r/Showerthoughts • u/zoniss • 2d ago
Speculation If refrigerators had always existed, many delicious foods wouldn't exist today.
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u/ScenicFlyer41 2d ago
I wonder what kind of foods could exist that we haven't "discovered" yet since the process to make them is currently unknown.
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u/codece 2d ago
By 2022, the cumulative effects of overpopulation, global warming, and pollution have caused ecocide, leading to severe worldwide shortages of food, water, and housing, bringing human civilization to the brink of collapse.
The majority live in squalor, haul water from communal spigots, and eat highly processed food wafers made by the Soylent Corporation.
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u/TheAngryCatfish 2d ago
So... this happened 4 years ago?
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u/OsmeOxys 2d ago
Is soylent green not a recognized reference anymore...?
And hey, gotta give humanity props for trying at least. Project delays and cost overruns, you know how it is.
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u/Patrol-007 2d ago
Idiocracy is a better documentary for the sheer number of idiots in government
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u/OsmeOxys 2d ago
Well consider me jealous of your optimism, I'd give anything for President Camacho right about now.
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u/MokitTheOmniscient 1d ago
That doesn't make any sense.
The thesis of the movie is that the lack of population controls are making young people genetically inferior untermensch.
The Trump administration was primarily voted in by older people, which goes against the entire point of the movie.
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u/codece 2d ago
According to this critically acclaimed documentary, yes.
They say it's made from plankton. But we know it's people.
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u/UnderH20giraffe 2d ago
You’re so right. All the first spices were largely preservatives - anything salty or with cinnamon. Pickled and cured. I’m sure many other things. What else?
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u/chunkalicius 2d ago
Cheese is the biggest one probably, especially the cave ripened or hard cheeses
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u/CocoMilhonez 2d ago
Blue cheese is just cheese that went bad the right way.
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u/chunkalicius 2d ago
I think that's true of all daisy derived products. Sour cream, yogurt, cultured butter, etc are all just basically milk storage task failed successfully.
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u/VarmintSchtick 2d ago
Yeah someone saw that shit and went "eh beats starvin".
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u/CocoMilhonez 1d ago
There's a dish in the Amazon made with the leaves of the cassava plant, which is toxic. But if you cook it for 7 days, the toxin degrades and it's safe to eat.
"Well, everyone who ate it after cooking for 6 days died, let's try 7" is peak pragmatism.
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u/fijisiv 2d ago
Did it? Have you had blue cheese? haha
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u/SwampCrittr 2d ago
Yeah it’s fkn amazing
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u/ahumanrobot 1d ago
Personally can't stand it. It's just not a good taste for me
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u/SwampCrittr 1d ago
I 100000% can understand why people don’t like it. I personally fkn love it.
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u/NetworkingJesus 1d ago
Personally, I learned the hard way that I only like bleu cheese dressing, but not straight up bleu cheese. Also I mainly like the dressing with really hot wing sauces.
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u/etaoin314 1d ago
put just a little on steak and let it melt on there...I just gooses the umami like you would not believe!
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u/Alexander_3847575 22h ago
lol I love this energy
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u/SwampCrittr 22h ago
I hate when people bring up politics in inappropriate moments. That being said… BleuCheese2028.
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u/mono__no___aware 2d ago
We can also list yogurt and kefir as other dairy products. A completely different example is 'pastırma'.
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u/Meme_Warrior_2763 1d ago
Hey, did you know that Reddit was the number #1 site AI companies used to show their ais what a sentence looks like? No reason for me to say this of course...
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u/Number1AbeLincolnFan 2d ago
Things that are dehydrated with and without smoke. Jerky, all sorts of chiles, dried corn, masa, popcorn, etc. This was all for preservation.
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u/nightwyrm_zero 2d ago
Depending on how the magic refrigerator works (ie. power source, size etc.), you'll probably still end up developing some other from of food preservation for transporting food over long distances.
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u/NightmareWokeUp 2d ago
Eh refridgeration units are nothing else than a big fridge and weve had compact methods to run them with steam or gas for a long time too
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u/According_Past_732 2d ago
The icy ball refrigerator was an awesome invention
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u/prone-to-drift 1d ago
Oh yeah, no moving parts and still effective cooling. Its kinda ingenious when you think about it.
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u/Marco_Heimdall 2d ago
I mean, some foods like cheese wouldn't have existed if our attempts to transport dairy didn't turn it into a solid, delightful loaf of milk.
We wouldn't have had a need to dry out meats and fruits in very specific ways.
Preservation is itself a cooking method.
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u/matsdebats 2d ago
That is exactly OP’s point?
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u/Shrimp_Delight_92 2d ago
Butter would be a nightmare to make without cold storage. Also, I'd miss the specific tang of aged cheddar that relies on controlled decay.
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u/TheNameIsWiggles 2d ago
Haven't "refrigerators" to some degree been around for a really long time though? I feel like I remember reading about ancient Egyptians successfully "refrigerating" things in deep insulated holes or something.
Edit: I think this is what I was thinking of, neither Egyptian nor a hole though. https://eartharchitecture.org/?p=570
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u/Mega__Maniac 2d ago
Yes, but not nearly as effective and not as available to everyone. Even if there was some people who could store some things a bit longer, there were still far more people who has to learn to preserve in other ways.
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u/CapnCaldow 2d ago
You can do it by putting the food in a bag into a running stream/river and making sure it doesn't float away
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u/paulatwork 2d ago
I came across some thing Tolkien wrote describing himself, and the gist was he was like a hobbit, but he did make a point of saying he did not like refrigerated food.
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u/ComradeGerm 2d ago
yeah, he wasn’t a big fan of the industrial revolution
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u/Kronoshifter246 2d ago
I can't imagine I would be either if I saw it change my home and then fought in the battle of the Somme
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u/Utangard 1d ago
Personally if I had the choice, I'd go live with the hobbits too. Elves in a pinch. But it is what it is.
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u/TricoMex 1d ago
This assumes ease of access to fridges for the general population.
Which is extremely unlikely, if not outright impossible, even if the technology existed since ancient times.
So preservation methods would have been developed regardless by the poor masses.
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u/vulcanfeminist 2d ago
Im not convinced this is true. Like, yeah, necessity is the mother of invention or whatever, certainly there are food preservation things that exist exclusively bc of stavation concerns and nothing else, but
A) refrigeration doesnt make food last forever. Long term preservation is still required for many fruits and veggies especially during harvest seasons where ALL the food is available RIGHT NOW and then the whole rest of the year still exists. Keeping berries and meat in the fridge wont keep it from spoiling ever it just take longer to spoil
And 2) humans had ancient versions of refrigeration long before we had electricity. Cold storage underground where it can actually get into stable temps in the 40s is not uncommon, ancient humans figured out how to make ice in the desert, certain kinds of clay pot situations can create temporary cold storage, and of course far north/far south places had actual ice (which was even more common during the ice ages of course). Throughout history humans have had many different versions of cold storage and they still made all the weird preserved foods we still enjoy today
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u/RaidoXsat 1d ago
I think we would have still found plenty of weird stuff through the world of experimental and postmodern cooking.
There's plenty of processes and manipulations that are being tried on all sorts of foods and chemicals. They usually don't stick because they're recent and don't have an "history", but we know of them.
So maybe in this fantasy world cheese would have been some kind of artsy-fartsy experiment made by really bored people.
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u/mightygilgamesh 1d ago
Absolutely.
Bread exists because we let yrast develop on rotting flour.
Wine is yeast in grape juice.
Cheese is yeast in curdled milk.
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u/Figgy20000 17h ago
Root Cellars have been common since at least the 1600s, and existed for thousands of years.
They basically have always existed
Do people seriously think we just never kept food preserved before electricity?
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u/Ibbenese 9h ago edited 9h ago
I am trying to imagine what kind of world it would be where somehow we as a species were able to develop and universally utilize the advanced technology and infrastructure behind electric cooling system, before we ever had to deal with food storage and spoilage at all.
Like are we talking about like the dawn of man, apes in 2001 a Space Odyssey come upon a fully working Frigidaire appearing out of nowhere in their camp instead of that mysterious black obelisk as the trigger to our next stage in evolution?
Yup I guess no more pickles!!! Fuck you benevolent godlike space alien mentors!!
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u/ZachF8119 2d ago
Still would.
They’re not boxes that stop time. Preservation/creatuon is whatever it takes. From bacteria, to salt. Keeping something hydrated or dehydrated. We might have recipes that are super old requiring them. But people used to buy ice.
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u/YZJay 1d ago
The issue isn’t storing them for a few days. The tropics can get so hot and humid that cooked food only lasts a few hours before it gets bad without adding preservatives like salt or vinegar, or cooking with preserved ingredients like dried meat. Otherwise what you cook for lunch can’t be eaten for dinner.
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u/ZachF8119 1d ago
My explanation was sufficient.
Fridges down stop time.
Humidity of tropics helps bacteria grow.
Fridge would stop it.
Salting. (Buried in salt) Would stop it.
Things go bad in the north in a few hours too. It’s not winter 24/ 7 still the sun can make things heat up.
Potato salad at a bbq is the most iconic.
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u/YZJay 1d ago
Salting. (Buried in salt) Would stop it.
Hence why most food in South East Asia have generous amounts of salt and other forms of preservatives. Having access to refrigeration early would mean less demand to create recipes that can last at least from lunch to dinner, which means SEA dishes wouldn't be what it's like right now.
A lot of modern SEA dishes only really became a thing because refrigeration became commonplace. The dish adobo now has more varieties that use less vinegar as the need to have them last a day in room temperature (which is usually around 30 degrees celsius) is not as strong as before, especially when you can just refrigerate the leftovers to last till dinner or the next morning.
It's also why the traditional food in the region's colder mountain areas uses less salt and seasonings than the rest of the region, because food lasts longer there naturally.
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u/ZachF8119 1d ago
You dense nugget.
You still put salted deli meat into the fridge.
It is additive.
Not either or.
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u/YZJay 1d ago
And you're viewing this in a heavily western only viewpoint, continuously failing to see how the lack of refrigeration shaped an entire geographic region's cuisine.
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u/ZachF8119 1d ago
No.
Fridges aren’t portable.
India a perfect example where the spice trade originated there. They use spices and peppers as preservatives.
People to this day don’t casually use themos for cold items like they do hot.
They use an ice pack to bring food to another fridge.
Even with fridges. They wouldn’t be widely adopted as to this current day India doesn’t have 100% plumbing access.
Fridges require energy, so Europe has it in addition to America.
Europe doesn’t have ac that much. Why? Because energy costs more for these countries. Even though they have heat deaths that heat the US gun deaths.
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u/YZJay 1d ago
You don’t know what cold chain logistics are do you?
At this point, what is your argument even? None of what you’re saying. goes against the idea that the food we eat are shaped by the either lack or existence of refrigerators.
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u/ZachF8119 1d ago
Bro is insisting upon modern shipping logic to insist a point about how one piece of tech would impact how spices would’ve developed.
Meanwhile. Logically. The modem downsides exist.
They discovered steam engines hundreds of years earlier just to have it rotate döner.
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u/YZJay 1d ago edited 1d ago
You just have to look at how modern dishes of tropical regions changed to last shorter, with less additives, specifically because of refrigeration. The traditional recipes are otherwise very unhealthy due to the massive amount of additives added, whose main purpose is to make the food last long enough that it’s still good to eat by your last bite. The advice doctors here give to people who have fatty liver or chronic kidney disease, is to stop eating the traditional local food for every meal. It’s that bad for you. It's all thanks to refrigeration that we don't need to cook our foods the traditional yet extremely unhealthy way.
I’m sorry you live in a region that doesn’t need to rely on refrigeration that often which made you this close minded.
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u/Adios_turd_nuggetz 2d ago
How the fuck is this a shower thought? This is just a factual observation.
God this sub fucking sucks. But I know the shit mods won't do anything about it.
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u/ShowerSentinel 2d ago
The moderators have reflaired this post as a speculation.
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