Open Writing

When I buy a sandwich at a local bakery/café, it is fresh. The bread was baked that morning. The lettuce, tomato, carrot, and other salad vegies were bought from the greengrocer round the corner. If it's a chicken sandwich, I know the chicken was cooked earlier the same day. Ham, roast beef, turkey and other meats could have been prepared and pre-sliced before delivery. How fresh are they?

When a fast food franchise café invites me to "eat fresh", I think I can be excused for thinking they offer fresh food. However, all the meat of various kinds comes to their shop in frozen or chilled pre-packaged portions. The pre-chopped and pre-sliced salad vegetables arrive in plastic bags. What they mean is that their rolls are freshly made while you wait, even if the ingredients themselves are not fresh.

Another fast food chain might be more accurate. They use the terms "fresh salads" and "baked fresh". Their largest competitors advertise "fresh chicken" and "prepared fresh for you". Another franchise chain offers "the most freshly prepared salad ingredients". What does that mean? Do they offer more salad ingredients than the others? Alternatively, how can salad ingredients be more freshly prepared or most freshly prepared? Are they less freshly prepared by competitors?

Our supermarkets are on the fresh bandwagon, too. One chain calls itself "the fresh food people". Another suggests you use "vegies fresh from your freezer", and that frozen vegetables help you prepare a fresh meal. We might pause again, and wonder to what extent frozen vegetables are fresh.

We can buy "steam fresh" vegetables. As they are made in New Zealand and I am in Australia, this obviously doesn't mean I'm buying freshly picked vegetables. Presumably their freshness is at least partially preserved by a steaming process. As anyone can blanch fresh vegetables in boiling water or steam before putting them in the ice box of their fridge, I wonder how "steam fresh" differs from any other form of preserving "fresh" vegetables?

"Fresh" came into English from French about 700 years ago. Shakespeare used it about 60 times in his plays. The erudite scholar David Crystal and his son the actor Ben Crystal identify four main meanings in Shakespeare's plays:

— young, lovely, blooming
— bright, blooming, gay
— refreshed, invigorated, renewed
— ready, eager, hungry.

A variety of usages can be seen in such phrases as:

— You meet in some fresh cheek the flower of fancy.
— How bravely thou becom'st thy bed! fresh lily, And whiter than the sheets!
— Or look upon our Romans, whose remembrance, Is yet fresh in their grief
— As many fresh streams meet in one salt sea,
— For I am fresh of spirit and resolved To meet all perils very constantly.
— hoary-headed frosts Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose
— this poor infant, this fresh-new seafarer.

In fact, many subtle meanings and usages have developed over the centuries. Consider: new, experienced for the first time, not previously seen, not stale, not sour, not salty, unaltered, inexperienced, recently made, very recently, with new energy, beginning again, inclined to take liberties in behaviour.

So perhaps I shouldn't be making a fuss about fast food outlets, supermarkets, and frozen food manufacturers, after all. And I certainly won't get fresh with the fresh faced young lady at the sandwich shop, on a nice fresh morning, if she tells me she has some fresh ham but she's fresh out of fresh lettuce and tomatoes.

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Reference:
Crystal, D. & B., Shakespeare's Words: A Glossary and Language Companion, Penguin Books, London 2002

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© Copyright Brian Barratt 2010