fast frozen foods

In a chilling account of the American "coldscape" in Cabinet Magazine, Nicola Twilley informs her readers that more than three-quarters of the food consumed in the U.S is processed, packaged, shipped, stored and sold under artificial refrigeration. In a beautifully written piece she traces this coldscape encompassing your home refrigerator, shipping containers, cheese caves, meat lockers, cellars and biobanks.

There could have been another actor in this network, pneumatic tubes. In Long-Haul Trucking and the Technopolitics of Industrial Agriculture, 1945 - 1975, Shane Hamilton describes this possible alternate future, through the coldscape imaginaries of the 1950s; a time when frozen food and refrigeration was seen to revolutionise food disribution and turn vegetable and animal matter into "pure abstractions capable of being transported, sold, and consumed at any time or place":

For example, one agricultural economist, in a fanciful aside in a technical article in 1951, dreamed of a tunnel distribution system whereby homeowners would hook up their freezers to a pneumatic tube that would deliver packages from the frozen food factory on demand (H.J. Humphrey, Temperatures for Frozen Foods, Ice and Refrigeration 121 (August 1951): 52 - 58)"

As my friend Patryk, who sent me this gem, points out "unfortunately long-haul trucks won the competition with pneumatic tubes".

Thanks Patryk for the always fabulous and quirky histories of technologies you send my way, and Alex for the lend of her Cabinet magazine!

Image my own, from the Paris' coldscape underground.

le bruit de choc

Paris in the 1890s, and a tubiste working in the Poste Pneumatique pulls a lever, cranks a steel door, exchanges cylinders and closes the door again. Sweat forms on his brow as he turns the wheel to create a vacuum and apply compressed air. He pauses to ring the bell so the next station knows of the coming delivery. A tubiste down the line rings his bell when he hears le bruit de choc as the tube arrives at his station.

This section of text, adapted from Molly Wright Steenson's Cabinet article, is filled with sound. The soundscapes of these brass-age pneumatic systems evoke the work involved in sending pneumatic missives underneath the city. These historic sonic delights are however considered pollution in many modern day hospitals, with an increasing call to 'turn the sound down' in clinical work spaces.
  
Swisslog have responded to this drive with their patent-pending Whisper Receiving System, which minimises noise associated with pneumatic transportation. Recently installed in the positively named Le Bonheur Hospital in America, the system is said to enable employees to concentrate better on the patient care requirements of the hospital. I wonder how the tubistes were ever able to get their work done with all of that cranking, clanging and bell ringing!

Image from Scott Kostolni's Flikrstream.