Jonathan Rees. Refrigeration Nation

Producing heat is simple, but for centuries, people could only dream of producing cold. As Jonathan Rees writes, “cold does not exist: it is simply the absence of heat” (p. 1). And thus the history of refrigeration is a history of how people figured out how to remove heat, and keep removing it, from a given space. Our growing competence at doing so, and the social effects of the technologies that resulted, are the subject of this well-written, thorough, and surprising book. This is more than a story about Americans and their Frigidaires. In fact, home refrigeration is a relatively small part of Rees's story. Long before chemical refrigerants, there was ice, which soaks up heat from its surroundings as it melts. Nineteenth-century Americans first used blocks of ice from frozen waterways, often harvested by farmers who had little else to do in winter. As early as the 1830s, New England ice was shipped as far away as India. Whether ice traveled by itself or perishables were shipped with it, the ice trade required a “cold chain,” an unbroken series of cold places in which icy cargo could travel and be stored. One weak link—a single balmy railroad depot or a few hours in a hot warehouse—would melt ice and rot meat. From the beginning, Rees makes clear, infrastructure was vital to the cold industry. As the American cold chain grew, so did the distance between consumers and the farms that grew their food. The cold chain also nationalized the economies of scale that privileged big producers. By the late nineteenth century, for example, Chicago meatpackers could undersell small butchers all over the country.

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