Jonathan Rees - Before the Refrigerator: How We Used to Get Ice

BEFORE THE REFRIGERATOR

HOW THINGS WORKED

Robin Einhorn and Richard R. John, Series Editors

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HOW WE USED TO GET ICE

JONATHAN REES
COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITYPUEBLO

2018 Johns Hopkins University Press

All rights reserved. Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rees, Jonathan, 1966 author.

Title: Before the refrigerator : how we used to get ice / Jonathan Rees.

Description: Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. | Series: How things worked | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017037463| ISBN 9781421424583 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 1421424584 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781421424590 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 1421424592 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781421424606 (electronic) | ISBN 1421424606 (electronic)

Subjects: LCSH: Ice industryTechnological innovationsUnited States. | Ice industryUnited StatesHistory.

Classification: LCC HD9481.U5 R44 2018 | DDC 338.4/7621580973dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017037463

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

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GENERAL ELECTRIC INTRODUCED the first modern electric household refrigerator in 1927. Much of the perishable food that stocks those refrigerators gets handled as part of the supply chains that bring those goods from their point of production to their point of purchase. Most people in the United States (and in many other developed countries around the world today) cannot live without a refrigerator or the benefits of refrigeration because they have such a positive impact on their lives. Refrigeration introduces the possibility of a healthier and more varied diet, saves time for whoever prepares food in the household, and lowers food costs by cutting waste. People in developing countries around the world generally crave refrigerators as soon as they get access to a reliable electrical grid because the benefits of refrigeration are important attributes of modern living.

The forerunner of the refrigerator and refrigerated supply chains of today was the American ice industry. The natural ice industry began in the early nineteenth century when Boston merchant Frederic Tudor started cutting ice from New England lakes, streams, rivers, and ponds. Tudor first created the demand for his product by convincing patrons in bars and taverns to drop ice into their alcoholic drinks. That habit gradually spread to other beverages as ice became cheaper and more accessible. Meatpackers began experimenting with ice refrigeration to ship their products as early as the 1860s. Starting around 1880, large, bulky ice machines the size of small houses appeared on the American scene and gradually became an important source for the American ice supply.

By the early twentieth century, ice had become an essential tool for preserving perishable foods of all kinds. Ice enters into dozens of phases of our daily life, explained a reporter for the Salt Lake Herald-Republican in 1909. The butchers, grocers and others who sell edibles use ice to keep them. In iced, or refrigerator cars fruits and vegetables, meats, milk, oysters and many other things are shipped from one part of the country to the other.... All over the country there are cold Consumers also bought and stored ice in boxes to protect perishable products like these in the early nineteenth century. Those iceboxes were gradually replaced by electric household refrigerators starting in the 1920s.

As the amount of and uses for ice increased, it became the centerpiece of an elaborate infrastructure that preserved perishable foods on long journeys from the countrys most productive farmlands to consumers kitchens around the country. Eventually, refrigerating engineers came to call these routes between the point of production and the point of consumption for perishable foods cold chains. Cold chains are similar to what most people know as food chains, only they exclusively involve foods that require refrigeration during transport. Cold chains were (and remain today) a series of related technologies that worked together toward bringing perishable food (including ice itself) from the point of production to the point of consumption. Taken together, these many cold chains came to form a seamless web for delivering ice and other perishable products to the masses.

Despite the important role of ice in daily life in America, few historians (besides me) have spent much time closely examining the ice industry. Descriptions of ice instruments and harvesting practices were fairly common in newspapers during the ice industrys heyday because so few people understood how their ice got to them. The descriptions in this book of how ice was harvested, stored, and transported are intended to allow these practices to be understood and appreciated for their long-term historical significance. That significance derives from their influence on what came later. By establishing a market for perishable foods, ice laid the groundwork for the modern mechanical refrigerationcentered distribution system that followed. Even if the technological components of the cold chains of the pre-mechanical refrigeration era no longer exist, their influence on how and whether perishable food reaches us today explains why they deserve consideration.

The ice industry also had an extraordinary impact on the types of foods that Americans ate. Ice turned the manufacture of perishable food products like meat and lager beer into year-round activities, thereby increasing their supply and decreasing their price. It improved the geographical reach of perishable food products and even made it possible for consumers to defy seasons for the first time, since cold storage warehouses (at first generally refrigerated by ice) were able to preserve items such as apples or eggs, which had particular seasons, until they could be distributed at whatever time during the year that consumers wanted them. Ice also improved the supply of perishable foods of all kinds simply by cutting spoilage, no matter what the season, which likewise drove down prices and improved accessibility to members of the lower and middle classes.