The Box That Shaped Global Diets

December 11, 2007

Sarah Murray looks at how shipping technology has changed what the world eats

It is hard to underestimate the role the shipping container has played in transforming our lives. For half a century or so, this steel box has been revolutionizing world trade, with intermodal container shipments spreading to every corner of the global transport network, paving the way for a massive growth in world trade. However, this simple box has also, with the assistance of refrigeration, dramatically changed our diets.

Or course, it all started in the 1950s—worried about the competition from ships to his trucking business, Malcom McLean, a North Carolina truck driver born in 1913, came up with the idea of simply driving loaded trailers on to vessels - his own vessels. As his ideas developed, he realized that a far more efficient use of space would be to do away with the wheels of the trailers and simply use the trailer bodies.

In April 1956 he put his idea into practice. That day, what one reporter described as an “old bucket of bolts” set sail from the port of Newark, New Jersey, and headed down the East Coast for Houston, Texas. The vessel—the Ideal-X, a converted Second World War tanker with a reinforced deck—carried fifty-eight metal boxes. It was the first-ever scheduled container ship service, heralding the end of break-bulk shipping, a laborious system whereby each piece of cargo had to be separately loaded, packed, arranged, and unloaded.

As a result, food can now be transported in previously unimaginable quantities. A single twenty-foot container could hold about forty-eight thousand bananas. That means a vessel carrying eight thousand containers could if necessary transport more than 3.8 million of them in a single voyage.

But quantity is only part of the story. With the assistance of high-tech refrigeration, the shipping container’s cousin, the reefer, has supplied the world with perishable and exotic produce that we now take for granted. A variant on McLean’s box, each reefer contains a complex system of coils, wires, and electrical fittings. Computer technology regulates everything from the temperature and humidity to ventilation and gas levels, all working to prevent the deterioration of fresh foods over long distances. It is this giant cooler box that has helped reshape global diets.

Barbara Pratt watched much of this happen. Today she is a senior executive at Maersk, the giant Danish shipping company, but in the late 1970s when she left college with a background in science, her first job was at Sea-Land, the company founded by McLean and eventually bought by Maersk. Her task was to build a laboratory inside a forty-foot container and, by traveling around the world with it, discover how refrigerated products fared during their journeys. For Pratt, then twenty-three, the job was a chance to see the world, albeit from a rather unusual perspective. “I figured, well, I could do this for a couple of years,” she says. “And then, of course, I got hooked and never left.”

Pratt’s lab was equipped with a diesel generator, and hot and cold running water. It had computers, a chromatograph that measured gas concentrations, as well as other pieces of equipment needed for the experiments the team would be conducting. It had a few comforts, as well—a set of bunk beds, a refrigerator, and a microwave. For Pratt and her team were to spend many nights within the metal walls of this moving laboratory.

Pratt’s first voyage was with a shipment of cocoa beans from the Dominican Republic to the US port of Newark via Puerto Rico. She spent almost a decade in her mobile laboratory, following everything from bell peppers to blueberries around the world, checking how ventilation, condensation, temperature, and different types of refrigerants affected them. “Essentially my job was to bring technology to what was then an industry built by truckers,” she says.

Meanwhile, companies with names like Carrier Transicold (founded by Willis Haviland Carrier, the “father of air-conditioning”) and Thermo King had been busy developing transportable refrigeration units. As with the container itself, the trucking industry had a hand in the development of the reefer.

In the hot summer of 1938, so the story goes, Joseph Numero, a businessman who then made sound systems for cinemas, was playing a round of golf with his friend Harry Werner, who owned a truck business in Minneapolis. After Werner complained that the summer heat was ruining many of his meat deliveries, Numero claimed he could come up with a solution. His golfing partner was highly skeptical—how, he wondered, could Numero create something small enough to move around but also sufficiently durable to withstand rough truck journeys.

What Werner did not realize was that Numero had a powerful tool at his disposal—the genius of Frederick Jones, a self-taught mechanical African American engineer who became one of the most prolific US inventors. While working for Numero’s cinema business, he devised an automatic ticket machine and a movie projector that played back recorded sound.

Despite Jones’s powers of invention, early attempts floundered. But eventually, with parts collected from junkyards, Jones assembled a rather ungainly unit that attached to the base of a trailer. Miraculously, the strange contraption worked. Jones and Numero improved on the device, patented it, and went on to found US Thermo Control Company (today’s Thermo King, which is now owned by the Ingersoll Rand industrial group).

In 1956, the company’s refrigeration unit was installed on an ocean-borne vessel. The new technology effectively turned the shipping container into a mobile fridge that, powered by propane, was self-sufficient. Suddenly, perishable foods could be sent on journeys of thousands of miles through tropical heat without deteriorating.

Another breakthrough came in the late 1970s with the advent of the microprocessor. Until then, reefers had been controlled mechanically, with primitive sensors monitoring the interior temperature. Armed with microchips, they could now start to give customized care to foods with different traveling requirements—from products with high fat content such as fish, for whom colder is better, to stone fruit, avocados, and kiwi fruits that must be kept as cool as possible without actually being frozen.

Not only do microprocessors keep the temperature constant but they also control levels of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen. These gases alter the respiration rate of fresh produce, which in turn slows down the ripening process, extending its shelf life and making it ready to eat at just the right moment—when it is unpacked and loaded on to the shelves of the supermarket. As a result, these high-tech boxes have brought western consumers new and exotic produce such as papayas and mangoes, and helped to keep supermarkets stocked with fresh produce year round.

Of course, the movement of food, often over vast distances, is nothing new. It has for centuries been part of human life—an inevitable consequence of mankind’s quest for sustenance. In ancient Rome, citizens consumed grain from Egypt and Africa, wine from Spain, France, Greece, and Sicily, preserved fruits from Syria, walnuts from Persia, and rare spices from China, India, Arabia, and Africa. Fresh produce also traveled some distance to reach consumers—apples and pears were conveyed by road down to Rome from Picenum, a northern district between the Apennines and the Adriatic.

Still, even the Romans, with their sophisticated technology and global appetites, would be astonished today to watch someone slice open a kiwi fruit from New Zealand or an avocado from South Africa, both of which have traveled halfway round the world before landing on the dinner table looking as if they were picked just hours earlier.

This now worries some people. Many lament the loss a seasonal approach to eating that global food transportation has brought about. Local produce often tastes better than something that has been traveling for several weeks in a refrigerated container. Moreover, interest has grown in the concept of “food miles”, which questions our reliance on long-distance food transportation because of the carbon emissions it produces.

Certainly transportation generates some of the greenhouse gases associated with our food supply. Yet agriculture and food processing are behind most of the environmental damage resulting from what we eat. Energy is consumed by everything from manufacturing chemical fertilizers and animal feeds to running farm equipment and vehicles, as well as farming practices such as drying crops, keeping poultry in heated buildings, and cultivating fresh produce in hot houses.

And while the constant movement of trucks running to and from processing plants might create unnecessary food miles, the journey of a vessel stacked with thousands of large steel containers, is a relatively small part of the picture.

For more on the history of transporting food, read Sarah Murray’s book, Moveable Feasts: From Ancient Rome to the 21st Century, the Incredible Journeys of the Food We Eat, St Martin’s Press, November 2007
www.moveablefeasts.org