Week 1: The birth of artificial cold: from the ice trade to Freon

Module 1 — Disenchantment: the commodification of cold and the myth of modernity. The module’s objective is to shatter the common-sense notion that the refrigerator is a natural necessity, and reveal it instead as a specific historical, technological and gendered construction.

For most of human history, people did not fight decay. They coexisted with it. Fermentation, drying, salting, potting, cellaring — these are not failed attempts at refrigeration. They are a different relationship with time, in which food changes and the household changes with it, and in which the changing is often the point. Nobody invented cheese by trying to keep milk cold.

The nineteenth century turned cold itself into a commodity. The natural ice trade cut lakes in New England and shipped them to Calcutta, with routes, labour, owners and losses — a global industry in a substance that falls from the sky for free. Then Freon completed the transformation: cold became something a household could manufacture on demand, in a box, for a monthly cost in electricity.

That is the hinge this course turns on. Once cold is purchasable and controllable, time and season become negotiable, and a household’s relationship to decay stops being a skill and becomes a subscription.

The claim to hold onto for eleven weeks: the fridge sells you time, and the bill arrives as waste.

Outline#

• coexisting with decay: fermentation, drying, cellars, and the knowledge they required
• the natural ice trade — cold as a commodity with routes, labour and owners
• Freon and the domestic compressor: manufacture replaces harvest
• what happens to “season” once every month is available
• what this course means by political economy when the unit is one appliance

Slides#

The week 1 deck runs the full two hours, with the ice trade and the Freon story told at length. Week 1 gets a deck because it is the only lecture that has to do two jobs at once: introduce the course and make its argument.

Reading#

• Jonathan Rees, Refrigeration Nation: A History of Ice, Appliances, and Enterprise in America (2013) — excerpts

Tutorial preparation#

The tutorial is a blind tasting and it cannot run without preparation. Read the session page before Wednesday.