(Photo via Steve Snodgrass)
One of the things I love about Bill Bryson, along with his 14 billion other fans, is that he really dives into those cultural eccentricities of which everyone is aware of, but hardly anyone knows the origin of. In other words, Bryson gives us the totally awesome historical backstory which explains the stereotype. Take ice for example. Does anyone remember that episode of Friends where Monica finds out her ‘wedding fund’ is gone? The rest of the scene went a little like this:
Mrs. Geller: We might still have some money, if your father didn’t think it was a good idea to sell ice over the Internet.
Mr. Geller: It seemed like such a simple idea.
Mrs. Geller: Stupid Jack, the word is stupid.
Funnily enough, the totally awesome historical backstory on why Americans love ice goes a little something like that. Except it wasn’t stupid, it was pure genius of the sorts that only an American could have and, per usual, the English were right on hand to complain about. The novel I’m currently reading, Brideshead Revisited, is sprinkled with all sorts of gems on what the English loved and hated in the interwar period, even on something so trivial as ice: “Oh, that swan! Six weeks in America has given me an absolute phobia of ice.”
So, why do we love ice when the rest of the world is indifferent, at best? “…Americans appreciated ice as no people had before. They used it to chill beer and wine, to make delectable icy cocktails, to soothe fevers and to create a vast range of frozen treats.” Being the good capitalists that Americans are, we, of course, wanted to export our ice. The Wenham Lake Ice Company set up shop in London in 1844 with a window display unlike no other, a giant block of ice. The English had never seen anything like it, especially in the middle of the summer. Wenham ice started being used at Buckingham Palace and was given a royal warrant. (That little emblem you find on some products letting you know that you’re buying the same thing as the Queen.) It never really caught on though. “Even now, it is still often dispensed in the UK as if it were on prescription.”
Ice, it could be argued, transformed the U.S. food industry. With refrigerated railways cars people in different parts of the country could now eat foods they had only the privilege to read about before. “For the first time in history food didn’t have to be consumed close to where it was produced.” Without the ability to produce and keep ice, Chicago, as we know it, would not even exist, much less be a thriving metropolitan area, which is all in part to the hub it became for the railway industry way back when.
So there you have it. We love ice because we can’t afford to not love ice.
Amy x
