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.