On any given day, life-saving antibiotics are shipped across the globe, and every variety of food is delivered from the processing plants to the grocery stores. The freshness and safety of temperature-sensitive goods are one of the luxuries we take for granted every day. But where did refrigerated transport come from?

In the United States, the first industry to make huge investments in refrigerated transport was the meat-packing industry. After a long stretch of preference for pork, Americans developed a taste for beef in the middle of the 1800s, and demand for it naturally grew. This trend developed alongside the Civil War, thus smart meat processing entrepreneurs took their businesses up north. They concentrated mostly around Chicago, hundreds of miles away from Texas, where most of the cattle in the country were herded.

Whether the cattle were slaughtered in Texas or Chicago, they had quite a trip before arriving in their respective markets. Ice suppliers grew wealthy rapidly; in fact, in the 1800s harvested ice fell second only to cotton for the nation's most exported product. In the 1860s, ice harvesting, which originated in China around 800 B.C., is what meat packers like George Hammond tapped into when he needed a way to transport his meat from Chicago to Boston.

In a refrigerated train car, shippers packed ice onto the floor and hung the meat carcasses above it. This way, the meat would maintain its true color, as contact with ice tended to dull its ruddy hue, making it less appealing to potential consumers. However, the suspended meat would sway back and forth whenever the train hit a bumpy patch or made a turn. It did not take railway inspectors long to make the connection between train accidents and swinging beef.

In 1865, San Antonio was the first city to boast of manufactured ice, and by 1909, about 2000 plants across the country were churning out frozen blocks for transport and personal use. But well into the 20th century, many Americans preferred that their goods were shipped over "natural" ice, despite the fact that it contained unseen germs.

Nonetheless, refrigerated transport using harvested and manufactured ice became more and more a necessity as animal byproducts were being processed in separate facilities and needed to be transported. In the 1870s, Gustave Swift commissioned the creation of the refrigerated train car. This made it possible to ship meat raised in Texas and packaged in Chicago to the entire eastern seaboard. The New York Strip and the K.C. Steak are really Texan cattle incognito.

In 1912, the zinc-lined Kelvinator refrigerator, which sold for $714, began to make an impact on refrigerated transport. It required messy drip-pan replacements and slowly was replaced by the electric refrigerator. It was still common for frozen foods to thaw while in transit.

Many rules and regulations developed along the way, but it hasn't been until recently that the FDA tightened the controls on temperature-sensitive transport. The space boom in the 1960s inspired the FDA to apply the strict regulations on astronaut food to the items shipped to supermarkets by the ton. For years, federal spot-checks could only catch problems such as food spoilage and contamination after the damage had been done.

What the FDA put in place was the The Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point, or HACCP. This structure of quality control has been adapted in increments since the mid-1990s but has finally been applied to all business sizes in January of this year.

The HACCP has seven components. It analyzes hazards, identifies critical control points, and establishes measures to prevent trespassing beyond those critical points. It also creates procedures for monitoring critical points, dictates corrective actions when the criteria is not met, sets standards for quality verification, and lastly, requires a system of accurate record keeping about every product.

HACCP was an important change to refrigerated transport. For one thing, microbacteria found in food mutates all the time. For example, two well-know strands of bacteria, Escherichia coli and Salmonella enteritidis, only became part of the mainstream causes of food poisoning after 1973. Also, spoilage due to raised temperatures can always be a problem.

Sources:

Railroads and Ice Help Build the Western Trail
Richard Stevens
Bandera Bulletin, July 23, 2004
http://www.banderabulletin.com/articles/

HACCP: A State-of-the-Art Approach to Food Safety
Food & Drug Administration
http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/~lrd/bghaccp.html