Refrigeration. What a
word. Why does it start with "re?"
Shall we guess? Here's
my guess:
Refrigeration started
out as a way to make things cold that were inherently supposed to be cold, but
had lost their coldness — sort of a "make frigid again" concept.
DICTIONARY PAUSE.
Surprise. Either I'm
right or close to it. Go back to Latin, and you've got "refrigerare,"
with "re" meaning "back" and "frigus" and
"frigor" meaning "cold."
Ergo, picture Julius
Caesar taking a package of Caesar salad out of his refrigerator and grabbing a
bottle of Caesar dressing from the shelf in the door. Why not? Would the
Latin-speaking world have given us a verb for "refrigerate" if they
didn't do some refrigerating?
Meanwhile, the
electrified world has gotten a bit carried away with a good thing, if you ask
me. We refrigerate everything. We miss a lot.
Me, I'm a room
temperature person. Lots of things taste better at room temperature. Consider
tomatoes. Cold ones may feel better when you chomp down on them, but room
temperature tomatoes taste better. Same thing goes for bananas. They've got
more flavor when they're not cold and crispy like some pickles we know. For
that matter, I don't care that much for cold pickles either.
At this very moment I'm
viewing a pineapple, an ear of corn, an onion, some tomatoes, a banana and
three squashes — all unrefrigerated and sitting defiantly on top of the
non-working refrigerator in our little camp trailer. Admittedly, I'm the one
who's projected the element of defiance into the still life arrangement, quite
attractively displayed on a red and white checked dishtowel. Did I mention it's
a red onion? Anyway, if you asked the fruits and vegetables, I think they'd
tell you themselves they prefer to be where they are, complimenting each
other's colors, rather than tucked away in a cold dark chilly drawer. They're
ripening even as we speak. Why spend money on energy to keep them cold when
they can add good looks and faint nice aromas to this little living space?
OK, if the refrigerator
happened to be working I might put the corn and squash in it to keep them cool
until cooking time. On the other hand, why? If something doesn't have to be
kept cool, why waste the energy to make it happen?
When my father was a
child, they kept milk cool in the well. That was how everybody kept milk cool
back in those days. Cool, huh?
When I was a child,
potatoes and a few other things, like apples and onions, lay in a three-shelf
vegetable bin in the pantry. We had a refrigerator, but we didn't use it for
absolutely every perishable food item.
Enter global warming.
We must reduce fossil
fuel use to keep the glaciers from melting.
So, why don't we hear
more about refrigerating less? Probably because somebody is afraid someone will
eat a rotten tomato and sue somebody.
Here's to that risk.
Disclaimer:
Don't eat any rotten
tomatoes.
