Jonathan Rees's short but informative history of ice production and consumption in the United States is a welcome addition to the Johns Hopkins University Press's “How Things Work” series. For Rees, the increasing accessibility to and affordability of ice constitute both a crucial ingredient of modernity as well as a potent historical force. Rees's work typifies a history of technology study in that he follows the introduction, growth, and socioeconomic consequences of an expanding (and here, increasingly sophisticated) application of science, and buttresses that analysis with the insights of commodity historians and food historians to trace the production chain from producer to consumer. The result is a detailed analysis of an industry—and a product—that Rees contends most Americans today take for granted.
Rees states that one of his purposes is to demonstrate how investigating the changing ways in which Americans acquired and used ice reveals “the interaction between technology and capitalism … between technology and consumption … and how technology can alter the physical landscape to meet the needs of producers and consumers” (ix). To this end, Rees is successful. He charts how the introduction of ice-production technology expanded commercial markets, and he addresses how those expanded markets shaped the physical and cultural worlds of Americans. Indeed, Rees often describes the consequences of commercially-available ice as something of a positive feedback loop; as the ice industry expanded, so too did the uses and desirability of the product, growths that in turn spurred larger and more efficient production.
Rees's study spans from the birth of the natural ice industry in the nineteenth century to the near ubiquity of household ice production in post-World War II America. Historians of labor and fin-de-siècle Northeastern and upper-Midwestern societies will appreciate his discussion of the natural ice industry, or the systems of harvesting and distribution that plucked ice from frozen bodies of water in New York, Maine, and Wisconsin and sent them to consumers in urban areas. Rees offers a detailed analysis of the process, explaining how ice men gashed the ice with horse-drawn ice plows before carving out large-but-manageable blocks, which were stored in ice houses before “cold chains” carried them to city markets. This natural industry was, of course, at the mercy of the seasons, and bad winters not only dented product but also dampened enthusiasm; as Rees notes, steady market demand depended on reliability. In addition, the dirt and grime of natural ice (trod on by men and horses and shot through with the impurities of the increasingly polluted water itself) dampened interest in using ice for anything but cooling (as opposed to consumption).
Beginning in the final decades of the nineteenth century, new technologies began to insulate the ice industry from climatic fluctuations and concerns regarding contamination, but the development occurred in fits and starts over the course of a century. The first ice factories were massive, warehouse-sized operations that were prohibitively expensive to operate. As such, regions in which natural ice was plentiful invested only tepidly in such facilities, while areas like the American South more quickly embraced the opportunity to manufacture ice. The nascent industry was boosted by the patronage of breweries, which relied on consistently cool temperatures to ferment their lagers. Manufactured ice also found its way into hotels, bars, grocery stores, dairies, and restaurants, and, in consequence, into the American diet.
Rees's discussion of the cultural effects of the increasing availability of ice constitutes a strength of his analysis. Drawing on both industry publications and newspapers from across the country, Rees provides an overview of home ice delivery, offering descriptions of the contracted icemen and freelance ice peddlers who brought the product into restaurant kitchens, butcher shops, and the American home. Along the way, he traces how ice shaped diets and culinary preferences. Fresh beef, for instance, became more affordable, and soon after the establishment of efficient cold chains, depressed reliance on and interest in pickled and canned beef products. Frosty cocktails like the mint julep became mainstays of bar menus and favorites of patrons. And ice cream entered the American diet to general acclaim.
As appetites for ice grew, the sophistication of cooling technologies increased. Rees explains that the food industry and Americans in general developed a dependence on ice such that there existed a constant impetus to make ice, and cooling technologies more generally, as available and affordable as possible. The earliest and most primitive way that ice chilled food products was simply through an icebox that held both ice and food. Over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, though, the technology that ice manufacturers used became more compact and efficient. By the 1930s, General Electric could market residential refrigerators that would eventually allow consumers to manufacture their own ice.
Rees's book offers a detailed analysis of a yet underappreciated industry, one that had a tremendous impact on American's diets, tastes, and health. His simple yet elegant argument—ice mattered—allows him to explore several interesting facets of the industry. Educators will appreciate the classroom potential of the work; the book's stories and factoids will enrich lectures, and the prose is approachable and assignable. Dyed-in-the-wool Gilded Age and Progressive Era historians might lament the slightly myopic focus of the book: Rees's detailed analysis of the industry leaves little room to engage the larger themes of the period. Historians of technology and food will appreciate the purpose and contribution of the work, even if Rees's enthusiasm for his subject makes him slightly too eager to assign causative agency to ice (ice did not, as Rees implies, “explain the roots of air conditioning,” which grew up in printing houses and textile mills that required the careful maintenance of temperature and humidity) (74). Overall, though, Rees's work is a sophisticated examination of a hitherto underexplored subject.
