What about Fruit? Foods, Seasons, and our Memories, Part Two. A Hundred Years Ago.
Central Pacific Fast Fruit Train, 1886.
Lex Anteinternet: Foods, Seasons, and our Memories. A Hundred Year...: The last garden I put in, 2017. Another interesting entry on A Hundred Years Ago. The Last Fresh Vegetable Month I've touched ...In that I noted that it was apparently the case that they were not transported by rail.*
Originally I planned on dealing with fruits and vegetables. But I ended up limiting it to vegetables for the most part.
Let's start with the obvious. Fruits native to higher latitudes are pretty limited, globally.
They aren't wholly absent. Apples, for example, do grow pretty far north.
Oranges, however, do not.
Let's also add something that's generally not pondered, that being that where fruit grows today is the product of introduction. Almost every fruit you can think of that we deal with commonly isn't grown today, even if that's just in your backyard, in the area from which it is originally from.
In our current era there's a big movement to be fearful of Genetically Modified Organisms, or GMOs. Truth be known, however, in terms of plants, unless you are eating a highly local diet purely of what grows there naturally, you are eating GMOs. They're GMOs that came about due to selection of characteristics, and that's farmer selection, not the natural selection that's a feature of evolution. We don't recognize that as its been going on so long.
Apples we mentioned above. Apples are interesting in that they're spread around the globe now and in a zillion varieties. There are apple groves all over. But apples are originally from Central Asia. They've spread everywhere from there, thanks to humans, as we like apples.
Even the word "apple" is interesting in this context. Apple is a cognate of the German word Apfel, and that word is one of the words we know to have been passed down from Indo European. It's an ancient, ancient word. It predates history. We don't know, however, if the word referred to apples. The better guess is that it just referred to any kind of fruit.** The fruit early Indo Europeans were eating aren't well known today. They could have included apples, but more likely were pears, which have a gigantic natural distribution.
The point is that everything we write about, or experience, is in some ways defined by the era. This blog focuses on the 1890 to 1920 time frame, although it dabbles in everything else and every other era. But when we're speaking of food in these recent posts, we're dealing with the early parts of our own era, and going back about a century or so.***
If we go back further, we're dealing with a much different set of circumstances. If, as an example, we're dealing with Bob CroMagnon in the year 10,000 BC, well we're dealing with highly local foods, rather obviously. If we're dealing with the year 1774, however, and talking about the North American East Coast, we're already talking about a highly altered food landscape with lots and lots of foods being grown and consumed locally that weren't natural.
Put another way, when you or your predecessor go out in your backyard in the 42 deg North region in North America, and pick an apple or perhaps a pear, you are picking a non native, and frankly highly selectivised fruit. Jonathon Apples weren't here when Columbus showed up. . . for that matter they weren't here when the Vikings showed up either.
Neither, of course, were a lot of other things you eat.
Diverting a bit, none of this is intended to pick on locavores. Rather, it's to point out that even a less resource intensive or a more "natural", or agrarian, lifestyle still makes use of a lot of consumables that didn't originate here.****
Anyhow, as we've already dealt with, in the winter months in the upper half of North America, the fresh vegetable season ended in October. And as I've also addressed, I know that fresh fruit was quite restricted during the winter months most places. Indeed, a common memory for people my parents age was getting fruit for Christmas. My mother recollected that for Christmas she normally got a book and some fruit, and she thought that a pretty good Christmas. The 1964 Valdez Alaska tidal wave was so devastating as young people had gathered at the docks to get fruit from ships that came in, something they traditionally brought that time of year as a gift.
That resulted in the horrible loss of life, but in terms of what we're observing, there is no earthly way that young people today would gather at the docks to get oranges.
It just wouldn't happen.
I note all of this as its clear that transportation of fruit isn't what it now is, but that some of it did occur. How much, I'm not sure. So little that it did make the gift of fruit a real gift, but enough so that in Montreal you could get it.
So clearly a closer look was in order.
In looking up this topic I ran across one fruit company advertisement from the 1910s or 1920s (I'm not sure which, but likely the 20s) depicting a young woman with a hitched up skirt, posing with an orange.***** On the advertisement wast the logo of the Union Pacific Company.
And that reminded me of the Pacific Fruit Express.
All of which means I may have been partially in error. Or maybe not. Or maybe partially. Or not at all.
It's one of those things I don't know, and which is surprisingly hard to learn about easily. I'm sure it could be fleshed out, but not in an easy net sort of way.
The story, apparently, of the fast rail transportation of edible vegetation starts with oranges and California. Oranges were grown early in California with the planting of orange groves at Catholic missions in the state early on.****** Commercial growing of oranges commenced in the state in the 1840s and the arrival of the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s was exploited almost immediately by fruit growers, who shipped iced fruit back east, which was at a bare minimum already well known as a method of preserving fish. Coincidentally this same technological development coincided with the invention of the railroad refrigerator car, which we've dealt with elsewhere. As we've seen here already, the refrigerator car lead to the rise of the beef industry in a very rapid way, changing American's diets in that regard, and it lead to the rise of large scale breweries as well.
It also lead to the rail transportation of fruit.
By the 1870s, hybridization of oranges had lead to new varieties and oranges became sort of a national mania.
By the 1890s this had become such a big deal that t he state entered its "Orange Era". The Santa Fe exploited citrus by introducing a large fleet of fast refrigerator cars to move citrus. This lead the Southern Pacific and the Union Pacific to combine to create the Pacific Fruit Express in 1906, which grew to be the largest refrigerator rail car leasing entity in the world.^
Grapes being loaded into refrigerator car in 1923. Predictably, this scene is from California.
Having refrigerator cars already, Armour, the meat packing company, soon entered into competition with Pacific Fruit Express. The Sherman Anti Trust Act intervened, however, and Armour had to divest itself of its fruit shipping branch, which lead to the creation of the Fruit Growers Express in 1919.^^ It merged with Great Northern Railway into a new entity in 1923 designed specifically to compete with the Pacific Fruit Express, emerging as the Western Fruit Express.
Refrigerator car being loaded with strawberries, 1939.
So what this tells us is that by 1900 shipping fruit by rail was already a big deal and becoming a bigger deal. If fruit was shipped this way, logic would hold that other produce also was, but it's exceedingly difficult to find any reference to it or photographs of it, which leaves doubt as to how common it was. Seemingly not very, if it occurred at all.
But fruit was definitely being shipped in that fashion.
So why was it regarded as a treat?
I'm not really sure. Some of that may have to do with economics of earlier times. And some of it may be that we now live very much in the "cheap food" era. If we go back a century or so, that wasn't the case and there were no governmental incentives or directives to keep food cheap, which now there is. That's something that really was an offshoot of the Great Depression but more than that agricultural policies that came out of it and into full fruition during the 1950s.^^^
It's also, as we have seen, a byproduct of transportation.
We've clearly seen that in regard to the impact of railroads upon food, starting with our earlier look at refrigerator cars and meat and refrigerator cars and beer. Now we've looked at in regard to refrigerator cars and fruit. Railroads, during the time we're discussing, were the only fast way to move anything, but it's also the case that the time period we're discussing saw the onset of a major effort to improve roads and to create an interstate highway system. That pioneering effort had started some time ago, but the 1919 Motor Transport Convoy really put it into focus. Even something like the 1919 Air Derby, which we've also been reading about, did as well. In 1919 the highways remained primitive most places, a recent Casper paper here reported on somebody's trip to Denver taking 16 hours by car, for example. But they were about to be very much improved. As that occurred, the trucking industry would start to make its appearance, giving the railroads competition in everything. Once that was fully established, everything became to change in the produce world.
The first refrigerated truck trailers, cooled by ice, came in during the 1920s, so we're on the cusp of that now in terms of the focus of the blog. The first mechanically cooled truck trailers, came in during the 1930s, and that's a huge deal. Once that occurred, the ability to transport cooled vegetables really advanced. Now, of course, this has developed to where trucks have replaced trains entirely, at least for the time being, shipping right to the grocery store.
What we didn't address, however, and need to, is reefer ships. We don't think of refrigerated ships being part of this picture but they are. By 1876 the mechanically cooled reefer ship had come about and had already taken a load of meat from Argentina to Europe. By 1899 refrigerated ship deliveries of fruit to the United states were over 90,000 tons per year. Prior to World War One the United Fruit Company had already introduced refrigerator ships, some also hauling passengers, to ship its produce globally.
*I also linked this in to our companion blog on railroads, in case my assumptions about rail transportation are in error, fwiw.
**FWIW, another long surviving word is "Bear". That says something. The Indo European word "apple" having survived so long due to people liking fruit and needing to eat. Bear, on the other hand, is still around as bears are dangerous.
***I know that is popular to talk in terms of "modern" vs. "post modern". Well that's a load of crap. When historians look back two centuries from now, 1890 is going to be part of the same era you are living in right now. We'll deal with that some other time, but the whole post modern thing is the age old phenomenon of people defining any era they live in as the best of all times, or the worst of all times, or both at the same time.
****As an aide, just recently the Tribune ran an article on a fellow, and some of his disciples, who really, really eat local, and have for a long time. The individual, dating back to the 1970s, pretty much wondered around the Red Desert making use of what's available there.
*****Early orange advertisements, or at least those of the 1910s and 1920s, are exceedingly strange which is why I haven't posted any of them here. They seemed divided, basically, into three categories.
One of them featured Western scenes, such as cowboys, even though cowboys aren't noted for their orange consumption. The only example of such advertising I've seen in person is of that type, featuring a hard working cowboy, his cowboy pushed to the back of his head, admiring an orange.
Another type, however, featured young women. Some just featured young women, but some featured young women in alluring poses. More than a few featured young women who were barely dressed. All of this is really an unmistakable attempt to sell oranges based on something other than oranges, but why?
A third type featured Plains Indians, who are not noted for their orange consumption. Of course, oranges aren't native to North America at all, so it'd be really unlikely that a Sioux warrior would pop up over a hill and observe an orange grove. But that sort of depiction was common.
A hybrid type featured Indian women who had lost part of their clothing. That's odd in and of itself but semi nude women were common in advertising art prior to 1930 and therefore perhaps that's not as odd as it might seem. It is odd, however. It's sort of bizarrely imperialist in fact.
Attractive Indian women linger on, albeit barely, in advertising in two ways. The Land O Lakes dairy entity, a cooperative, still features their very early advertising logo of an attractive, but at least fully clad, Indian woman, even though Indian women of the era depicted would have found any dairy product unusual. The Navajo Trucking company still features its attractive stylized Indian woman on the doors of their trucks, in a very much post World War Two, pre 1960, type of illustration. I'm particularly amazed that the latter logo, and indeed the company name, haven't changed.
******While California today is desperate to deny it, and while its fairly clear the problems in the state have eclipsed its rise and its in a state of continual decline of all sorts, California owes its existence to Catholic missionary endeavors.
It owes its modern existence in part to mining, which is rather obvious, and partially even to oil exploration, but overall, very much to agriculture. In that sense, modern California is an example of the "tragedy of the Commons" written large. It's still a major food producer, but its also built over and paved over its base industry to a shocking degree.
^Rail cars are often leased, rather than owned.
^^That year again, 1919. It's amazing how important of year 1919 was in all sorts of ways.
^^^We're so used the there being certain Federal departments today, such as the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Education, that we tend to think they must have always existed.
The Department of Agriculture was actually created in 1860s, although some of its duties had bounced around in the Patent office prior to that. The Department of the Interior, therefore, very much predates the Department of Agriculture in any form. It didn't become a cabinet level department until 1889, almost the era that this post deals with.
That's significant for a lot of reasons, most of which we'll skip for the time being. Worth nothing here, however, is that the Federal government became hugely interested in agriculture during the 1930s, due to the Great Depression. Lots of programs sprang up at that time designed to deal with farm relief and environmental conditions that the 30s demanded. Not all of those were successful by any means.
The Depression was followed by World War Two which created a massive strain on the county's food production.
And that was followed by the Cold War and the 1950s, which started a really odd era of "get big or get out" that was partially fueled by Cold War fears, partially fueled by the "cheap food" policy of the era, and partially fueled by apocalyptic food scenarios that the government feared. We still live in that era as its become institutionalized, although in terms of direct involvement, the Federal government has much reduce its activities.
