Near a Thousand Tables (43 page)

Freshness in food is the quality hardest to deliver when space opens up between points of production and consumption. It was a problem for city-dwellers in ancient Rome. Seneca described runners, “breathless and shouting,” to clear the
way as they bore live turbot for gourmets who “cannot taste a fish unless they see it swimming and palpitating in the very
dining room
.” When industrialization multiplied the problems of ensuring fresh supplies, preservation was Western society's first, traditional recourse. Most methods are of great antiquity. As noted above (p. 155), freeze drying, which most people think of as one of the most up-to-date techniques, was perfected as a way of preserving potatoes by early Andean civilizations over two thousand years ago. The technique was elaborate: overnight freezing, then trampling to squeeze out residual moisture, then sun drying, repeated over several days. The durability of frozen food has been known to all Arctic peoples from time immemorial. Wind drying, as suggested above (p. 4), was probably an older technique of preparation than cooking. In every documented period of the history of food, salting, fermenting and smoking appear among recorded preserving techniques.

It is well known, moreover, by trial and error, in almost all societies, that the decay and putrescence of food can be arrested by isolation from the air. Oil seals were used in the storage jars of ancient Mesopotamia. The use of butter or aspic was a favorite device in the European Middle Ages to fill up the cavities in pies and keep the contents from contact with the air. Potted fish and meat are legacies from the same tradition. If potted foods are actually cooked in the pot they will keep for months without refrigeration or added preservatives. In the Middle Ages, tightly coopered, well-seasoned barrels were sought by all long-range navigators to limit bacterial activity. We know very little about the water preservation technology of the period, except that vinegar was used to prolong the life of drinking water on board ship. But the leap to long-range voyaging at the end of the Middle Ages, when Portuguese expeditions to the Indian Ocean tripled earlier records for time spent continuously at sea, would have been impossible without improvements in the design of casks to make them more airtight.

The theory which explains the phenomenon of bacterial suppression, however, was still unknown. The science of food preservation fascinated geniuses of the early scientific revolution. Francis Bacon was the first martyr: he died of an infection contracted while he was experimenting with the “induration” of chicken at low temperatures. In the late seventeenth century Denis Papin's experiments with the preserving properties of boiled sugar inspired Leibniz with the idea of adapting his discoveries to sustain armies
in the field
. By that date microbial activity had already been revealed by the microscope of Anton van Leeuwenhoek. The commonsense assumption was that the mold and worms that are visibly associated with putrescence generate spontaneously and, like many other life forms on earth, need air to survive.

Yet the problem of explaining how microbes reproduce was actually one of the most profound in science. Archaea, closely followed by the slightly more complex organisms called eukaryotes and prokaryotes—one-celled life forms, the former with, the latter without, nuclei—are the most primitive life-forms on the planet: indeed, for three and a half billion years or so, by most reckonings, these were the only life-forms. As the earth had already existed for between 500 million and one billion years when they appeared, they cannot be said always to have existed. They must have arisen spontaneously at first, by some sort of “chemical accident,” before developing the ability to reproduce. Alternatively, the evolutionary process must have been started by an act of divine creation or by some other intervention beyond the realm of science. In the debates of the eighteenth century, though the antiquity of microbes had not been determined, and a theory of evolution had been proposed only in a very rudimentary form, a sense that the very existence of God was at stake—or, at least, the validity of claims about his unique power to create life—invigorated debate about spontaneous generation. As far as we know, there is no case of spontaneous generation in nature. Yet it was a theory much cultivated at the time, especially among free thinkers, until, in 1799, Lazaro Spallanzani observed fission—cells reproducing by splitting—under a microscope. He concluded that microbes did not “appear” from nowhere: they could only multiply in an environment where they were already present.

He demonstrated that if bacteria—or “animalculi,” to use the term favored at the time, or “germs,” as he called them—were killed by heat before food was sealed, they could not generate spontaneously; the demonstration was imperfect, since he could not show conclusively that the heating was effective in itself: critics claimed that heating worked by somehow depriving the heated substance of air. Nevertheless, the lessons of Spallanzani's experiments for the food industry were clear. Heating and sealing in combination could ensure that food would keep indefinitely. The result was the most important innovation up to that time in the history of food preservation: the rise of canning. The fact that Spallanzani's discovery occurred at a time of war made the application of his work a matter of urgency and utility.

Almost simultaneously—and perhaps merely coincidentally—commercial bottling was introduced into a confectioner's business in Paris by Nicolas Appert, who had been working on the effects of sugar on preservation since about 1780. In 1804 he opened a factory at Massy with fifty workers, and began experiments with tins heated in boiling water, then watched to see whether they
showed signs of expansion caused by microbial activity. In practice, most of his output remained confined to glass jars for many years. Meanwhile, he graduated to the use of steam pressure cookers. When, in 1810, he made his process public in a book, he appealed to gourmets and housewives. Really, however, the needs of the army were the paramount consideration. “Appertization” came to mean
sterilization by heating
. Canning in tinned iron containers, sealed by soldering, began in England at about the same time. Appert switched to them in 1822. They were not, at first, entirely reliable. Sir John Franklin's expedition in search of the Northwest Passage failed, and all the members perished, not, perhaps, because of cold but because of botulism—ironically, in an environment so cold that exposed food naturally kept fresh while lethal bacteria bred in the expedition's cans. On the other hand, some cans from the 1820s have been found to contain still edible food.

At first, the industry was chiefly concerned with supplying the armed services; but a few products soon achieved a certain éclat with the wider public. The first was sardines, canned in Nantes in the 1820s. By 1836 Joseph Colin's firm was producing 100,000 cans annually. By 1880 50 million tins of sardines were emerging yearly from canneries on the
west coast of France
. In terms of volume of production, milk was probably the next most important product of the early industry. Gail Borden began canning milk in America in time to supply Union armies in the Civil War. The great interest of these products was that they acquired properties and flavor which distinguished them from their fresh forms: sardines acquired succulence and a grainy consistency; canned—popularly “condensed”—milk, which was sugared to assist preservation, had distinctive sweetness and a thick consistency.

Canning, in effect, was a method of cooking, not just preserving. Grimod de La Reynière, the great gourmet, early food guru and disseminator of Appert's bottling process, declared bottled petits pois to be as delicious as those
eaten in season
. He was wrong. They are different and, in their way, better. The lengths to which Three Men in a Boat went to enjoy canned pineapple supply one of the legendary episodes in English comic literature. Their dog escaped “merely with a flesh wound” as, using the mast as a weapon,

We beat it out flat; we beat it back square; we battered it into every form known to geometry—but we could not make a hole in it. Then George went at it, and knocked it into a shape so strange, so weird, so unearthly in its wild hideousness, that he got frightened and threw away the mast. Then we all three sat round it
on the grass and looked at it. There was one great dent across the top that had the appearance of a mocking grin.

The peculiar quality which made this bootless, booty-less battle seem worthwhile was the “
thought of the juice
.” Jules Gouffré, one of the most famous chefs of the nineteenth century, was devoted to the pursuit of individual creativity, but he had high praise for the tenderness of canned petits pois, and the aftertaste of
tinned salmon terrine
.

I should declare my interest. I like fresh food. I like the modifications made by frankly transforming preservation methods. I do not like old food which masquerades as fresh. Therefore I do not like freezing or irradiation. The justification for these processes is claimed to be that they do not impair, or barely impair, flavor. Pressure cooking in a space filled with steam at 120 degrees for at least fifteen minutes kills microbes and spores: it also kills a lot of the taste and texture of many foods. Steaming or boiling deals with most microbes and as far as we know, all pathogenic ones, but leaves spores that germinate as the liquid cools. So second and even third boilings are necessary: failure to observe this requirement was one of the reasons why Spallanzani's efforts were imperfect. After two or three boilings most green vegetables have been done to death. Obviously, none of these methods suited the scientists and entrepreneurs who sought a way of preserving food without changing it. Milk is a special case: it can be pasteurized—heated, that is, to seventy degrees—without much noticeable effect on its flavor. This kills enough germs to delay souring. Ultraheat treatment is exposure to a four-second blast of vigorous boiling followed by rapid cooling. Milk so treated will keep for months but many palates reject the claim that the quality is unaffected. Chemical preservation is risky. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Borax was added to most preserved fish and meat, and used to prolong the shelf life of dairy products; now it is reclassified as a poison and forbidden. Chemical suppression of bacteria seems bound to affect the flavor of food, even if it does no further harm.

Irradiation is extremely effective as a method of preservation. Only one known microbe survives gamma rays, but the idea is revolting and it is impossible to believe that the delicacy, aroma and gustatory impact of the food are unaffected either by the irradiation process or by the long shelf life to which irradiated items are condemned. Any method of preservation which delivers food disguised as fresh, months after emergence from the field or slaughterhouse, seems repugnant. Traditionally preserved foods are changed by the process; so no subterfuge is involved; in some respects they are changed for the better. It would be a sacrifice to
eat only pickled, fermented, dried, potted or smoked, sugar-preserved and salted foods but as long as they do not altogether supplant fresh articles they are an enhancement of life. Others, like cheese and sauerkraut, rely on their own bacterial allies to suppress others which cause decay: a cheese is an ecosystem and in the veins of Roquefort or Stilton you can see the battlegrounds of rival bacteria, friendly and malignant. In line with the maxim “Il faut vivre pour manger et ne pas manger pour vivre,” preserving should not be for its own sake, but, like cooking, should be practiced to produce an effect delightful in itself. While genuinely fresh food is abundant, what is gained by misrepresenting as fresh food which lingers after processing, like an embalmed corpse, supine, lifeless and commendable only because of the absence of stench?

Freezing supplied the least offensive answer to the problems of the search for preservation without alteration. From 1806, Boston traders conducted extensive commerce in enormous blocks of Arctic ice, towed to destinations all over the Atlantic world. In 1851 the first refrigerated rail car, cooled by natural ice, brought butter from Ogdensburg, New York, to Boston. Ice, however, remained, in most of the world, an expensive commodity, which could never be the basis of industrial freezing: there would never be sufficient ice nor low enough temperatures. The solution was the compressed-gas cooler, perfected in Australia in the 1870s primarily for the brewing industry—but its wider usefulness was obvious in a hemisphere with a large meat surplus and nowhere nearby to export it to. The first long-range shipment of frozen meat is generally said to have been made in 1876 by the SS
Paraguay
from Argentina to France at minus thirty degrees Celsius. Australia's first shipment to London was made in 1880.

The impact was enormous: meat became relatively cheap and abundant in the industrial world. Yet this was a modest effect in comparison with what followed in the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century. Clarence Birdseye, having observed Inuit
cookery in the Arctic
, invented cellophane wrapping, which made it possible to freeze food more quickly while it was fresh. He also introduced a waxed cardboard wrapper that did not dissolve when thawed. This “marvellous invention” by man “wrought a miracle which … may change the whole course of food history.” So said General Foods' copywriters in their first advertisement for Birdseye “Frosted Foods.” Cole Porter included cellophane in his list of “the tops,” along with a summer night in Spain, the National Gallery and Garbo's salary. By 1959 Americans were spending $2.7 billion annually on frozen foods, including half a billion on ready-prepared meals of the
“heat and serve” variety
. Birdseye had opened the way to a further stage of industrialization: the industrialization not just of production, processing and supply, but of eating.

An hour before the migrants' train arrived in Chicago they began to notice the smell.