Figure 1 from United States patent #1,773,079 issued to Clarence Birdseye for the production of quick-frozen fish. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
My wife regularly asks me a question such as what do you fancy for dinner tomorrow night, which seems a bit like asking me where I want to go on holiday the year after next. I simply don’t know. I can tell you what I feel like now or whether I liked what I just ate but asking me what’s going to tickle my culinary fancy tomorrow is a bit of a stretch.
I can’t imagine there were too many such conversations in the Neanderthal household. Back in those days, what you ate came down to what you could grow or catch. If you fancied something meaty it came down to whether you could run faster than this evening’s dinner. Once the nasty business of killing was out of the way, you had to peel your meal – removing any fur or feathers. Before fire was discovered, having rare meat was not a choice, it was a necessity. I don’t think I’d have lived too long unless a met a particularly feisty cave girl.
With bartering came a lot more choice. Instead of doing everything yourself, you had the option of sharpening your neighbour’s axe in exchange for a chicken or hiring out your feisty cave girl for something more exotic in return. No-one really moved around that much, so communities were still restricted to what lay within easy reach.
With more mobility came more choice still. Knowing that rarity breeds value, smart people with orchards went to where there were no orchards and exchanged their goods. As transportation technology evolved, foodstuffs could be moved further and further. Unfortunately, most food has a shelf life and perishability determined how far they could travel. Salt became the preservative of choice or food was cured or pickled in some way.
People eventually worked out that keeping foods cold helped to keep them for longer. In the beginning, there were no artificial cryogenics available, so large blocks of slowly melting ice in cool rooms had to suffice. Once the humming white box in the corner had been developed, there was no stopping us. Everything was frozen from vegetables to meat and a whole new selection of sweets became available for the first time. Legend has it a certain Captain Birdseye realised on a polar fishing expedition that food frozen quickly tasted so much better than the stuff that was left in the icebox to cool down on its own.
Of course, now that the other side of the planet can be reached in a mere 24 hours, pretty much any delicacy from anywhere in the world is available in a choice of high street supermarkets all year round. Ecologically, this is a disaster. There is every chance that if you choose the right (or wrong depending on your point of view) choice, the carbon footprint of your evening meal could be several thousand tonnes. All this explains why our fridge and freezer are rammed full of a multiplicity of ingredients – hence my wife’s insistent question!
Related articles
- ‘Birdseye’: The Frozen Food Revolution (beatcancer2010.wordpress.com)
- Ten Reasons to Make Shopping at a Farmers Market Part of Your Life (portlandfarmersmarket.wordpress.com)
- Caring neanderthals (evoanth.wordpress.com)
- Straight From the Garden! (gemakarolina.wordpress.com)
bluedeckshoe.com 
Of course being able to plan a meal in advance depends on a number of factors, most of which are beyond Julie’s control. The fact that she utilises the available technology to enable the well being of her immediate social group is in fact a marvel of the development of the person, and gender, rather than the technology.
The ecological disaster that has been sprung by modern man will be imminently upon us and this has been hastened by rapid progression of technology and in particular ‘IT’ – if that is what it is called.
Far from empowering the human race it seems to have made us ignorant of the fundamentals of life. I, like many others, are more than enabled of communication with most of the people that I need to converse with but why do we use it in the opposite way from which it was intended.
Consider this.
In business I can get around 60 e-mails a day – most of them are from people who are within a radius of 100 metres. My occasional rebellion by standing up and shouting a response is normally not well received. I function better without the emails.
By some strange quirk of our rather immediate evolution we seem to misuse our technology by communicating with our near social group by electronic means, when personal contact would be better!. We then compound this by insisting to circumnavigate the globe to appear in person in front of strangers when surely there must be a viable technological alternative – of course there is – but it makes us feel more important and is good for the ego.
It is destroying the race and the planet all in one go.
The big question then – ‘Does technology Empower us or does it merely distract us from what we should really be doing?’
Switch off you electricity for a day and see who survives best – maybe being able to plan a meal a few days in advance would be a significant evolutionary advantage – in the IT disenabled world.
Some good points made and I suspect that I would suffer most from deprivation of electricity. Having said that, the cooker wouldn’t work and neither would the fridge. But rather than go on further – I feel a new post coming on!