Ok, so I'm boring and haven't posted in a long long time. My only excuse--a poor one, I know--is that I have so many classes that I have no time to be interesting. That said, I shall share my class experience with all of you by giving you... an ode to frozen foods! (Written for an economic history class)

Kathleen Clark-Adams
February 12, 2008
14.70 Spring 2008

Frozen Food: The Great Emancipator
As a starving college student, I occasionally realize that the only breakfast food around is a frozen burrito. At this point, two trains of thought force their way into my head. The first thought is that I should have perhaps gone through with my resolution to visit the grocery store last Tuesday. The second is the miraculousness of prepackaged, precooked food products.
We take our access to instant, easy food preservation for granted. When Clarence Birdseye first developed flash-freezing technology in 1920, however, the refrigerator and freezer were not the staples of any kitchen that they are today. Most foods were preserved either by canning—a laborious process with dangerous failure modes like botulism—or by drying, which destroyed a great deal of the fresh taste and the entire texture experience of the food being preserved. The invention of flash-freezing allowed cooks to use fresh-tasting ingredients year-round with a fraction of the labor or danger of pre-existing technologies.
Living in Massachusetts in the winter, it is easy to understand the appeal of a technology that increased access to fresh foods in every season. Frozen foods not only increased access to foods, however—they also increased vastly increased efficiency by allowing the mass-production of certain foods that could not be preserved using other technologies. Anyone who has ever made a dish that required puff pastry or filo dough, for example, can appreciate the ease of purchasing these ingredients rather than laboriously creating them by hand. By removing the need to make difficult components like these by hand, frozen food technology paved the way for the industrialization of processes that had previously required an artisan's knowledge of cooking. Furthermore, with the advent of entire pre-prepared food products in addition to individual ingredients, many people could finally enjoy new types of food without spending the time or money to acquire the knowledge or expertise that would have been required in a previous era.
The ease and efficiency that frozen foods brought to cooking had significant societal effects. By substituting capital for labor in cooking, this technology allowed women to spend more time on other endeavors, encouraging the gradual erosion of the traditional divisions of labor. Along with other inventions that replaced labor with machinery in traditional womanly realms—dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and many other now-ubiquitous household appliances—frozen food technologies helped encourage the progression of women's equality movements, as society now no longer required a class of housekeepers.
Of course, the trends from the increasing mechanization of food preparation were not wholly positive. The food preservation technology that broadened access to fresh, healthy foods also helped create vast fast food empires, as gains in efficiency and standardization allowed the creation of billions upon billions of low-cost, low-flavor calories. As fewer people bothered to learn the artisanal skills that had once been the backbone of cooking, respect for these skills plummeted; in the United States, at least, food became a commodity measured in volume rather than quality. The ease of access to cheap, good products almost certainly eroded our cultural respect for food.
Despite a few cultural shortcomings, however, the impact of frozen foods on the life of the average American has undoubtedly been positive. More people have access to cheap, delicious food now than ever before in human history; in many parts of the world, in fact, obesity has overcome hunger as a public health problem. While most women of future generations may never have to appreciate the level of work that modern food technologies saved their foremothers, women and men alike should appreciate the incalculable benefits that flash-freezing and other food technologies bring to their lives.



And I mean every word. Frozen foods ftw.