Well-Traveled and Unspoiled

By ARAM BAKSHIAN JR.

Fresh
By Susanne Freidberg
Belknap, 408 pages, $27.95

Exactly what is fresh? And what is it about the word, Susanne Freidberg asks, that "makes marketers so keen to put it on every label"? The obvious answer: Fresh is the opposite of rotten and, when it comes to food, a quality that improves taste and the odds of surviving the experience of eating. But Ms. Freidberg, a professor at Dartmouth, has a bigger idea in mind.

The appeal of the word fresh, she says, "lies in the anxieties and dilemmas borne of industrial capitalism and the culture of mass consumption. This culture promotes novelty and nostalgia, obsolescence and shelflife, indulgence and discipline. It surrounds us with great abundance, but not with much that feels authentic or healthful. It leaves many people yearning to connect to nature and community but too busy to spend much time in either. Above all, it's a culture that encourages us to consume both as often as possible and in ever better, more enlightened ways. . . . Of all the qualities we seek in food, freshness best satisfies all these modern appetites."

OK, then. There is certainly much that is "modern" about the fresh food we now enjoy, not least the incredibly complex and ingenious globalized trade and technology networks that bring unprecedented freshness and variety to American supermarkets and tables. Perhaps "anxieties and dilemmas" play a role on the demand side, too. To Ms. Freidberg's credit, she traces not only her cultural theories but the real-world trade routes to freshness, so to speak. The result is a sometimes insightful, sometimes confused book, both readable and scholarly (there are almost 100 pages of footnotes).

Like the television fare that consumes so many hours of life today, America's food supply offers an array of choices, some tasteless and downright unwholesome. But there is quality to be found if you seek it out, and a kind of abundance that is something to marvel at. Thanks to refrigeration and modern transport, snow-bound consumers in midwinter Michigan can buy limes, mangoes, grapes, peaches, pears and melons from Chile and Mexico; land-locked Kansans can buy ranch-raised shrimp and Tilapia from Thailand and China, lobsters from far North Atlantic waters, frog legs from India, catfish from Indochina and lamb from Australia and New Zealand.

The trade-off is that food selectively bred or chosen for long hauling often sacrifices flavor and texture for durability and a shelf life. And some major supplying countries are anything but rigorous about their health inspections. At one time or another all of us have bitten into pasty peaches and cardboard tomatoes, and we have shuddered over news accounts of toxic terrors in the Chinese food chain. But what to do?

Some remedies are obvious: e.g., requiring stricter inspections or using biotechnology to develop better-tasting fruit and vegetable varieties that will still keep and travel well. And a more energetic sourcing of regional farmers by the big supermarket chains -- something already being done by Wal-Mart, the bête noire of the eco-Ieft -- can encourage the cultivation of fresh, seasonal and affordable foodstuffs closer to home.

But even if all the practical problems are solved, certain ideological problems would remain. Take the case of live-catch fish from foreign waters destined for the tanks of up-scale seafood restaurants. The trouble, according to Ms. Freidberg, "is not the aliveness and wildness of the fish per se but rather that these qualities are highly valued by the rich yet supplied, across great distances, mainly by the poor." True enough: He who eats the catch of the day tends to be better-heeled than he who catches it. But is there anything inherently wrong here? And what would happen to those poor, distant fishermen if the bottom suddenly fell out of the live-catch market?

For better or worse, and mainly for better, the planet is smaller than ever. Ideas and materials, cures and diseases, the good, the bad and the ugly: All travel faster and farther than ever, and there is no turning back. Ms. Freidberg -- tracking the movement of beef, eggs, fruit, vegetables, milk and fish from source to table -- shows how technology, abetted by modern public relations, has changed the way we eat. Despite all the unwholesome junk out there -- and the declining interest in home-cooking compared with a generation or two ago -- the trend, she shows, is toward tastier, fresher food.

At her best, Ms. Freidberg writes with wit and clarity, and her sense of humor extends to her choice of illustrations. We see, for instance, a 1952 trade journal ad featuring a picture (as the ad text puts it) of "pert, pintsized, red-headed Virginia Gibson, singing and dancing Warner Bros. star and Queen of the Second Annual Conference and Exposition of the Produce Prepackaging Association in Columbus, Ohio." Ms. Gibson beams gamely beside a pile of plastic-wrapped fruits and vegetables. A great deal has changed since then, and a good thing too.

"The utopian vision of an unchanging local food economy really is a fiction," Ms. Freidberg concedes. "Refrigeration engineers dreamed of machines that could preserve this steady state [of freshness], whether in steamships or in home kitchens. They ended up with machines that, by slowing spoilage, set off all kinds of other changes in food culture and commerce." And she is not complaining. The history of refrigeration, she concludes, "illustrates (to reverse the old truism) that the more you try to keep things the same, the more they are apt to change."

Mr. Bakshian writes frequently on politics, history and gastronomy.