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fromWIRED
4 hours agoThere's a Secret Ingredient to Making Luxury Ice at Home
The extravagant ice trade highlights absurdities in resource allocation and sustainability concerns.
Long before home appliances involved stainless steel, touchscreens, compressors, and electricity, there was a decidedly different way to keep food cool - one that involved a clever designer, humble sheets of metal, and huge chunks of ice. It's a curious contraption appropriately named the icebox, an almost forgotten ancestor to modern-day refrigerators. This was no fly-by-night invention, rather a carefully crafted one that transformed eating and food storage across the globe in the mid-to-late 1800s.