for prolonging the life of perishable food that they themselves had prepared—like hunters, for instance. Trained by the people who sold them, many housewives froze enough of their own food that freezer makers were afraid that they would lose track of what they stored. “A method of record keeping is valuable to help you remember quantities and length of time foods have been in the freezer,” recommended GE in 1958.2 The company then went on to explain how to prepare and store most every kind of food under the assumptions that the housewives who bought these appliances didn’t know how to freeze food already and that they would be using them exclusively for this reason. Food frozen by others wouldn’t really become popular until the 1960s. Freezers today, like refrigerators in general, haven’t really changed that much since they first became popular appliances. They keep food frozen. The same larger sizes and frost-free models that became available to refrigerators also came to their freezing units, but they still do the same job of keeping food frozen. It’s very difficult for any freezer to keep food fresher longer since freezing has the same effect upon food no matter how it’s done, unless it’s done very quickly, 92

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and nobody has tried to market a flash freezer for home use. This technology, however, has been very important in making the frozen food industry possible.

Frozen foods Frozen foods, in the modern sense, began with Clarence Birdseye during the 1920s. Before Birdseye, frozen food was mushy and unappetizing. While working in Labrador on no one job in particular, Birdseye noticed that the Inuit people froze fish that tasted just as good as fresh-caught and he wondered how they did it. Conducting experiments, he realized that the quality of frozen food depended upon how quickly the food got frozen. When he returned to the United States he began experiments in fast freezing at a local ice cream company that had space to spare. While Birdseye invented many technologies related to freezing foods, the most important of these inventions was multiplate freezing. This technology could produce lots of frozen food fast, while keeping it away from direct contact with the sometimes-noxious refrigerants that might spoil it. Another advantage of multiplate freezing was that the final product proved easy to box and sell, which wasn’t true of earlier attempts to make freezing food profitable.3 As a result of Birdseye’s success, the company that would become General Foods bought the names, patents, patent applications, and assets of Birdseye’s self-founded company Freezing and Freezers

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in 1929 for $23.5 million dollars.4 Unfortunately for General Foods, there was no infrastructure or mass market for frozen foods when it bought out Birdseye. Therefore, they set out to build both. That process took three decades to complete. While there was already an elaborate cold chain in place by the 1930s to protect perishable food through refrigeration, frozen food required a whole new cold chain that could keep frozen food frozen. These elements included frozen storage places, rail cars—even new display cases at supermarkets. Perhaps most importantly, frozen food required that Americans buy bigger freezers since these were basically created for such food to be eaten at home. The big growth in refrigerator size after World War II meant that there was more room for bigger freezers, too. Also, many Americans started using the benefits of postwar prosperity to buy stand-alone freezers. As a result, the number of frozen food companies in America increased from one to more than one thousand between 1930 and 1950 alone.5 Yet few Americans actually bought frozen foods until the technology itself had been perfected. While many servicemen had encountered frozen food for the first time during World War II, many of them didn’t like it because that food hadn’t been preserved very well. Back home, there were many lessons that frozen food purveyors had to learn in order to make their product possible. For example, early frozen food cases for grocery stores often had open tops. Whoever bought the topmost box in the case would often find that it had partially defrosted before they could prepare 94

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what was inside, and as a result it didn’t taste particularly well. One refrigerator sold in 1959 had specially designed trays in the freezer door to fit frozen food boxes, a sure sign that frozen food had begun to be accepted for the first time. In this post war era, frozen food made up one part of a broader agenda of technological progress. Writing about Norway, the historian of technology Terje Finstad suggests that “for both the freezing industry and the public, there was a well-developed belief that . . . the future household would not have a kitchen. People would simply buy prepared frozen meals, and heat them in a small oven placed in a corner of their living room next to their home freezer, which was filled with frozen dishes.”6 Nothing symbolizes the American variation on that sentiment more than the TV dinner, a food technology that also dates from this period. So while refrigerators liberated women from “the shackles of ice,” freezers, in conjunction with frozen foods, saved women time. They even carried the potential for liberating women from cooking altogether. While frozen food obviously never eliminated cooking completely, Americans did take a number of interesting first steps. Frozen orange juice was the first product which demonstrated that frozen foods could be a viable industry. While it had been marketed unsuccessfully during the 1930s, an age of small freezers, it did much better during the postWorld War II years when freezer space in American kitchens abounded. Frozen orange juice was also heavily promoted, most famously by singer Bing Crosby, during these years. It Freezing and Freezers

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also helped when companies realized that if they removed most of the water before freezing, it improved the taste. That’s why today’s frozen orange juice is described as being “from concentrate.” Spinach also adapts particularly well to freezing; because spinach shrinks when you cook it, precooking it first proved particularly efficient. Also, spinach, unlike some other vegetables, holds most of its nutrients when frozen. As a result, spinach was often cited in articles making the case to consumers that they should consume more frozen foods. Despite these advantages, producers and politicians had to make the case for frozen foods well before they ever became commonplace. The most important reason that some people did—and still do—resist frozen food is the effect that freezing has upon taste. Fish, for example, were often ruined by failed attempts at freezing as a means of preservation. Freezing fish well required more experience with freezing than anyone had during the mid-twentieth century. More and larger ice crystals form when food is frozen slowly. Fewer, smaller crystals mean that more moisture is kept in the food when it thaws, which is particularly important to the taste of fish. This explains why fish were the first kind of food that Clarence Birdseye sought to preserve. Now there is flash-freezing equipment on fishing boats so that fish can be preserved effectively almost the moment the fish leaves the water. That fish is then kept frozen as it travels around the world. While fish is still generally displayed on ice because of the positive effect that ice has on its skin, much of that fresh 96

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fish has often been frozen at some point between the ocean and its point of sale. Consumers have fewer illusions about the origin of frozen vegetables. While there are plenty of vegetables that are now frozen right after picking—sometimes right in the field—anybody who has actually tasted fresh vegetables can recognize the taste difference immediately. While the term “fresh frozen” may have worked on an earlier generation that was still impressed by the ability to eat fruits and vegetables out of their regular season, the ability to get everything year round at your local Whole Foods Market serves as a constant reminder of the taste failings of frozen foods. Yet in terms of nutrients, frozen foods (like spinach) are indeed sometimes better than fresh food that has been kept too long, since the process of freezing locks most of the nutrients in until the package is thawed out again in your kitchen.

The humble ice cube With no frozen foods available in the early days of the household refrigerator, the major selling point of this new appliance became the humble ice cube. While this seems absurd to modern ears, you have to remember that before household refrigerators, people paid to have ice delivered to their kitchens every day. When it became possible to make your own ice by putting metal trays near the coldest part of the fridge, it seemed like a miracle. Early manuals for home Freezing and Freezers

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refrigerators recommended that housewives freeze flowers or sprigs of mint inside their ice cubes so that their guests would know that this ice came from inside their kitchens. They also generally noted that this ice, unlike the ice that the iceman delivered, would always be free from dirt or foreign matter, the kinds of things that sometimes appeared on blocks dragged through dirty streets. Americans have a reputation for being the most strident consumers of ice cubes in the world. Go anywhere in Europe and ice cubes will be few and far between. Ask for them explicitly and people will assume that you’re an American. Obviously, there are many cultural and geographic explanations for this well-known phenomenon. However, none of them would matter if Americans didn’t have access to an extraordinary amount of freezer capacity both when out in the world and at home. After all, nobody has to drink a Coke cold—one simply chooses to do so. Many of today’s Europeans think that adding ice to a drink does nothing but water it down. Americans, however, have been used to drinking their drinks with ice long before they had access to freezers at home. Ice cube trays are the simplest of technologies: just molds in which to pour water. Nevertheless, like so many things about refrigerators they too have changed over time. They started off being constructed from heavy nickel-plated copper. The grids that portioned the water into separate ice cubes were made from brass. In order to get the ice cubes out, consumers had to hold the trays under running water. The 98

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first flexible ice cube trays were invented by Lloyd Copeman during the late 1920s. He got the idea of making them from rubber by watching his rubber hunting boots flex. Another invention from this era was a large steel rod in the middle of a metal tray that would help remove the ice when you pull on it, once the freezing had been completed. Today, of course, ice cube trays are overwhelmingly made of plastic, which is more flexible than metal and far cheaper to produce. In a society that takes its access to ice cubes for granted, few people really think about ice cube trays. According to the website Gizmodo, the best ice cube tray of all time is the OXO Good Grips Ice Cube Tray. It has a sturdy plastic body that you can flex to remove cubes and a sliding cover that allows you to remove only two cubes at a time if you are so inclined. Their fifth-ranked ice cube tray has a cover with a spout coming out of it so that you won’t spill water on the way to the freezer.7 There are now novelty ice cube trays on the market that allow you to freeze cubes into the shape of the Death Star from Star Wars or into cubes covered with emblems from apps on your iPhone. While clever, these innovations do not make ice that’s any better than the ice that trays made in the 1920s. Since ice molds are a simple technology, there is very little that can be done to make ice cube trays better than they already are. This may explain why many refrigerators make them automatically—thereby sparing us even the slight inconvenience of having to fill the trays in the first place. In fact, high-end refrigerators now carry an option for a second Freezing and Freezers

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ice maker, the idea being that if you host a lot of parties you can turn both on and get a lot of ice made quickly. Most people, of course, simply go out and buy bag ice at the grocery store, which serves as the basis of the modern ice industry. Examining the difference between party ice and domestic ice making suggests a surprising amount about how people use ice cubes. Ice, once exclusively a product for regular home use, has become a product of convenience for people when their need for ice exceeds the capacity of the freezer to make as much as they require. Investments in technology to create small units that could produce “fragmentary ice” led to the creation of the packaged ice industry that Americans know today. In 1962, it was a ninety-million-dollar business.8 During the 1970s, it experienced double-digit growth.9 It is possible that more ice is manufactured in the United States outside the home today than in the late nineteenth century, when an entire industry existed to make all our ice for us (which was, of course, before we had freezers that allowed us to do it ourselves). Today, Reddy Ice (which traces its origins to the Southland Ice Company, the same firm that gave birth to the 7-Eleven convenience store chain) is the largest packaged ice firm in the United States and makes 1.8 million tons of ice each year.10 Newer ice machines produce not blocks, but individual cubes. They work by continuously dribbling water evenly onto large frozen plates until the ice coating reaches a predetermined length. Stainless steel knobs are then pressed 100 refrigerator

against the layer of ice on those plates, breaking it into cubesize pieces that are caught when they drop. Other machines produce ice cubes that are shaped like half moons, rings, or crescents. After all, nobody wants to pay extra for the same boring old ice cube that they can always make in their own freezers. The future for ice cubes differs for cubes made inside or outside the home. Assuming the water is safe, there should be literally no difference between the two for most people. That’s why people generally buy bag ice only as a matter of convenience and there is no brand loyalty when they do. A relatively new invention, the Ice Factory, is a machine that will manufacture and bag ice on site, on demand. As ice is very cheap and very heavy, the possibility of cutting both transportation and storage costs has allowed this smaller machine to shake up the industry. It has driven many older ice manufacturers into bankruptcy or to sell out to larger concerns. Reddy Ice now controls the technology for the Ice Factory, which was originally developed by one of its competitors. Small specialty ice machines that make unusually shaped cubes have made a comeback in recent years as more attention gets paid to the effect of ice upon the taste of particular cocktails. Similarly, purveyors of non-alcoholic drinks now pay attention to the effect of ice upon their bottom line. Shape an ice cube in a particular way that it will last a little longer and it will allow them to include more ice and less liquid. Over time, this adds up. Of course, nobody Freezing and Freezers 101

bothers with these kinds of calculations when they make ice at home, but this is what has happened since ice went back to being an industry—just as it was before the electric household refrigerator first appeared on the scene. The past and present of the refrigerators that make ice suggest a complicated device with a very simple purpose. Essentially, the technology to make cold hasn’t changed since the late nineteenth century and the technology of the refrigerator itself hasn’t had an important breakthrough since frost-free refrigerators became possible in the late 1950s. As long as refrigerators and the freezers that accompany them can make ice and keep perishable food fresh, nobody seems to care. Nonetheless, that hasn’t stopped refrigerator manufacturers from trying to improve their products, even today. When considering the future of the refrigerator, the question becomes whether the improvements that manufacturers want to make are important enough to become standard when most people simply care about how well these appliances can preserve food.

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Conclusion

From the 1920s through the end of the twentieth century, the future of the household refrigerator looked a lot like its past. While these appliances had become increasingly sophisticated since they debuted, few of the changes were particularly important. Refrigerators had become more energy efficient and more precise—in the sense that they could control the temperature and humidity of any cold space better than they had ever done before—but their basic function had not changed at all. However, two technological developments in the household refrigerator industry, one from around the year 2000 and another much more recently, raise the prospect of fundamental changes to refrigerators in the very near future. The first of these technological developments is the “smart” refrigerator, which is part of a larger trend known as the “Internet of Things.” Imagine a refrigerator hooked up to the Internet, that scans the food inside so that it knows when you run out of something essential or even when your perishable foods reach their expiration dates. You could also use this kind of refrigerator to send shopping lists to your

mobile phone or even send e-mail, just like you would on any home computer. A new LG refrigerator will recommend dinner recipes based upon what you’ve got in it already and will even respond to texts from you if you want to know if your milk is spoiled. Although examples of such refrigerators have been on the market since at least as far back as 1998, they have never become popular. Yet the newest smart refrigerators—which will allow you to run apps like Google Calendar, Pandora, or Twitter—hope to change that. This same technology also make it possible to connect your refrigerator to other Internet-enabled appliances, thereby making a smart kitchen possible for the first time. Of course, these sophisticated refrigerators are much more expensive than ordinary models, but manufacturers are counting on the convenience being worth the cost. Unfortunately for smart fridge producers, the problems that this technology will have to overcome to make it worth the cost are probably insurmountable. As Charles Arthur explained in the Guardian in 2013, the idea of scanning your food before you place it in the fridge ought to be a nonstarter, because people will inevitably forget. To have refrigerators scan food by themselves will require including some kind of chip (the Obama administration has just convened the talks for determining protocols for these sorts of interactions), but for that technology to be at all worthwhile will require a huge number of people to buy Internet-enabled refrigerators.1 This is unlikely, because cheaper refrigerators 104 refrigerator

keep food about as well as a really expensive one does. As the humorist Dave Barry explained back in 2000, “We don’t need a refrigerator that knows when it’s out of milk. We already have a foolproof system for determining if we’re out of milk: We ask our wife.” Instead, Barry joked, “What we could use is a refrigerator that refuses to let us open its door when it senses that we are about to consume our fourth Jell-O Pudding Snack in two hours.”2 Refrigerators that order food for you are an incredibly complicated solution to a very simple problem. Indeed, there is already at least one app for your smartphone that can keep track of your food the same way a smart refrigerator does and it won’t cost you a cent. Having a refrigerator that simply can access the Internet for you also raises a series of new problems: How much extra power will it use? Will your fridge be able to spy on you? What happens if your refrigerator gets a virus? Do you call a computer technician or a refrigerator repairman? How expensive will it be if you have to call both of them at the same time? The entire concept of an Internet refrigerator is reminiscent of George Packer’s line about Silicon Valley in general that, “the hottest tech start-ups are solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand, because that’s who thinks them up.”3 Assuming the possibility of being out of milk until your next trip to the supermarket even counts as a problem that most people worry about at all, smart refrigerator technology is the equivalent of using a bazooka to destroy a gnat. Conclusion 105

A different new kind of refrigerator will likely be much more important than the smart refrigerator because it respects the purpose that refrigerators have always had: to keep perishable food fresh. GE is currently testing a fridge that would completely replace the 150-year-old compression cycle by running a water-based fluid through magnets. This has the potential not only to make environmentally damaging refrigerants obsolete, but also to use 20 to 30 percent less energy than the machines that we use now.4 These machines would be better for the environment, better for our wallets and, unlike smart refrigerators, have sticker prices that would keep them affordable to the average consumer. While there is no such thing as a “dumb” refrigerator, people will never buy even the most sophisticated ones on the market just to perform the same basic function. While some people might be able to purchase conveniences that most of us don’t need, there will always be a market for home refrigeration because it has so many advantages that people in the developed world generally take for granted. Because refrigerators are the most visible links in the long cold chains that bring perishable foods all the way into our kitchens, they can represent all kinds of other links in that chain that we may not notice, or even choose to see. In this sense, refrigerators are a symbol of modern life, as much as the computers that some manufacturers want to mount inside their doors. If there is any lesson that the past, present, and future of the household refrigerator should offer, it is to not take the 106 refrigerator

Figure 12  The control panel of an Internet Refrigerator demonstrates the similarities between smart appliances and personal computers.

benefits of refrigeration for granted. The time they save by allowing us to forego trips to the grocery store, the variety in our diets that they make possible—even the ice cubes that once required special daily delivery to be readily available for our consumption—improve countless people’s lives every day. Taking a moment to appreciate that the next time you reach for the refrigerator door looking for snacks shouldn’t take very long at all.

Conclusion 107

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Notes

Introduction 1 Fridges of the World, http://www.fridgesoftheworld.com/. 2 Olga Khazan, “Refrigerators of the World,” The Atlantic,

February 26, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/international/ archive/2015/02/fridges-of-the-world-unite/386138/.

3 Khazan, “Refrigerators of the World.” 4 Tracie McMillan, “The New Face of Hunger,” National

Geographic, July 2014, http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ foodfeatures/hunger/.

Chapter 1 1 Much of the history covered in this chapter is recounted in

greater detail in Jonathan Rees, Refrigeration Nation: A History of Ice, Appliances and Enterprise in America (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). See also Bernard Nagengast, “Electric Refrigerators Vital Contribution to Households,” supplement to ASHRAE Journal (November

2004): 52–59. 2 Maria Parloa, Home Economics (New York: Century, 1898),

88–89.

3 Alexander Stevenson Jr., “Report on Domestic Refrigerating

Machines, 1923–1925,” August 17, 1923, www.ashrae.org/ File%20Library/docLib/Public/200611215455_347.pdf, 374. I’m using the numbering of the document online, not the original document numbering.

4 Stevenson, “Report on Domestic Refrigerating Machines,” 380. 5 Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother (New York:

Basic Books, 1983), 136.

6 Stevenson, “Report on Domestic Refrigerating Machines,” 18. 7 Cowan, More Work, 138. 8 Oscar Edward Anderson Jr., Refrigeration in America:

A History of a New Technology and Its Impact (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), 214.

9 Matt Novak, “The Great Depression and the Rise of the

Refrigerator,” Pacific Standard, October 9, 2012, http:// www.psmag.com/blogs/time-machine/the-rise-of-therefrigerator-47924/.

10 Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into

the Value of Work (New York: Penguin, 2009), 2.

11 Deborah Smith-Shank quoted in Katheryn Krotzer Laborde,

Do Not Open: The Discarded Refrigerators of Post-Katrina New Orleans (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2010), 121.

12 GE Appliances, “Refrigerator—Sounds and Noises a

Refrigerator Makes,” http://www.geappliances.com/search/ fast/infobase/10001431.htm.

110 Notes

Chapter 2 1 John Holusha, “The Refrigerator of the Future, For Better or

Worse,” New York Times, August 30, 1992.

2 Rees, Refrigeration Nation, 167. 3 Shelly K. Schwartz, “As Waistlines Grow, So Do Refrigerators,”

CNBC.com, October 8, 2012, http://www.cnbc.com/ id/49101730.

4 “Refrigerators 1974,” Appliance 31 (May 1974): 50. 5 Jonathan Bloom, American Wasteland: How America Throws

Away Nearly Half Its Food (and What We Can Do About It) (Cambridge, MA: De Capo Press, 2010), 196.

6 Daniel DiClerico, “Here it is, the biggest refrigerator we’ve

ever tested,” Consumer Reports News, October 26, 2011, http:// www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2011/10/here-it-is-thebiggest-refrigerator-we-ve-ever-tested/index.htm.

7 Tony Guerra, “What Does My Refrigerator Weigh?”, eHow,

http://www.ehow.com/info_8115835_refrigerator-weigh.html, n.d.

8 General Electric, “Shopping Guide: Refrigerators,” http://www.

geappliances.com/appliances/refrigerators/refrigerator-buyguide.htm; Rees, Refrigeration Nation, 171.

9 Lowe’s, “Appliance Buyer’s Guide,” 2009: 4. 10 Kersten Hrubesch, quoted in Kimberly L. LaPat, “Cooling

Trends,” Appliance Magazine, July 2003, http://www. appliancemagazine.com/editorial.php?article=133.

11 Nicholas Colchester, “China Warms to the Refrigerator,”

Financial Times, December 30, 1985.

Notes 111

12 Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio, Hungry Planet: What the

World Eats (Berkeley, CA: Material World Books/Ten Speed Press, 2005), 84.

13 Levent Ozler, “Electrolux Declares War on White,” Dexigner,

February 15, 2006, http://www.dexigner.com/news/6927.

14 Mary Andrews, quoted in Shelley Nickles, “Preserving

Women: Refrigerator Design as Social Process in the 1930s,” Technology and Culture 43 (October 2002): 712–13. Much of this section is informed by Nichols’ work.

15 Kara Kamenec, “How to Buy a Refrigerator,” PC Magazine,

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2458506,00.asp.

Chapter 3 1 Jason Samenow, “Ozone layer is healing, expected to recover

by around 2050, major report finds,” Washington Post, September 11, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ capital-weather-gang/wp/2014/09/11/ozone-layer-is-healingexpected-to-recover-by-around-2050-major-report-finds/.

2 Stephen Chu, “Regulation Stimulates Efficiency: Refrigerator

Efficiency Standards Stimulated Industry Innovation,” slide 139 from the National Clean Energy Summit, 2008, http:// www.slideshare.net/guest3fd329/national-clean-energysummit-ppt-presentation.

3 Energy Star, “Refrigerators for Consumers,” http://www.

energystar.gov/certified-products/detail/refrigerators.

4 U.S. Department of Energy, Building Technologies Office,

“Residential Refrigerators and Freezers,” http://www1.eere. energy.gov/buildings/appliance_standards/product.aspx/ productid/43.

112 Notes

5 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

(OECD), “Energy Efficiency Standards for Traded Products, Annex 1, Working Paper #5,” Paris, 1998: 8.

6 National Geographic, “Refrigerator Buying Guide,” http://

environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/greenguide/buying-guides/refrigerator/environmental-impact/.

7 Ralph Vartabedian, “Cable TV boxes become 2nd biggest

energy users in many homes,” Los Angeles Times, June 16, 2014, http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-power-hog20140617-story.html.

8 Stephen Budiansky, “Math Lessons for Locavores,” New York

Times, August 19, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/ opinion/20budiansky.html.

9 Mike Berners-Lee, How Bad Are Bananas?: The Carbon

Footprint of Everything (London: Profile Books, 2010), 27.

10 Michael Specter, “Big Foot,” The New Yorker,

February 25, 2008, http://www.newyorker.com/ reporting/2008/02/25/080225fa_fact_specter#ixzz0vlVPD5uM.

11 Steven Kurutz, “Trashing the Fridge,” New York Times,

February 5, 2009, D1.

12 Erica Kannall, “Is Dried Fruit As Nutritious As Fresh Fruit?”

Demand Media, http://healthyeating.sfgate.com/dried-fruitnutritious-fresh-fruit-7614.html.

13 Tom Shachtman, Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold

(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 16.

14 Rebecca Rupp, “Frederic Tudor: The King of Ice,” The

Plate, National Geographic, July 19, 2014, http://theplate. nationalgeographic.com/2014/07/19/frederic-tudor-king-ice/.

15 Katheryn Krotzer Laborde, Do Not Open: The Discarded

Refrigerators of Post-Katrina New Orleans (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), 2. Notes 113

16 Kurutz, “Trashing the Fridge.” 17 Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimze, The Locavore’s

Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-Mile Diet (New York: Public Affairs, 2012), 27.

18 Sanjoy Majumder, “The village that just got its first fridge,”

BBC News Magazine, January 27, 2015, http://www.bbc.com/ news/magazine-30925252.

19 Nicola Twilley, “What Do Chinese Dumplings have to Do

With Global Warming?” New York Times, July 25, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/magazine/whatdo-chinese-dumplings-have-to-do-with-global-warming. html?nytmobile=0&_r=1.

Chapter 4 1 F. E. Matthews, “Improved Cold Storage Methods: A Means to

Better World Provisioning,” A.S.R.E. Journal 5 (May 1919): 417.

2 Andrew Martin, “One Country’s Table Scraps, Another

Country’s Meal,” New York Times, May 18, 2008.

3 Tara Garnett quoted in Twilley, “What Do Chinese Dumplings.” 4 Jonathan Bloom quoted in Twilley, “What Do Chinese

Dumplings.”

5 Lisa Palmer, “Innovative technology for global food

waste solutions,” Future Food 2050, June 18, 2014, http:// futurefood2050.com/innovative-technology-for-global-foodwaste-solutions/.

6 For more on this argument about the cultural context of

freshness, see Susanne Freidberg, Fresh: A Perishable History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

114 Notes

7 Robert R. Zall, Managing Food Industry Waste (Ames, IA:

Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 120.

8 William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great

West (New York: Norton, 1991), 230.

9 Frigidaire ad as displayed in Freidberg, Fresh, 46. 10 Nickles, “Preserving Women,” 723. 11 Unless otherwise noted, all ads in this section come from the

refrigeration advertising collection at the American Society for Heating, Air-Conditioning, and Refrigerating Engineers Library in Atlanta, Georgia. None of these ads have exact dates; I am guessing the general eras based upon information in the ad and on their appearance.

12 Roland Marchand, Advertising and the American Dream:

Making Way for Modernity 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 273.

13 Alexis Coe, “Meet Irma Harding, the Once and Future Face

of American Refrigeration,” Modern Farmer, June 30, 2014, http://modernfarmer.com/2014/06/irma-harding/.

Chapter 5 1 Ben Bradlee Jr., The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

(New York: Little Brown, 2013), 9.

2 General Electric, “Better Living With Your New GE Freezer,”

1958, n.p., Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/Better_ Living_With_Your_New_GE_Freezer_.

3 Mark Kurlansky, Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man

(New York: Doubleday, 2012), 159. This biography is definitive on all things Birdseye. Notes 115

4 Kurlansky, Birdseye, 173. 5 W. J. Stelpflug, “The Food Industry and the Part That

Refrigeration Plays In It,” The Analyst’s Journal 6 (1950): 38.

6 Terje Finstad, “The Means of Modernization, Freezing,

Technologies and the Cultural Politics of Everyday Life, Norway 1940–1965,” in History of Artificial Cold, Scientific, Technological and Cultural Issues, ed. Kostas Gavroglu (Boston: Springer, 2014), 245.

7 Sam Biddle, “The Best Ice Cube Tray of All Time,” Gizmodo,

May 26, 2012, http://gizmodo.com/5913538/the-best-icecube-tray-of-all-time.

8 R. T. Hansen, “Mass Production of Consumer Fragmentary

Ice,” ASHRAE Journal 7 (September 1965): 67.

9 Ian Parker, “The Emperor of Ice,” The New Yorker 86 (February

12, 2001): 62.

10 Reddy Ice, “About Us,” http://www.reddyice.com/about.php.

Conclusion 1 Charles Arthur, “Internet fridges: the zombie idea that will

never, ever happen,” The Guardian, January 7, 2014, http:// www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/07/internetfridge-lg-ces-2014.

2 Dave Barry, “Smart appliances are a bad buy for half-

wits,” Deseret News, September 18, 2005 [a reprint of a September 27, 2000 column], http://www.deseretnews.com/ article/605154899/Smart-appliances-are-a-bad-buy-for-halfwits.html?pg=all.

116 Notes

3 George Packer, “Change the World,” The New Yorker,

May 27, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/ reporting/2013/05/27/130527fa_fact_packer?currentPage=all.

4 Amanda Kooser, “Your Next Refrigerator May Run on

Magnets,” CNET, February 10, 2014, http://www.cnet.com/ news/your-next-refrigerator-may-run-on-magnets/.

Notes 117

118

INDEX

Page references for illustrations appear in italics. 7-Eleven 100 Advertising and the American Dream (Marchand)  78 Alcor Life Extension ­Foundation  85–6 Amazon.com 30 appliances  3, 13, 30–7, 36, 38 amenities  2, 5, 25, 26, 27–30, 31, 32, 41, 43–6, 77, 91, 99–100, 103–5 benefits  47–63, 55, 57, 58, 60–3, 70–1, 75, 107 brands 14–20, 19, 24, 28, 29–30, 31, 32, 38, 39, 40, 41, 44, 48, 61, 66, 75, 77, 78, 79–81, 87, 91–2, 104, 106 cleaning  4, 12 competition  14, 17, 18, 25, 34, 41

consumers  9, 13–20, 26, 27, 35, 36, 51–2, 58, 63, 75, 76–82, 91, 106 controls  2, 28, 44, 68 convenience  4, 6, 15, 18, 35, 43–6, 68, 76–82, 99–100, 105, 106, 107 costs  6, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17–20, 26–7, 38, 44, 47–63, 91, 104–5, 106 credit 18 customization  3, 29, 38 design  2, 8, 10, 14–15, 24, 25–46, 37–43, 50–2, 76–7, 81–2, 84, 91, 98–9, 102, 106 efficiency  8, 14–16, 20, 24, 25, 27, 33, 37, 45, 47, 50–2, 62, 65–71, 66, 103, 105, 106

and environment  43–4, 46, 47–52, 53–6, 58–9, 62–3, 70–1, 102, 106 exteriors  2, 3, 5, 24, 26, 29–30, 35, 37–43, 41, 42, 91 functionality  3, 5, 7–24 future 103–7 history  3, 5, 7–24, 11, 25–6, 56–63 household  8–9, 13–24, 28, 34, 37–41, 60–1, 71–5, 76–82, 76–84, 87, 88–93, 94, 97–9, 102, 103–7 industrialized societies  2, 3, 5, 62 interactive  3, 44, 103–7, 107 interiors  1, 2, 5, 9–10, 29, 31, 32, 35, 41, 43–6, 65–8, 74, 77, 82, 83, 84, 87, 90 and lifestyles  2, 3, 4, 6, 37, 54, 59, 60–1, 91 longevity  14–15, 27 manufacture  8–9, 16, 17, 25–6, 34, 43–6, 50–2, 90–1, 102 marketing  16–17, 27–30, 31, 32, 36, 44, 48, 59, 75, 76–82, 87, 91, 97 materials  3, 9, 16, 42, 45–6, 47–9 120 INDEX

mechanics  5, 7–24, 23, 40, 59 men  76, 77, 78, 81, 87 obsolescence  5, 27 patents  14, 93–4 Perkins, Jacob  8 power sources  49–52 preservation  3, 4, 5, 6, 7–24, 10, 12, 34, 43–6, 72–5 prosperity  6, 94 reliability  3, 13, 15, 16, 48, 49, 50, 61 repair  20–1, 105 safety  13, 15, 16, 17, 47–9, 78–9, 88 size  2, 30–7, 50–1, 59, 88, 92, 94, 95, 98 social status  26, 28, 43, 61, 78 sounds  3, 17, 22–4 technology  2, 5, 7–24, 29, 44–6, 48, 50–2, 62, 63, 71–5, 78, 88–93, 90–1, 93–4, 95, 98–100, 102, 103–7, 107 Twining, Alexander  8 ubiquity  3, 5–6, 7, 13 waste 69–71 women  32, 40, 66, 68–9, 76–82, 81, 83, 87, 92, 95 Arthur, Charles  104 Atlantic 1

Aunt Jemima  82 Automatic Refrigerating ­Company  14

Crosby, Bing  95–6 Crosley 18, 32 cryogenics 85–6

Baby Boomers  38–9 Barry, Dave  105 Batman 86 BBC 61 Betty Crocker  82 Birdseye, Clarence  93–4, 96 Boston Cooking School  12 Boston Red Sox  85 Bradlee, Ben Jr.  85 Brooklyn (NY)  2

Depression, the  18 Detroit (MI)  15 DuPont  38, 48

California  17, 50 CFCs see Freon Chicago (IL)  14 Chicago Bears  30 China 37 chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) see Freon Chu, Stephen  86, 88 Civil War  16 climate change  48–52, 62 cold chain  53–4, 59, 71, 76, 94, 106 Cold Guard  29 Consumer Reports 30 Copeman, Lloyd  99 Crawford, Matthew B.  20 Shop Class as Soulcraft 20 Cronon, William  75

Egypt 7 electricity  49–52, 57–8 energy standards  50–2, 62, 103 Energy Star  51–2 Electrolux 39 Energy Star  51–2 EPA see U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Europe  2, 36, 98 Finstad, Terje  95 food abundance  4, 6, 21, 34, 35, 60, 68, 71 cold chain  53–4, 59, 71, 76, 94, 106 consumption  2–3, 6, 36, 53, 54, 61, 71, 75, 96 convenience  5, 60, 61, 72–3, 92, 93–7, 107 costs  4, 6, 60, 73, 79 decay  3, 4, 57, 68, 73, 86 diets  4, 59, 107 INDEX 121

and environment  53–6, 62 Europe 56–7 farmers’ markets  53 fermentation 73–4 freshness  3, 4, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 24, 26, 34, 53, 55, 59–60, 65–71, 72, 82 frozen  5, 81–2, 84, 88, 92, 93–7 health  57, 61, 78–9, 97 history 56–63 humidity 67–8 insecurity 6 leftovers 55 lifestyles  54–5, 59 locavores  53–6, 73 marketing  54–5, 93–7 packaging 54 preparation  6, 7, 55 preservation  3, 5, 6, 7–24, 33, 34, 50, 53, 55, 56, 57–63, 65–71, 78–9, 82, 86, 88, 92, 94, 96, 102, 105, 106 production  4, 6, 34, 54, 57, 59–60, 69, 71 seasonal  4, 71–5 shopping  1, 2, 6, 34, 35, 36, 53–6, 61–2, 79, 105, 107 spoilage  10, 11–12, 50, 53, 57, 58, 60, 65, 67, 70, 71, 86, 93, 104 122 INDEX

taste  3, 7, 56, 72–3, 96, 97 transport  6, 54, 60, 71, 72, 75, 88, 94 TV dinners  5, 95 variety  3, 4 waste  59, 65–71 women 76–82 freezers  5, 81–2, 83, 84, 87 freezing  85–6, 88–9 cryogenics 83–4 Freon 47–8 Fridges of the World  1 Frigidaire  14–15, 16, 18, 28, 29–30, 31, 39, 75, 80, 81 GE see General Electric (GE) General Electric (GE)  14, 16–17, 18, 19, 24, 40, 79, 92, 106 Monitor Top  16–17, 19, 40, 79 General Electric Appliance Guide 2014  34 General Foods  93–4 General Motors (GM)  16, 48 Gizmodo 99 global warming see climate change GM see General Motors (GM) Godrej 61 Google Calendar  104 Greece 7 Guardian 104

Hartford (CT)  14 HCFCs  46, 48 Hollywood 17 Hurricane Katrina  58 ice  7–8, 9, 10–12, 14, 49, 57, 68, 75, 82, 84, 85, 86, 88, 91, 96–102, 107 Tudor, Frederick  8 iceboxes  3, 9–13, 11, 14, 15, 16, 18, 45, 49, 67–8, 78, 90 Ice Factory  101 icehouses 8 Jefferson, Thomas  8 Ice King see Tudor, Frederick Iceland 73 Ice-O-Matic 18 India 61 International Harvester  80, 82, 83 Internet  1, 3, 104, 105 Internet of Things  103, 107 Inuit 93 Jefferson, Thomas  8 Monticello 8 Jomoco 18 Jonasson, Heather  1, 2 Kane, Bob  86 Kelvinator  15, 16, 20, 41, 66, 79–80, 87 Korea 57

Laborde, Katheryn Krotzer  58 Labrador 93 Leonard Refrigerator ­Company  78 LG  44, 104 London (UK)  8 Lowe’s 35 Madison (WI)  40, 91–2 Marchand, Roland  78 Advertising and the ­American Dream 78 Massachusetts 8 Mayflower 18 Mesopotamia 7 Midgely, Thomas  48 Monitor 16 Monitor Top  16–17, 19, 40, 79 Monticello 8 Montreal Protocol  48 National Football League (NFL) 30 New Deal  80, 82 New Orleans (LA)  58 New Yorker 54–5 New York Times  25, 58 NFL see National Football League (NFL) Norge 18 Northern Illinois ­University  22 Norway 95 INDEX 123

Obama, Barack  86, 104 OXO Good Grips Ice Cube Tray 99 Packer, George  105 Pandora 104 Parloa, Maria  12 PC Magazine 44–5 Perkins, Jacob  8 Perry, William ­(Refrigerator)  30, 33 Philadelphia (PA)  57 Philco 18 Philco-Ford 29 Cold Guard  29 polyurethane 45–6 Progressive Era  38 Reddy Ice  100, 101 refrigerants 47–9 Samsung 44 Sears  18, 20 Servel  77, 78 Shop Class as Soulcraft ­(Crawford)  20 Silicon Valley  105 Singapore 2

124 INDEX

Smith-Shank, Deborah  22, 24 Southland Ice Company  100 Stevenson, Alexander Jr.  14, 15, 16 Sub-Zero  40, 91–2 Super Bowl  30 Sweden 1 Tesco 54 Tudor, Frederick  8 Twining, Alexander  8 Twitter  1, 104 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)  51–2 Volkswagen 20 Washington 2 Whole Foods Market  97 Williams, Ted  85 Wilson, Woodrow  11 Wolf, Fred Jr.  14 World War II  28, 38, 40, 94, 95 Yale University  8 Zall, Robert  74