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Reviews
Reviews
A smart and illuminating book that will be of great interest to anyone engaged with either the history of technology or the history of food.
Rees has written an entertaining, well-narrated, and well-researched book about building one root infrastructure of modern food systems. He brings this infrastructure to the foreground of U.S. history, and hopefully the book will reach a broad readership, both within history departments and a public with an interest in the intersections of the histories of food, business, and technology.
Refrigeration Nation is a well-written and useful book for both scholars and students... Rees presents a well-developed account of the importance of American enterprise and innovation in the national and global marketplace.
A fascinating book.
Refrigeration Nation is a valuable, well-researched study, but it also suggests the need for more work on a subject that at first seems mundane and taken for granted but, upon greater inspection, is really quite fascinating and compelling.
Jonathan Rees provides us a good history of the ice industry, cold chains, cold storage, refrigerated transport, and mechanical refrigeration in this valuable book.
[Rees] delves into the very infrastructure of ice-making, chronicling the engineering feats, describing the machinery of temperature control, and a particularly appealing exploration of human ingenuity that has made refrigerated food the norm in American homes.
Nowhere else can one find such rich information on everything from ice boxes to home freezers to refrigerated container ships... A most welcome contribution to our understanding of how Americans came to expect cold drinks, unpickled produce, and unsalted meats as a matter of course.
Nowhere else can one find such rich information on everything from ice boxes to home freezers to refrigerated container ships... A most welcome contribution to our understanding of how Americans came to expect cold drinks, unpickled produce, and unsalted meats as a matter of course.
Rees has written an outstanding, and outstandingly readable, account of an industry whose importance is exceeded only by its obscurity. In these days of increasing food consciousness, one can learn a lot about where those strawberries on your table come from and how they got there from reading Refrigeration Nation.
Rees has written a solid, comprehensive account of the technological creation of cold chains in the United States. I wish this book had been available for me to read when I was doing my own research.
Americans consider their refrigerators and freezers as ordinary features of life, but that wasn’t always the case. In this fascinating and very well-written book, by America’s leading authority on the subject Jonathan Rees, readers learn just what it means to have their frozen dinners and drinks "on the rocks."
About
Book Details
Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x 9
Pages
248
ISBN
9781421419862
Illustration Description
12 b&w illus.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Inventing the Cold Chain
2. The Long Wait for Mechanical Refrigeration
3. The Decline of the Natural Ice Industry
4. Refrigerated Transport Near and Far
5. The Pleasures and
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Inventing the Cold Chain
2. The Long Wait for Mechanical Refrigeration
3. The Decline of the Natural Ice Industry
4. Refrigerated Transport Near and Far
5. The Pleasures and Perils of Cold Storage
6. "Who Ever Heard of an American without an Icebox?"
7. The Early Days of Electric Household Refrigeration
8. The Completion of the Modern Cold Chain
Conclusion
Notes
Essay on Sources
Index
Featured Contributor
Jonathan Rees
Jonathan Rees is a professor of history at Colorado State University–Pueblo. He is the author of Industrialization and the Transformation of American Life: A Brief Introduction and Refrigerator.Resources
