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Paper short abstract

This paper explores “freshness” as a biopolitical technology during the 2022 Shanghai lockdown, showing how cold-chain infrastructures bureaucratically redefined what counted as safe and legitimate, producing food that was politically correct yet materially rotten.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines freshness as a biopolitical technology during the 2022 Shanghai lockdown, when suspended transport and logistics subjected both people and food to an anxious struggle for legitimacy and survival. Under conditions of extreme quarantine, freshness ceased to function as a biological condition governed by material processes of decay; instead, it was bureaucratically redefined through state-administered cold-chain infrastructures that determined what could safely—and legitimately—enter sealed neighbourhoods.

Drawing on ethnographic observations of food distribution under lockdown, I show how vegetables transported through officially sanctioned cold-chain routes frequently arrived biologically spoiled yet politically correct: rotten produce circulated as hygienic, virus-free, and administratively legitimate. This paradox reveals how bureaucratic regimes of safety displaced situated knowledge of preservation, while rendering material decay both normalized and invisible.

Conceptually, I engage Lauren Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism to analyse cold-chain logistics as an infrastructure of eternity: a techno-utopian promise that freezing, refrigeration, and logistical control could indefinitely secure freshness, safety, and life itself. Yet it was precisely this industrial logic of refrigeration that accelerated spoilage and transformed food’s “slow death” into an unseen condition masked by the aesthetics of industrialized freshness. Crucially, this logic was extended beyond food to the governed population, as residents’ legitimacy and mobility were similarly conditioned by low-temperature infrastructures and bureaucratic thresholds of safety. By foregrounding the gap between technological utopias of preservation and their material failures, this paper contributes to debates on infrastructural governance by showing how living through lockdown involved enduring the violence of infrastructural optimism.