ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Frozen Favourites: Accidental Cryopreservation and ‘Object Shrines’ in Extreme Expeditions

• In Event: The Environmental Lives of Things: Science and Technology, Environmental History, and Material Culture

English Abstract

The foods packed for scientific and exploratory expeditions were often designed to last for years, and chosen to shore up the mental as well as physical wellbeing of expedition members. In the high and cold places of the earth these foods – which, in the twentieth century often bore global branding from companies like Nestle, Heinz or Oxo – have ended up lasting decades frozen in ice. Some were left experimentally, some were deliberately cached as parts of expeditions, and some were simply forgotten or abandoned. This paper considers accidentally cryopreserved foods across Antarctica and on Everest and other high mountains, and the roles they have played in twentieth-century expeditionary science, from emergency health preservers, to evidence of territorial claims, to ways of communicating between nations and into the past and future. This paper considers accidentally frozen food as an unexpected part of the global cold chain, but also as a foreign element to the cryosphere; introducing new materials that often began their lives in very different climates and locations. In this paper, the cryosphere serves as a kind of meta-refrigerator: a ‘naturally’ preservative environment that has kept human-made preservation technologies from decomposing for decades, allowing later generations of researchers to uncover them.

Author

• Vanessa Heggie, University of Birmingham