THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY was known for sumptuous dining, even ordinary folks feasting on soup to nuts and a’plenty more. And Atlas Obscura recalls an especially significant feast: “Remembering the World’s First ‘Cold-Storage Banquet,” by Diana Hubbell, July 12, 2024, is a review of Nicola Twilley’s Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. Here are tidbits gleaned from Hubbell’s review of Twilley’s book, IndieBound’s comments, and my usual Internet sleuthing.
Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves, by Nicola Twilley, Penguin Press, 2024.
Pre-Fridge Fresh Foods. IndieBound notes, “The introduction of artificial refrigeration overturned millennia of dietary history, launching a new chapter in human nutrition. We could now overcome not just rot, but seasonality and geography. Tomatoes in January? Avocados in Shanghai? All possible.”
Prior to that, Hubble writes, “In order to supply enough meat, farmers brought live animals into the heart of cities like Chicago and Manhattan. ‘You get these amazing descriptions of trying to herd a flock of turkeys on the road,’ Twilley says. ‘They go about a mile an hour. And then they’d roost in trees in the evening, and people had to chase them down.’ ”
“In Manhattan,” Hubble continues, “cowboys wrangling their herds toward the Meatpacking District became such a problem that city officials built a cow tunnel under Twelfth Avenue…. ‘I went on this quest to see if there were still remnants, and the city archaeologist got involved,’ Twilley says of the cow tunnel. If any parts survived the construction of the Javits Center and Lincoln Tunnel, they’re now inaccessible to humans—although the president of the archaeological consulting firm that coauthored the 2004 Hudson Yards/No. 7 Line study assured Twilley that they were very much real.”
Literary Citations. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, 1905-1906, exposed unsanitary practices in Chicago’s meatpacking industry. John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, 1952, recalled the controversial introduction in the early 20th century of iced vegetable transport out of California’s Salinas Valley.
Quelling Refrigeration Anxieties. Hubble notes, “And as is so often the case with new technology, there was rampant anxiety about whether or not it was safe.” To counter this, on October 23, 1911, some 400 guests sat down to one of the most pivotal meals of the 20th century in the Louis XVI room of Chicago’s prestigious Hotel Sherman. “There,” Hubble describes, “under the cavernous, molded ceilings resplendent with gilt details, the mayor of Chicago, the city’s health commissioner, and other bigwig bureaucrats steeled their nerves for the world’s first-ever ‘cold-storage’ banquet.”
This and the following image courtesy Nicola Twilley from Atlas Obscura.
Noteworthy to us 21st-century readers: First, the multi-course nature of this banquet. Second, the citing of cold-storage facilities from which the food came.
Hubble writes, “A great deal of fanfare was made over the true age of the meats, eggs, and fish on the table—and that the ladies present had the bravery to ingest any of it. ‘Your capon received its summons to the great unknown along about last St. Valentine’s day,’ Meyer Eichengreen, the National Poultry, Butter, and Egg Association’s vice president, told the rapt diners.”
The Reaction Back Then—And Now. “Immediately after the banquet,” Hubble recounts, “the Chicago Inter Ocean ran a scathing op-ed. The paper, along with others, decried the whole business, but said, ‘The one silver lining is that soon everyone who can remember what food is supposed to taste like, pre-refrigeration, will be dead, and we’ll all just be used to this.’”
“That actually happened,” Hubble notes. “ ‘We do not expect to taste seasonality in our butter and milk, which people would have—the taste of summer milk, the taste of spring butter,’ Twilley says. ‘We would have known those flavors. Those are gone.’ ”
Yes, but as Twilley also notes, “the third largest cause of death at the turn of the 20th century was gastrointestinal infections and diarrhea.”
I’m happy to live in a refrigerated environment, for more reasons than purely gustatory. And there’s also the Locavore or even Paleo Diet. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2024