Here is a bit of refrigeration trivia gathered from my own interest in the subject and a penchant for collecting and reading old engineering books, so from the early days of shipping food , in refrigerated cargo ships, determining the ideal cooling temperature for each food type, was one thing, but another, facinating component, is that most food is exothermic, and this property is called "the heat of evolution", and varys with each food type, and is large enough that 50 tons
of food will produce enough heat as it ripens to
overwhelm an insuficient cooling system, so they had charts detailing the heat output of all the shipped foods, and recomendations on the design of the cooling plants, with some so specialised as to work with one food only....banana boats....
Got a 70 year old "admiral" fridge, the wiring insulation just crumbled, and it will get a new thermostat(hidden) and wire, everything else is in battered original, working condition
Growing up in my fathers shop we had a 30's Frigidaire as well. One summer day it was outside getting defrosted and washed when an employee decides to be helpful and chip the ice with a screwdriver. Yes, he punctured the coils. What a scene, I was there and saw the pop, my grandfather sees it through the door and comes flying out screaming, then my father comes out and it turns into a scene (guy wasn't fired but got an ear full.) My grandfather silver soldered the aluminum coil but the few technicians they called didn't want to or know how to charge it. So it went to the scrap guy. I was just a kid but if I were older I would have pushed to get it fixed.
Home refrigeration is quite a bit older than electric refrigerators though. Iceboxes, kept cool by chunks of ice, were also called refrigerators and started being produced for home use in the 1840s.
Interestingly, my Mom's parents owned both an icebox and a quite modern electric refrigerator (1980s).
The icebox was kept in a carpeted room and it was used for dry storage. We never put ice in it. And it was definitely called "the icebox". But also, Grandma referred to the refrigerator as "the icebox" as well, and we always knew what she meant, because she'd typically say "put that milk in the icebox" or whatever to refrigerate the stuff.
Grandma had the best kitchen with the most fascinating appliances and gadgets. She had a flour sifter, an eggbeater or two, an actual breadbox (have you ever heard the question, "is it bigger than a breadbox?"). Our other grandparents were the first ones on the block to purchase a microwave oven. They hoisted it on top of the refrigerator and we could barely reach into it! My cousin said not to look into the microwave while it was cooking because it'd cook our eyeballs!
My father's parents had a late-40s or early-50s refrigerator in the kitchen well into the late-90s. It had an actual levered latch to hold it shut, and a small freezer section up in the top. Especially as a child, I had to just about body-slam the door to get it to latch. That was the "icebox". They also had a more-modern fridge and chest freezer in the basement. Honestly, I don't remember how they differentiated them, vocabulary-wise.
There was an actual Radar Range microwave, although I don't know the vintage. Old enough for a mechanical timer and a bell to ring when it was done.
Grandma was a home baker (especially cookies at Christmas), so she certainly had all the classic equipment, hand and electric egg-beaters, flour sifters, breadbox...yep.
The question is what changes to the mode of production were brought by the technological advance. I think fatty tuna sushi became popular due to early refrigeration
I can't emphasize this strongly enough. Recently, I had the pleasure of eating at a fine dining restaurant that grows a number of vegetables and herbs, and they presented an amuse bouche with a number of raw vegetables and herbs for us to taste. Their flavours were so elevated compared to the usual counterparts that I get from supermarkets, that I questioned whether any artificial addititives were used - obviously not. The difference is like going from being short sighted but able to complete daily activites with some difficulty, to wearing glasses that makes everything crystal clear and easy.
Moving to the US from Europe the quality of the produce was one of my biggest culture shocks. There was tons more availability especially out of season and it was cheaper but the fruit and vegetables here are so bland. Even the so called heirloom varieties are devoid of the flavor I’m used to.
It’s gotten better over the years as consumer awareness has grown but now there’s the trend of making fruit increasingly sweet like cosmic crisp apples, sumo mandarins, or cotton candy grapes.
Part of it is that the plants have been optimized for durability in transport, harvesting etc not just flavor. Farmers Markets here in the US or smaller chains are more likely to have the better produce but not guaranteed depending on where you are.
Out of season stuff is usually imported from Mexico or South America. I'm guessing the long distance transport conditions may change the taste of the produce?
My point of reference is the same latitude as Moscow for what it’s worth and yet the food I get here in Southern California falls short. Sicily would be a dream in comparison.
Very true but how many people would pay the extra cost for vegetables outside the agricultural industrial complex? Most people want cheap and their fruits and vegetables year round, even if they are out of season. There is a major taste difference just between canned vegetables vs frozen.
My biggest annoyance is ordering a BLT in August and getting a green artificially ripened tomato even though ripe and flavorful ones can be found everywhere. You would think that CSAs would be a lot more popular and successful then they are but the reason (imo) is that most people really don't want to cook and even if they do, they don't want to do that every day so the CSA shares end up overwhelming them with fresh supplies that get given away or thrown out instead.
You think that it's cheaper for some reason to get it from the "complex", while it is very obviously not so.
The logistics between growers to distributors to store and customers add a ton of cost to your food. In the order of 200%.
The reliance on external food sources for many ingredients exacerbates this even more.
Many business models in other countries are based on lowering logistics, doing basically grower-to-customer directly and evading all the middlemen. No refrigeration, better quality, cheaper food.
Our neighbor told this story about her mom. They are both French, but the daughter lives in the Netherlands for about a decade. The mom lives in France.
The mom came to visit her daughter during COVID and while eating something bought from the local supermarket, she noticed that the food has a very weak taste if any at all. COVID was said to impact one's sense of taste or smell. So, upon returning to France, she went to take a test and... she didn't have COVID. In fact was completely healthy :)
I went to France last summer. And... truth be told, I don't taste the difference between Dutch vegetables and French vegetables. To me they are both fine. The bread on the other hand is on a completely different level.
Anyways. I don't really know what may be causing these perceived differences in taste. But, I have a theory that it's a learned thing. Maybe our sensors adapt to a particular food and then a very small change overall can affect them in a major way?
If you can find a good family-run Vietnamese Phở restaurant, try it out. The ones around here serve very fresh food, and I specifically asked the wife where she got the fresh herbs, and she said that grandma grows them in her backyard. There are spearmint, cilantro, jalapeños, and bean sprouts. They are always so very consistent and fresh and very healthy plants. There is absolutely no comparison to this sort of restaurant. The others can serve food-service slop, and somehow, Vietnamese cooks' main ingredient is love.
I sincerely doubt that the chilled stock in a local Irish supermarket makes my food options LESS diverse than they were a century ago. Grapes, blueberries, strawberries everywhere at any time of year, frozen fish from halfway around the planet, frozen pizzas, even ice cream for God's sake. Perhaps the cucumbers are worse, but I can always get them, and don't have to suffer the Hungry Gap in winter on nothing but potatoes, nettles, cabbage, pickles, and grain.
> American households open the fridge door an average of 107 times a day
The fridge door one came up some time ago on HN with actual data to back it up from "smart" fridges. Some people with kids said it was opened well over 100 times a day which shocked me.
If TV/film/YouTube is anything to go by the habit of leaving the door open for extended periods is common too. That one really grinds my gears. I just can't understand a brain that doesn't tell you to minimise the amount of time the door is open. It's one of those things that makes me realise how fundamentally different people can be.
A few years ago I had a housemate who would fill up the kettle all the way to the brim, would wait for it to boil and then she'd make a single cup of tea and let the rest go cold. Every single time. This unreasonably angered me.
Kettle fillers are bizarre but I think there's slightly more to it. Some people think they are being rude if they only prepare enough food for themselves. I think kettle fillers may believe they are doing a service for others when they fill. But that's really stretching the benefit of the doubt here. They may just be thick.
I can actually top this, though. In my student days I had a guy from a hot country move in. Apparently the water from the tap was too cold so he would warm it in the kettle. The trouble is the kettle is too hot... So I watched in utter disbelief as he boiled the kettle, poured boiling water into a pint glass, then carried said glass to the fridge to cool it back down to drinking temperature!
Later I came back and he'd forgotten about the water so it was now colder than tap water in the fridge.
When I bought a fridge for my camper I realized why nobody who cares about power usage has a common standing fridge. Every time you open the door the cool air falls out, it sucks in the warm room air and has to start over again.
While "camping coolers" just keep the cold air inside.
My fridge doesn't cool when the door is opened, not even sure if slightly longer opening times make a huge difference when the complete air is exchanged in seconds anyway.
100 times a day might be bursts of many times in short succession, which is definitely preferable to leaving the door open for what might be a longer cumulative time.
Perhaps the diversity lost is the one caused by seasonality. Fruits and vegetables are highly seasonal, some meat and fish are, too.
From reading various articles, apparently there really was greater diversity in vegetables, too. Nowadays people eat tomatoes, salad, onions, perhaps carots, and that's about it but there are many, many more that can be locally grown and that have almost disappeared from many people's diets. If you mention swedes, turnips, cabbage, beetroots, leeks, rhubarb, types of squash, etc. even cauliflowers to many people they won't be able to tell you when was the last time they ate or touched one. The only time people touch a pumpkin is at Halloween and they don't eat them.
Regarding meat, offal has almost completely disappeared, and I suspect seafood is now mostly processed fish from one or two species only.
> swedes, turnips, cabbage, beetroots, leeks, rhubarb, types of squash, etc.
Perhaps this is a U.S. issue. Every single one of these is available at my local Lidl supermarket (~a marginally upscale Aldi for those outside Europe) for much of the year, not to mention other more starkly seasonal things that filter in like peaches, salsify, runner beans, cherimoya (a tropical fruit), and so on. Across Europe I've had no trouble getting all the offal I'd want: head cheese/zult, haggis, black pudding, balkenbrij, hearts, various horrors suspended in aspic-- in supermarkets. Not specialist shops, not the butcher. I'm in rural Ireland now, but the selection was better yet when I lived in Switzerland and NL and also shopped at Lidl.
There is some diversity missing from my local UK supermarket. I don't know if it existing before, but I can only ever get one kind of squash - butternut. There are dozens of other varieties of squash of different shapes and colours but I can only get them at a farmer's market.
A friend started growing vegetables, and I got some as a gift at the end of the season.
Just regular stuff like potatoes, carrots, celery root, parsnip and such.
Now when I got them I was very busy, so they sat in a cool and dark place for a couple of weeks before I had time to use them.
First thing I did was make a simple vegetable soup using only the vegetables I got from her, and it completely blew me away with the flavors.
I enjoy food and making food, and that soup was one of the best dishes I've ever tasted. Each spoonful was a feast.
I told my friend this, and she replied that she had noticed it right away herself, and like me was taken aback by how stark the difference was to what was in the grocercy stores.
I've made soups and stews with fresh and frozen vegetables, but nothing has come close to those homegrown ones.
Yeah well, my parents have a garden of some 1000 square meters (a quarter acre) and lemme tell ya, there's a lot of stuff you can grow on that area. Obviously as a kid I couldn't escape being sent to attend the garden and saying I wasn't a fan of that is an understatement. Unless you do it as a hobby it's not a pleasant activity.
In fact nowadays I use it to form a mental image on the enthusiasm that today's kids have for reading (and unfortunately mine is no exception). I read a ton as a kid and still read now but my kid wouldn't touch it with a barge pole unless forced to. Never saw him pick up a book on his own volition, that is.
But I imagine it's the same situation as me with tending the garden. Never, not once, did I go to my father and say "dad, gimme the hoe coze I wanna start hoeing the weeds between the tomatoes".
Bottom line, I'd take supermarket vegetables anytime to growing myself. It's just not for me :)
> read a ton as a kid and still read now but my kid wouldn't touch it with a barge pole unless forced to. Never saw him pick up a book on his own volition, that is.
My daughter didn't like to read too, until I bought her a book from Monster High universe (the hot topic for small girls at the time). She was hooked and now buys her own books from allowance.
I'm vegetarian and I've noticed there's an assumption made by many people that vegetarian or vegan food comes with sacrifice and is somehow lacking in pleasure. I can only assume this is because they have only tasted cheap supermarket vegetables or maybe just don't know how to prepare and cook them. I became vegetarian for ethical reasons but I stay for the flavour. I could never go back.
It's no surprise to me that the top vegetarian countries in the world (by percentage of population) have historically been countries like India, Mexico, Italy. All countries with long growing seasons. In India (again, historically, things are changing everywhere), they basically didn't even store food. Vegetables were harvested and eaten right away. Can't get fresher than that.
As with everything, though, you have to choose what to do with your life. Growing vegetables takes time (and money). Given the choice I think most people would opt to buy their vegetables from someone else so they have time to do other things. The problem comes when the quality of those veggies is slowly eroded over time in pursuit of profits. This problem isn't exclusive to vegetables, though.
I guess the point is India can afford to be religious about vegetarian food because they can grow vegetables pretty much year round. India being a big country with all kinds of climate, there are pockets where is is much less enforced, e.g. the Himalayan states.
Yep. Even something simple like bay leaves. I have some from a community garden. Dropped in a couple as normal and you can immediately taste something different compared to store bought leaves.
(with that said, I grew up on a "farm", and as a child had to do a lot of gardening. I understand your enthusiasm about the flavors, but oh heck no, I'll eat the tasteless food for now and happy to not having to deal with all the work in the gardens :) )
Yeah, frozen is pretty good and quite often better nutritionally as it is more ripe than the "fresh" stuff since it doesn't have to be cosmetically appealing or to stay "fresh" while going on the trip through the cold chain.
The general problem is with "fresh" as it is specifically optimized for the time spent in the cold chain. Produce has less water as that would bruise. Stuff is picked while unripe and then "ripened" in warehouses. Characteristics that cause degradation are bred out (like the enzymes in roses that give you the scent that is the defining characteristic of a goddamn rose). etc.
And, you are quite correct that the overarching problem is the consolidation of the food chain into a small number of giant "agribusiness" entities.
Yes exactly - and more broadly pretty much all food consumed globally is automatically selected by tolerance of storage + packaging + shipping. Many varietals and whole specimens have been lost to the annals of history because they cannot make it to a Walmart in North America from Mato Grosso in a scalable (and profitable) way.
Bananas, for example, are practically a miracle fruit for scalable production and distribution. They are incredibly consistent - have resilient skins, have lots of structure that prevents damage from packing, come in easily managed bunches, and (if temperature controlled) the ripening process can begin on demand at point of delivery.
There are many varieties of bananas still grown in SE Asia, the original home of the banana. If somehow Cavendish is wiped out totally, it's not too difficult to pick another cultivar, breed resiliensy to it, and restart the whole banana industry.
I've worked in a "fresh" vegetable packing factory once... I'll go with frozen food. Stuff like broccoli came in from the fields in crates on pallets and were put in cold storage, probably not frozen but close enough, and stayed there until they were individually wrapped. Frequently one of the crates or a whole pallet was moldy and had to be discarded. I have no idea how long it must've been in the cold storage for that to happen.
The place burned down a few years later, anyway; they stacked up pallets as high as the factory itself right next to it, iirc someone lit it.
Frozen is good for smoothies / shakes. You cannot put fresh berries in a mixer and get a smoothie back, instead you'll get an expensive lump of thick substance that you cannot push through the straw :)
The same process makes certain things difficult or impossible because the frozen fruits and vegetables will fall apart (quickly) when cooked.
Also, I will prefer frozen spinach to fresh any day because it takes less time to cook (you can measure enough of it right away into the pan instead of adding incrementally and waiting for it to whittle and cook down).
Also, I think all these compliments to fresh locally picked food vs the plainest cheap stuff from the supermarket exaggerate the difference... a lot. Sometimes there's indeed a noticeable difference because a particular sort of fruit or veg aren't grown industrially (eg. there are plenty of sorts of potatoes but in a supermarket you will find maybe two, which are probably the most resilient to pests). But if you were to grow the same sort of potato you buy from supermarket, I'm pretty sure the difference would be so small as not to be noticeable at all.
From what I understand, if you freeze anything quickly as opposed to slowly, the resulting ice crystals are much smaller -and they tend to have much better taste and texture.
this is true. the process is called flash freezing.
That said, this advantage gets completely undone if the frozen food is left in a pallet waiting to get into another freezer. the subsequent refreeze will introduce the very ice damage the original process was trying to avoid. you can certainly take steps to minimize thaw on the way to your freezer but you don't know if the entire supply chain was so judicious.
IMHO its more about the varieties that are grown for industrial scale and efficiency, rather than flavor. I was part of a community garden and started a lot of stuff from seed- celery, tomatoes, onions, garlic, lettuces etc... and I was overwhelmed by the different numbers of varieties of each and that "celery" isn't just celery. To be fair, not all of it was better- the celery variety was very bitter and chewy, but most other stuff was much more flavorful, though yields were smaller in most cases. The lettuce we grew in particular was so much better than anything sold in a store- at a cost of the fact that it would be wilted and almost unusable by the next day. We did throw in some garlic bulbs straight from the super market to grow next to our "heirloom" variety and the supermarket garlic was exactly what we were used to, while the heirloom was much stronger, and arguably more pleasant (I love garlic). Cooks often joke that "one clove" of garlic really means 5 to them, and I wonder if this is more of a result of breeding garlic over the years for different qualities other than its garlicky-ness instead of just recipe writers with a light hand... I don't think its the methods being used in large scale farming, but really more the varieties attempting to be grown.
There is also a factor that some types of foods will degrade within hours to some extent of being picked- Herbs I pick out of my garden like thyme and rosemary are extremely fragrant when picked, even a few hours later they are noticeably less so. I think many consumers have picked up on this, over the last decade or so I have noticed the fresh plants section of the grocery store expanding, while the "cut and plastic boxed" section of the store shrinking. I am in an urban area, most people don't have outdoor space (I didn't for many years), and I had difficulty keeping those plants alive when attempting to keep them going on my windowsill with a western exposure.
Not how they are grown, but when they were harvested.
Ripe tomatoes are more delicate than underdeveloped, still green tomatoes. So pick them before done developing, ship them, and they'll turn red in the weeks it takes to get to the store.
And if they are picked ripe, they'll also go bad before they even get to shelf via their weeks long boat journey.
That's why local is better, and your own garden better still.
It's better than days old refrigerated food, but not equivalent to freshly picked.
I grow beans in my garden. French beans and broad beans are quite good frozen, perhaps amongst the vegetables that tolerate the freezer the most. Very happy to have those out of season. But there is no comparison possible with the fresh stuff.
Texture and flavor may suffer, but nutritionally, there is no real difference between fresh or frozen. And in the winter, frozen is sometimes the better choice as they are frozen at the peak of readiness.
If it's sent shipped cross-continent(s) it might be.
The point of fresh to me is to have it come from closer sources, even if it's in a worse shape, and be consumed basically in a day or two.
For anyone caring enough, getting access to local(ish) fresh food can be a pretty good indicator of a nice place to live, and it's usually worth the tradeoffs.
I have access to fresh veggies by taking the elevator down and out of my apartment building. There's a fresh groceries store right in front if i want a salad.
But I have no problem with grabbing a bag of frozen veggie mix to make borsch.
Yes, but refrigeration enabled us to produce at massive scale and then ship large distances. Prior to that, you only ate locally (or what could be preserved through pickling and other methods).
Frozen vegetables are less nutrient rich compared to fresh vegetables, because they lose nutrients while being frozen. And to be honest, frozen vegetables are frozen in the first place because those vegetables would have gone to waste otherwise.
So not only is their original state already compromised, they're then even more so when they're frozen.
Furthermore, if a produce purchaser is going to freeze, they freeze as soon as they possibly can to limit any spoilage or degradation, which hurts their overall profit. Frozen fruits and vegetables have typically retained their nutrition much better than "fresh" ones that were shipped from out of state.
Frozen fish and peas can be a lot fresher then even bought direct from local markets. A lot of the worst offenders for flavour loss, like Tomatoes, are from picking before they are ripe, which favours automation but dosn't really require refrigeration.
> Commercial produce today is both less flavorful and markedly less nutritious than what our great-grandparents ate. Outside a home garden or a farmer’s market, the modern consumer can’t taste truly fresh produce. In our pursuit of endless abundance, Twilley explains, we have lost “diversity and deliciousness.”
Yup. Turns out, the varieties that do best in climate controlled greenhouses aren't the ones that have much going on in terms of flavor.
Thankfully at least in Germany there still are farmers' markets, and in Croatia any small town will have a daily one - and the difference is night and day, even compared to German farmers.
Farmers markets (at least locally for me in California USA) are a bit of a crap shoot. They've become popular enough that one has to be discerning because some are infiltrated by people simply reselling goods from warehouse stores, though the boutique varieties of produce are pretty much guaranteed to be authentic and if one is lucky some regular produce is much cheaper than even discount grocers.
Decent vendors usually list their website or farm name on their tent/stall. They could make things up of course, but people who frequent the market would get wise to the shenanigans. If it’s some guy with a bunch of wax boxes worth of produce then yeah, they may just be reselling -just like the rando selling strawberries on a random corner without a license.
Both in Germany and Croatia, that's enforced by the market managers, aka the local government.
Obviously there's exceptions for stuff that's out of season or doesn't even grow in the country - but they do a darn well job at ensuring everyone plays by the rules.
I’m quite envious of that situation, here it’s an anything goes for the provenance of goods and the onus is on the consumer to be ever vigilant in almost all markets and guaranteed to get worse for a generation at least (federal judges being lifetime appointments).
This is a review of an excellent book by Nicola Twilley. Also worth checking out is Twilley's podcast Gastropod (https://gastropod.com), which "looks at food through the lens of science and history".
https://web.archive.org/web/20240804172211/https://www.nytim...
https://archive.ph/GNKiL
The home refrigerator is barely a century old
When the article was written, it turned 110: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOMELRE
I somewhat follow the vintage refrigeration community (owning a mid-30s Frigidaire myself) and still believe this is the only one of them known to be in existence today: https://www.coolingpost.com/features/ashrae-displays-first-e...
Here is a bit of refrigeration trivia gathered from my own interest in the subject and a penchant for collecting and reading old engineering books, so from the early days of shipping food , in refrigerated cargo ships, determining the ideal cooling temperature for each food type, was one thing, but another, facinating component, is that most food is exothermic, and this property is called "the heat of evolution", and varys with each food type, and is large enough that 50 tons of food will produce enough heat as it ripens to overwhelm an insuficient cooling system, so they had charts detailing the heat output of all the shipped foods, and recomendations on the design of the cooling plants, with some so specialised as to work with one food only....banana boats.... Got a 70 year old "admiral" fridge, the wiring insulation just crumbled, and it will get a new thermostat(hidden) and wire, everything else is in battered original, working condition
> (owning a mid-30s Frigidaire myself)
Growing up in my fathers shop we had a 30's Frigidaire as well. One summer day it was outside getting defrosted and washed when an employee decides to be helpful and chip the ice with a screwdriver. Yes, he punctured the coils. What a scene, I was there and saw the pop, my grandfather sees it through the door and comes flying out screaming, then my father comes out and it turns into a scene (guy wasn't fired but got an ear full.) My grandfather silver soldered the aluminum coil but the few technicians they called didn't want to or know how to charge it. So it went to the scrap guy. I was just a kid but if I were older I would have pushed to get it fixed.
Any discussion of the history of refrigeration needs to mention the yakhchāl (~2400 years old)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakhchāl
Home refrigeration is quite a bit older than electric refrigerators though. Iceboxes, kept cool by chunks of ice, were also called refrigerators and started being produced for home use in the 1840s.
Interestingly, my Mom's parents owned both an icebox and a quite modern electric refrigerator (1980s).
The icebox was kept in a carpeted room and it was used for dry storage. We never put ice in it. And it was definitely called "the icebox". But also, Grandma referred to the refrigerator as "the icebox" as well, and we always knew what she meant, because she'd typically say "put that milk in the icebox" or whatever to refrigerate the stuff.
Grandma had the best kitchen with the most fascinating appliances and gadgets. She had a flour sifter, an eggbeater or two, an actual breadbox (have you ever heard the question, "is it bigger than a breadbox?"). Our other grandparents were the first ones on the block to purchase a microwave oven. They hoisted it on top of the refrigerator and we could barely reach into it! My cousin said not to look into the microwave while it was cooking because it'd cook our eyeballs!
I have some parallels.
My father's parents had a late-40s or early-50s refrigerator in the kitchen well into the late-90s. It had an actual levered latch to hold it shut, and a small freezer section up in the top. Especially as a child, I had to just about body-slam the door to get it to latch. That was the "icebox". They also had a more-modern fridge and chest freezer in the basement. Honestly, I don't remember how they differentiated them, vocabulary-wise.
There was an actual Radar Range microwave, although I don't know the vintage. Old enough for a mechanical timer and a bell to ring when it was done.
Grandma was a home baker (especially cookies at Christmas), so she certainly had all the classic equipment, hand and electric egg-beaters, flour sifters, breadbox...yep.
We stored meat in cold conditions back in the paleolithic. All you need really is to know how to dig a hole.
The question is what changes to the mode of production were brought by the technological advance. I think fatty tuna sushi became popular due to early refrigeration
That's a pretty cool hobby...
I can't emphasize this strongly enough. Recently, I had the pleasure of eating at a fine dining restaurant that grows a number of vegetables and herbs, and they presented an amuse bouche with a number of raw vegetables and herbs for us to taste. Their flavours were so elevated compared to the usual counterparts that I get from supermarkets, that I questioned whether any artificial addititives were used - obviously not. The difference is like going from being short sighted but able to complete daily activites with some difficulty, to wearing glasses that makes everything crystal clear and easy.
Moving to the US from Europe the quality of the produce was one of my biggest culture shocks. There was tons more availability especially out of season and it was cheaper but the fruit and vegetables here are so bland. Even the so called heirloom varieties are devoid of the flavor I’m used to.
It’s gotten better over the years as consumer awareness has grown but now there’s the trend of making fruit increasingly sweet like cosmic crisp apples, sumo mandarins, or cotton candy grapes.
Part of it is that the plants have been optimized for durability in transport, harvesting etc not just flavor. Farmers Markets here in the US or smaller chains are more likely to have the better produce but not guaranteed depending on where you are.
Turns out you can measure the sweetness of an orange using an infrared light and camera.
Then you can sort all the oranges by sweetness, and sell the sweet ones to one place and the pretty ones to another.
Where the consumer only sees the looks in the shop, why send that country the nice tasting ones?
This sounds like a business opportunity. Handheld produce analyzers you bring to the store/farmer's market/etc.
Out of season stuff is usually imported from Mexico or South America. I'm guessing the long distance transport conditions may change the taste of the produce?
Yes, everything from parts of the fruit not rippening (Sometimes not at all), weakening of flavours, or visually ripe fruit that's really not
Having scaled the latitudes of Europe, I will say that your generalisation is moot.
Try an aubergine in Germany, and then try one in Sicily. The difference is stark.
My point of reference is the same latitude as Moscow for what it’s worth and yet the food I get here in Southern California falls short. Sicily would be a dream in comparison.
Very true but how many people would pay the extra cost for vegetables outside the agricultural industrial complex? Most people want cheap and their fruits and vegetables year round, even if they are out of season. There is a major taste difference just between canned vegetables vs frozen.
My biggest annoyance is ordering a BLT in August and getting a green artificially ripened tomato even though ripe and flavorful ones can be found everywhere. You would think that CSAs would be a lot more popular and successful then they are but the reason (imo) is that most people really don't want to cook and even if they do, they don't want to do that every day so the CSA shares end up overwhelming them with fresh supplies that get given away or thrown out instead.
You think that it's cheaper for some reason to get it from the "complex", while it is very obviously not so.
The logistics between growers to distributors to store and customers add a ton of cost to your food. In the order of 200%.
The reliance on external food sources for many ingredients exacerbates this even more.
Many business models in other countries are based on lowering logistics, doing basically grower-to-customer directly and evading all the middlemen. No refrigeration, better quality, cheaper food.
Our neighbor told this story about her mom. They are both French, but the daughter lives in the Netherlands for about a decade. The mom lives in France.
The mom came to visit her daughter during COVID and while eating something bought from the local supermarket, she noticed that the food has a very weak taste if any at all. COVID was said to impact one's sense of taste or smell. So, upon returning to France, she went to take a test and... she didn't have COVID. In fact was completely healthy :)
I went to France last summer. And... truth be told, I don't taste the difference between Dutch vegetables and French vegetables. To me they are both fine. The bread on the other hand is on a completely different level.
Anyways. I don't really know what may be causing these perceived differences in taste. But, I have a theory that it's a learned thing. Maybe our sensors adapt to a particular food and then a very small change overall can affect them in a major way?
Oo can you share the restaurants name?
If you can find a good family-run Vietnamese Phở restaurant, try it out. The ones around here serve very fresh food, and I specifically asked the wife where she got the fresh herbs, and she said that grandma grows them in her backyard. There are spearmint, cilantro, jalapeños, and bean sprouts. They are always so very consistent and fresh and very healthy plants. There is absolutely no comparison to this sort of restaurant. The others can serve food-service slop, and somehow, Vietnamese cooks' main ingredient is love.
> we have lost “diversity and deliciousness"
I sincerely doubt that the chilled stock in a local Irish supermarket makes my food options LESS diverse than they were a century ago. Grapes, blueberries, strawberries everywhere at any time of year, frozen fish from halfway around the planet, frozen pizzas, even ice cream for God's sake. Perhaps the cucumbers are worse, but I can always get them, and don't have to suffer the Hungry Gap in winter on nothing but potatoes, nettles, cabbage, pickles, and grain.
> American households open the fridge door an average of 107 times a day
This also beggars belief.
The fridge door one came up some time ago on HN with actual data to back it up from "smart" fridges. Some people with kids said it was opened well over 100 times a day which shocked me.
If TV/film/YouTube is anything to go by the habit of leaving the door open for extended periods is common too. That one really grinds my gears. I just can't understand a brain that doesn't tell you to minimise the amount of time the door is open. It's one of those things that makes me realise how fundamentally different people can be.
A few years ago I had a housemate who would fill up the kettle all the way to the brim, would wait for it to boil and then she'd make a single cup of tea and let the rest go cold. Every single time. This unreasonably angered me.
Kettle fillers are bizarre but I think there's slightly more to it. Some people think they are being rude if they only prepare enough food for themselves. I think kettle fillers may believe they are doing a service for others when they fill. But that's really stretching the benefit of the doubt here. They may just be thick.
I can actually top this, though. In my student days I had a guy from a hot country move in. Apparently the water from the tap was too cold so he would warm it in the kettle. The trouble is the kettle is too hot... So I watched in utter disbelief as he boiled the kettle, poured boiling water into a pint glass, then carried said glass to the fridge to cool it back down to drinking temperature!
Later I came back and he'd forgotten about the water so it was now colder than tap water in the fridge.
My math may be off, but it seems like 2000 joules to cool the volume of air 1 degree C vs 6,000,000 for the same volume of water.
It's the stuff in the fridge that takes the initial work, repeatedly exchanging the air is maybe a rounding error?
When I bought a fridge for my camper I realized why nobody who cares about power usage has a common standing fridge. Every time you open the door the cool air falls out, it sucks in the warm room air and has to start over again.
While "camping coolers" just keep the cold air inside.
My fridge doesn't cool when the door is opened, not even sure if slightly longer opening times make a huge difference when the complete air is exchanged in seconds anyway.
100 times a day might be bursts of many times in short succession, which is definitely preferable to leaving the door open for what might be a longer cumulative time.
Minimizing the number of openings, even in favor of longer ones, would reduce the number of times the air in the fridge is cycled.
You can probably chart this and calculate an optimum.
Perhaps the diversity lost is the one caused by seasonality. Fruits and vegetables are highly seasonal, some meat and fish are, too.
From reading various articles, apparently there really was greater diversity in vegetables, too. Nowadays people eat tomatoes, salad, onions, perhaps carots, and that's about it but there are many, many more that can be locally grown and that have almost disappeared from many people's diets. If you mention swedes, turnips, cabbage, beetroots, leeks, rhubarb, types of squash, etc. even cauliflowers to many people they won't be able to tell you when was the last time they ate or touched one. The only time people touch a pumpkin is at Halloween and they don't eat them.
Regarding meat, offal has almost completely disappeared, and I suspect seafood is now mostly processed fish from one or two species only.
> swedes, turnips, cabbage, beetroots, leeks, rhubarb, types of squash, etc.
Perhaps this is a U.S. issue. Every single one of these is available at my local Lidl supermarket (~a marginally upscale Aldi for those outside Europe) for much of the year, not to mention other more starkly seasonal things that filter in like peaches, salsify, runner beans, cherimoya (a tropical fruit), and so on. Across Europe I've had no trouble getting all the offal I'd want: head cheese/zult, haggis, black pudding, balkenbrij, hearts, various horrors suspended in aspic-- in supermarkets. Not specialist shops, not the butcher. I'm in rural Ireland now, but the selection was better yet when I lived in Switzerland and NL and also shopped at Lidl.
Those are all available in any US supermarket well. The quantities on the shelf suggest they don't sell well, just enough to be worth having.
I should have mentioned that I am in the UK.
Many of them tend to be available in supermarkets, though it varies by location, but, really it's only older people who buy them.
That said, coming from the continent myself, the UK is below average. For an island the general lack of a variety of seafood is especially stricking.
There is some diversity missing from my local UK supermarket. I don't know if it existing before, but I can only ever get one kind of squash - butternut. There are dozens of other varieties of squash of different shapes and colours but I can only get them at a farmer's market.
Hmm isn't frozen food - even veggies - very close in content to fresh food?
The real problem being not how the veggies are stored on their way to us, but how they're grown industrially?
A friend started growing vegetables, and I got some as a gift at the end of the season.
Just regular stuff like potatoes, carrots, celery root, parsnip and such.
Now when I got them I was very busy, so they sat in a cool and dark place for a couple of weeks before I had time to use them.
First thing I did was make a simple vegetable soup using only the vegetables I got from her, and it completely blew me away with the flavors.
I enjoy food and making food, and that soup was one of the best dishes I've ever tasted. Each spoonful was a feast.
I told my friend this, and she replied that she had noticed it right away herself, and like me was taken aback by how stark the difference was to what was in the grocercy stores.
I've made soups and stews with fresh and frozen vegetables, but nothing has come close to those homegrown ones.
Yeah well, my parents have a garden of some 1000 square meters (a quarter acre) and lemme tell ya, there's a lot of stuff you can grow on that area. Obviously as a kid I couldn't escape being sent to attend the garden and saying I wasn't a fan of that is an understatement. Unless you do it as a hobby it's not a pleasant activity.
In fact nowadays I use it to form a mental image on the enthusiasm that today's kids have for reading (and unfortunately mine is no exception). I read a ton as a kid and still read now but my kid wouldn't touch it with a barge pole unless forced to. Never saw him pick up a book on his own volition, that is.
But I imagine it's the same situation as me with tending the garden. Never, not once, did I go to my father and say "dad, gimme the hoe coze I wanna start hoeing the weeds between the tomatoes".
Bottom line, I'd take supermarket vegetables anytime to growing myself. It's just not for me :)
> read a ton as a kid and still read now but my kid wouldn't touch it with a barge pole unless forced to. Never saw him pick up a book on his own volition, that is.
My daughter didn't like to read too, until I bought her a book from Monster High universe (the hot topic for small girls at the time). She was hooked and now buys her own books from allowance.
Yeah she spent a lot of time on her small plot, and the result was essentially just a handful of meals.
Gave me a newfound appreciation for how much work growing crops is.
Yep, the difference in taste is remarkable.
I'm vegetarian and I've noticed there's an assumption made by many people that vegetarian or vegan food comes with sacrifice and is somehow lacking in pleasure. I can only assume this is because they have only tasted cheap supermarket vegetables or maybe just don't know how to prepare and cook them. I became vegetarian for ethical reasons but I stay for the flavour. I could never go back.
It's no surprise to me that the top vegetarian countries in the world (by percentage of population) have historically been countries like India, Mexico, Italy. All countries with long growing seasons. In India (again, historically, things are changing everywhere), they basically didn't even store food. Vegetables were harvested and eaten right away. Can't get fresher than that.
As with everything, though, you have to choose what to do with your life. Growing vegetables takes time (and money). Given the choice I think most people would opt to buy their vegetables from someone else so they have time to do other things. The problem comes when the quality of those veggies is slowly eroded over time in pursuit of profits. This problem isn't exclusive to vegetables, though.
India is up there because many of them are vegetarian for religious reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_and_religion
Religion follows reality, though. It's not a coincidence that vegetarianism is common in Indian religions and not among the Inuit.
I guess the point is India can afford to be religious about vegetarian food because they can grow vegetables pretty much year round. India being a big country with all kinds of climate, there are pockets where is is much less enforced, e.g. the Himalayan states.
Yep. Even something simple like bay leaves. I have some from a community garden. Dropped in a couple as normal and you can immediately taste something different compared to store bought leaves.
Too bad local farming is not scalable.
There are things where you don't need scaling, maybe.
Around me there are a lot of those community gardens. It's encouraged by the city, and you can rent a piece of land for yourself.
https://www.lebendige-traditionen.ch/tradition/en/home/tradi...
(with that said, I grew up on a "farm", and as a child had to do a lot of gardening. I understand your enthusiasm about the flavors, but oh heck no, I'll eat the tasteless food for now and happy to not having to deal with all the work in the gardens :) )
There are a few community gardens around me too. But how many members does that feed and entertain? Hundreds?
Farming for quality is a luxury activity.
Bay leaves that aren't dessicated and crumbled to dust in the sad little spice jar are kind of magical
We garden a lot, and buy shares and volunteer for local farming co-ops.
We don’t save any money this way but we eat better and feel more self sufficient.
This year will be my first crop of sweet corn :)
Yeah, frozen is pretty good and quite often better nutritionally as it is more ripe than the "fresh" stuff since it doesn't have to be cosmetically appealing or to stay "fresh" while going on the trip through the cold chain.
The general problem is with "fresh" as it is specifically optimized for the time spent in the cold chain. Produce has less water as that would bruise. Stuff is picked while unripe and then "ripened" in warehouses. Characteristics that cause degradation are bred out (like the enzymes in roses that give you the scent that is the defining characteristic of a goddamn rose). etc.
And, you are quite correct that the overarching problem is the consolidation of the food chain into a small number of giant "agribusiness" entities.
Yes exactly - and more broadly pretty much all food consumed globally is automatically selected by tolerance of storage + packaging + shipping. Many varietals and whole specimens have been lost to the annals of history because they cannot make it to a Walmart in North America from Mato Grosso in a scalable (and profitable) way.
Bananas, for example, are practically a miracle fruit for scalable production and distribution. They are incredibly consistent - have resilient skins, have lots of structure that prevents damage from packing, come in easily managed bunches, and (if temperature controlled) the ripening process can begin on demand at point of delivery.
And thus, this monoculture became susceptible to a single fungal plague that is killing the plantation!
And a replacement species is not available.
> And a replacement species is not available
There are many varieties of bananas still grown in SE Asia, the original home of the banana. If somehow Cavendish is wiped out totally, it's not too difficult to pick another cultivar, breed resiliensy to it, and restart the whole banana industry.
I've worked in a "fresh" vegetable packing factory once... I'll go with frozen food. Stuff like broccoli came in from the fields in crates on pallets and were put in cold storage, probably not frozen but close enough, and stayed there until they were individually wrapped. Frequently one of the crates or a whole pallet was moldy and had to be discarded. I have no idea how long it must've been in the cold storage for that to happen.
The place burned down a few years later, anyway; they stacked up pallets as high as the factory itself right next to it, iirc someone lit it.
Frozen is good for smoothies / shakes. You cannot put fresh berries in a mixer and get a smoothie back, instead you'll get an expensive lump of thick substance that you cannot push through the straw :)
The same process makes certain things difficult or impossible because the frozen fruits and vegetables will fall apart (quickly) when cooked.
Also, I will prefer frozen spinach to fresh any day because it takes less time to cook (you can measure enough of it right away into the pan instead of adding incrementally and waiting for it to whittle and cook down).
Also, I think all these compliments to fresh locally picked food vs the plainest cheap stuff from the supermarket exaggerate the difference... a lot. Sometimes there's indeed a noticeable difference because a particular sort of fruit or veg aren't grown industrially (eg. there are plenty of sorts of potatoes but in a supermarket you will find maybe two, which are probably the most resilient to pests). But if you were to grow the same sort of potato you buy from supermarket, I'm pretty sure the difference would be so small as not to be noticeable at all.
From what I understand, if you freeze anything quickly as opposed to slowly, the resulting ice crystals are much smaller -and they tend to have much better taste and texture.
this is true. the process is called flash freezing.
That said, this advantage gets completely undone if the frozen food is left in a pallet waiting to get into another freezer. the subsequent refreeze will introduce the very ice damage the original process was trying to avoid. you can certainly take steps to minimize thaw on the way to your freezer but you don't know if the entire supply chain was so judicious.
IMHO its more about the varieties that are grown for industrial scale and efficiency, rather than flavor. I was part of a community garden and started a lot of stuff from seed- celery, tomatoes, onions, garlic, lettuces etc... and I was overwhelmed by the different numbers of varieties of each and that "celery" isn't just celery. To be fair, not all of it was better- the celery variety was very bitter and chewy, but most other stuff was much more flavorful, though yields were smaller in most cases. The lettuce we grew in particular was so much better than anything sold in a store- at a cost of the fact that it would be wilted and almost unusable by the next day. We did throw in some garlic bulbs straight from the super market to grow next to our "heirloom" variety and the supermarket garlic was exactly what we were used to, while the heirloom was much stronger, and arguably more pleasant (I love garlic). Cooks often joke that "one clove" of garlic really means 5 to them, and I wonder if this is more of a result of breeding garlic over the years for different qualities other than its garlicky-ness instead of just recipe writers with a light hand... I don't think its the methods being used in large scale farming, but really more the varieties attempting to be grown.
There is also a factor that some types of foods will degrade within hours to some extent of being picked- Herbs I pick out of my garden like thyme and rosemary are extremely fragrant when picked, even a few hours later they are noticeably less so. I think many consumers have picked up on this, over the last decade or so I have noticed the fresh plants section of the grocery store expanding, while the "cut and plastic boxed" section of the store shrinking. I am in an urban area, most people don't have outdoor space (I didn't for many years), and I had difficulty keeping those plants alive when attempting to keep them going on my windowsill with a western exposure.
Not how they are grown, but when they were harvested.
Ripe tomatoes are more delicate than underdeveloped, still green tomatoes. So pick them before done developing, ship them, and they'll turn red in the weeks it takes to get to the store.
And if they are picked ripe, they'll also go bad before they even get to shelf via their weeks long boat journey.
That's why local is better, and your own garden better still.
It's better than days old refrigerated food, but not equivalent to freshly picked.
I grow beans in my garden. French beans and broad beans are quite good frozen, perhaps amongst the vegetables that tolerate the freezer the most. Very happy to have those out of season. But there is no comparison possible with the fresh stuff.
Texture and flavor may suffer, but nutritionally, there is no real difference between fresh or frozen. And in the winter, frozen is sometimes the better choice as they are frozen at the peak of readiness.
If it's sent shipped cross-continent(s) it might be.
The point of fresh to me is to have it come from closer sources, even if it's in a worse shape, and be consumed basically in a day or two.
For anyone caring enough, getting access to local(ish) fresh food can be a pretty good indicator of a nice place to live, and it's usually worth the tradeoffs.
I have access to fresh veggies by taking the elevator down and out of my apartment building. There's a fresh groceries store right in front if i want a salad.
But I have no problem with grabbing a bag of frozen veggie mix to make borsch.
Yes, but refrigeration enabled us to produce at massive scale and then ship large distances. Prior to that, you only ate locally (or what could be preserved through pickling and other methods).
And there's another issue I have heard raised — we ate a lot more probiotic foods before refrigeration because you could keep it over the winter.
It's proposed that our gut biomes desperately miss those days.
Not flavor
Exactly... the real problem is how they're grown.
Frozen vegetables are less nutrient rich compared to fresh vegetables, because they lose nutrients while being frozen. And to be honest, frozen vegetables are frozen in the first place because those vegetables would have gone to waste otherwise.
So not only is their original state already compromised, they're then even more so when they're frozen.
Freezing itself does not lower nutritional value.
Furthermore, if a produce purchaser is going to freeze, they freeze as soon as they possibly can to limit any spoilage or degradation, which hurts their overall profit. Frozen fruits and vegetables have typically retained their nutrition much better than "fresh" ones that were shipped from out of state.
Frozen fish and peas can be a lot fresher then even bought direct from local markets. A lot of the worst offenders for flavour loss, like Tomatoes, are from picking before they are ripe, which favours automation but dosn't really require refrigeration.
Unless you live in front of the sea, frozen fish is almost always better.
Tomatoes can improve substantially if left without refrigeration, it's one of those fruits that continues to ripen after being picked.
I think there was a Good Eats episode, that tomatoes actually lose flavor if refrigerated - some chemical change, don’t remember the details.
Does it regain the flavour in the same way chocolate does when brought back to room temp, or does it lose flavour permanently?
Unfortunately no.
The cold degrades some molecules involved in the flavour of the fruit.
But also yes. There may be some loss as you describe , but they’ll taste better brought back till room temperature than straight from the fridge .
> Commercial produce today is both less flavorful and markedly less nutritious than what our great-grandparents ate. Outside a home garden or a farmer’s market, the modern consumer can’t taste truly fresh produce. In our pursuit of endless abundance, Twilley explains, we have lost “diversity and deliciousness.”
Yup. Turns out, the varieties that do best in climate controlled greenhouses aren't the ones that have much going on in terms of flavor.
Thankfully at least in Germany there still are farmers' markets, and in Croatia any small town will have a daily one - and the difference is night and day, even compared to German farmers.
Farmers markets (at least locally for me in California USA) are a bit of a crap shoot. They've become popular enough that one has to be discerning because some are infiltrated by people simply reselling goods from warehouse stores, though the boutique varieties of produce are pretty much guaranteed to be authentic and if one is lucky some regular produce is much cheaper than even discount grocers.
Decent vendors usually list their website or farm name on their tent/stall. They could make things up of course, but people who frequent the market would get wise to the shenanigans. If it’s some guy with a bunch of wax boxes worth of produce then yeah, they may just be reselling -just like the rando selling strawberries on a random corner without a license.
Both in Germany and Croatia, that's enforced by the market managers, aka the local government.
Obviously there's exceptions for stuff that's out of season or doesn't even grow in the country - but they do a darn well job at ensuring everyone plays by the rules.
I’m quite envious of that situation, here it’s an anything goes for the provenance of goods and the onus is on the consumer to be ever vigilant in almost all markets and guaranteed to get worse for a generation at least (federal judges being lifetime appointments).
Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/24/books/review/frostbite-ni...
This is a review of an excellent book by Nicola Twilley. Also worth checking out is Twilley's podcast Gastropod (https://gastropod.com), which "looks at food through the lens of science and history".
(2024) Related: Remembering the First 'Cold-Storage Banquet' (33 points, 8 months ago, 9 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41150879