Anyone who was a child in the 50s might remember a time before fridges in the home. It must be hard for younger people to imagine not having a fridge. We had a meat safe, which was used for milk as well. I remember my mother walked to the local village every day to buy food for that evening, as most of her friends did. It meant that our food was always fresh, and she got to meet up with her friends for a chat, as well as a daily walk.

There is nothing new about food storage – it’s always been a necessity. Prehistoric humans stored meat in ice caves. Thousands of years ago, mud huts with suspended floors were built specifically to store food. Ice was being used in China before the first millennium, to keep food fresh. Snow was used as well. Greeks, Romans and Hebrews placed large amounts of snow into storage pits and covered this cooling agent with insulating material.

The ancient Greeks used large ceramic jars to store wine, grapes, oil, olives, grain, fish, and other commodities. These containers were so cheap and plentiful that when used to transport goods, it wasn’t worth taking them back when empty, so they were often broken up and left behind. In one site in Rome, the fragments of broken jars piled up in such a heap it created a hill now known as Monte Testaccio. Those merchants were the forerunners of today’s polluters.

Historically, it has always been a worldwide problem keeping food edible throughout the winter. One method was drying meat, fruit and vegetables in the sun and wind to remove moisture, others were salting, spicing, smoking and pickling.

Napoleon was aware that his soldiers and sailors lived off salt-preserved meats. The lack of fresh vegetables caused scurvy. He offered a prize to anyone who invented a better system of preserving food. It was won by a French chemist who introduced sealed containers, which led eventually to the canning industry and later to food preservation by freezing, which was used commercially for the first time in 1842.

When fridges first became popular, we called them refrigerators – it seems quite a mouthful now. It’s hard to imagine life without one though!

Happy Puzzling!