Visions of Plenty: Refrigerators in America around 1950

Abstract

Once the most essential and time-consuming of activities, the procurement of food had became by mid-twentieth century for many Americans a simple matter of opening the refrigerator. This essay considers the refrigerator as a modem symbol of triumph over the physical distances of hunding and the temporal dimensions of agriculture. When it was new, electronic refrigeration was promoted for the engineering that made it cleaner and more reliable than the iceman. As refrigerator technology became commonplace, advertising strategies shifted. Borrowing from themes in architectural circles regarding fluid relations between inside and outside, refrigerators were pitched as labour-saving machines that revitalized relations with the outdoors by virtue of the leisure time they helped create. Even more vividly, the refrigerator by the early 1950s was itself promoted as a window on to a large food landscape. Gathering together the fruits of this earth, the refrigerator was increasingly marketed toward mid-century as a spectacle of nature's bounty.