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- Convenors:
-
Matilda Marshall
(Umeå University)
Flora Mary Bartlett (Linköping University)
Inger Johanne Lyngø (Lyngøya )
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- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- SUSTAINABILITIES
- Location:
- Room H-203
- Sessions:
- Thursday 16 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
In a time of global warming, ways of living with cold are challenged. This panel focus on the culture and history of cold with a particular interest in the relation to a changing climate. How has refrigeration influenced everyday practices and what happens to these when cold is under threat?
Long Abstract:
We are surrounded by heat and cold in our everyday lives. We conform, adjust to, and strive for temperatures in relation to our indoor environments, clothing, cooking, storing and choice of vacation destinations. Managing and mastering cold and heat is thus intimately connected to practices concerning survival and sustainability, especially in the context of global warming. Warming has previously been suggested as a cultural analytical tool or metaphor to think about change and continuity (Ger 2007); here we wish to turn focus on the opposite, the cooling, or more specifically refrigeration. We wish to explore the culture and history of refrigeration from different perspectives with particular interest in relation to a changing climate. A central question is how refrigeration has influenced and become integrated into everyday practices and narratives and what happens to these when cold is under threat.
We welcome papers on topics relating to, but not limited to:
• Production, commodification, and consumption of ice and refrigeration technology
• Living with and managing cold
• Sensing cold
• Refrigeration and freezing practices, for example air-conditioning, food storage, ice halls, sports and recreation, laboratory work.
• The folklore of cold and refrigeration
• Power relations and social inequalities in access and use of refrigeration
• Natural vs artificial cold
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 16 June, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Cold energy, in the shape of natural ice blocks, was an export commodity from several Norwegian coastal communities from about 1850 until the First World War. The paper presents core traits of the business, which comprised an intricate logistical chain from producers to consumers.
Paper long abstract:
Building on a chapter of the author’s forthcoming PhD thesis, this paper zooms in on the natural ice business, specifically its Norwegian iteration around the middle of the 19th century. It aims firstly to give an overview, emphasizing that regular size ice blocks were elements in systems comprising production, transportation, and storage. The main part of the paper is a tracing of how and why some entrepreneurs established ice exports, when ice was harvested on Norwegian ponds and shipped across the seas to (urban) markets in the UK and on the Continent. Harvesting and using natural ice did, as can be imagined, occur in all Nordic countries, for a variety of purposes. Particular circumstances made it more profitable in some Norwegian districts to engage in ice exports rather than supplying near markets.
Paper short abstract:
This paper accounts for the antagonism between the imported Norwegian natural ice and the French locally manufactured ice during the long nineteenth century. It discusses how the two products got embroiled in heated debates over their safety for consumption and use in the French food industry.
Paper long abstract:
Norwegian natural ice blocks were regularly shipped to numerous French ports between 1870 and 1920. The peak of this trade overlapped chronologically with the emergence of refrigeration technology in France in the last decade of the nineteenth century. This paper accounts for the antagonism between Norwegian natural ice and the French manufactured ice during that period. It showcases how the two products got embroiled in heated debates over their hygienic qualities and safety for consumption, driven by the new realities in the field of public health, the rise of bacteriology and emerging trends in food hygiene.
Employing a diverse set of primary sources and drawing from Douglas’ Purity and Danger (1966) and Fischler’s (1988) notion of neophobie, the fear attached to a newly introduced food product, this paper showcases how refrigerated and/or frozen food was deemed impure and taboo in nineteenth century French gastronomic culture which prioritized freshness. As food technologies are currently having an unprecedented growth while facing up numerous controversies relating to quality and suitability for consumption, this paper stresses the need to rethink food insecurities in the long nineteenth century and how they unfolded. It argues that what was termed in some French refrigeration journals as frigoriphobie, the fear of the frozen produce, was in fact enabling the continuing success of Norwegian ice imports into France, forcing French refrigeration to baby steps well until after the War.
Paper short abstract:
In the mid 1900s having a home freezer was still a luxury whereas collective freezer lockers offered an affordable alternative. This paper explores everyday practices connected to these locker facilities. What can past collective cooling practices tell about future (sustainable) cooling practices?
Paper long abstract:
Would you share your refrigerator or freezer with your neighbours?
When the freezer still was a novelty and affordable for a few, collective freezer locker facilities offered an alternative especially for producer households on the countryside. The lockers could be rented out by, for example, dairies and housing companies, or managed through an economic association with memberships. In Sweden, the first was established in 1947. The facilities had their heydays in the 1950s whereafter they went in decline with a few surviving into the 21st century. Today most Swedish households have access to their own freezer in their the home, the freezer has become a self-evident kitchen feature integrated into our food culture.
Recently, geographers have suggested encouraging collective cooling practices, e.g. for air-conditioning and food storage, as means for reducing environmental impact (Phillips and Waitt 2018; Farbotko and Waitt 2011). Could the collective locker facilities of the mid-1900s offer perspectives on contemporary ideas of collective cooling practices?
This paper will, departing from a bricolage approach to Swedish freezer locker facilities, explore the everyday practices connected to the collective freezer lockers. How were collective freezer practices organized and why did they seize to be meaningful in everyday life? How could past collective practices contribute with perspectives on present or future cooling practices?
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores how the stories related to food preservation reveal diverse consumption patterns and changes in access, meaning, and use of cold storing techniques and freezers over the past hundred years in Estonia.
Paper long abstract:
Due to its position in the northern part of the temperate climate zone, the traditional food preservation and storing practices in Estonia are similar to those in the neighboring Nordic countries. Yet, due to a different sociopolitical context, the history of refrigeration took different paths and is in many respects related to specific dynamics of modernisation of everyday life in Estonia. We mainly rely on ethnographic descriptions and memoirs from the archives of Estonian museums as well as other sources. We explore how the stories related to food preservation reveal diverse consumption patterns and changes in access, meaning, and use of cold storing techniques and freezers over the past hundred years, from the Republic of Estonia (1918-1940) to the period of Soviet occupation (1940-1991) and the new independent democracy in the early 1990s. We examine how preservation was not only about keeping food fresh, but also a part of food provisioning and hoarding strategies; how the access to refrigeration revealed significant social inequalities and diverse abilities to cope within the Soviet system of scarcity, and how the transition to the market economy made freezing and (deep) freezers normality that replaced earlier pre-modern practices of storing.