A Birdseye view of a world without winter

By DON DONOVAN*

It's the merry month of July and once again I've had to give the narcissi a stern talking to. It happens every year, but they never listen. Here it is, winter, and there they are poking up all over the garden, brandishing long, green fingernails and unfurling their petals like flags of truce.

I've noticed, too, that some of our other flora have jumped the gun. A couple of prunuses have started putting on the flossy stuff, and three oak trees - can you believe this, oak trees? - whose first leaves, puny little things, soft as baby's ears, waggle in the southerlies brazen as swimmers on mid-winter's day.

Have they forgotten what spring's all about? Do they think they can ignore the seasons and blossom when they fancy? I mean, who do they think they are, marketers?

Ah - there's the culprit, the season slayer: Modern marketing.

I was in that business for more years - and even more seasons - than I will admit and I remember that among any number of slick definitions there was one that has caused more artificiality than any other: It was the marketers' shibboleth, usually hanging framed on some office wall that read: "MARKETING. Find out what the consumers want and give 'em more. Find out what they don't want and give 'em less."

Now that's a great idea for cars, stereos, videos, cameras, microwaves, golf clubs, TV soaps, family magazines, pop-up toasters, packets of detergent and other inanimate objects. But when it comes to fruit, veges, flowers and shrubs I reckon the marketers have done us a disservice because, at the same time as they've smoothed out the seasons they've taken away the enchantment of seasonal light and shade and made the consumer's world mid-grey all year round.

It started long before any of us were on the planet. It was Technology tripping over something that nobody had ever defined and which was eventually given the name Marketing. The Technology was Food Preservation.

You see, there were all these hirsute guys, armed with the jawbones of asses, smartly turned out in woad, bearskins and thongs, hunting woolly mammoths and having to eat like gluttons until they were fit to burst, then having to leave the rest to go rotten because they couldn't keep it.

One day, inspired, they hit on the idea of drying the meat in strips. And then they discovered that they could preserve fruit, nuts and cereals, too, and ferment juices, which meant that on cold evenings around the fire they could have a chew on mammoth jerky and get smashed into the bargain.

Well that was okay as long as they did it for themselves and were not foisting all that unseasonable tucker on their neighbours through some prehistoric supermarket chain.

But things really started to get bad when, in 1795, the French Government offered a prize of 12,000 francs for anyone who could find a way of preserving food for the Army.

In 1809 Francois Appert invented canning and collected the prize; and by the end of the 19th century all sorts of food - meat, fish, fruit, juices, veges, you name it - had given consumers the opportunity to eat almost anything they fancied, in or out of season.

Mind you, canned wasn't all that good compared with the real thing, and to my mind it still isn't. Have you ever eaten canned peas, beans, raspberries, gooseberries, pears or peaches that were anything other than a pale apology for fresh-picked?

(The awful thing is that generations of city dwellers have grown up thinking that canned is the way things should taste!)

But canning wasn't really so bad because the difference between fresh and tinned was such a contrast. In some ways it was a good thing because it made you value fresh produce and look forward to its harvest. What really made a mess of the seasons was Low Temperatures - Freezing and Chilling.

Not that it was all that new an idea. After all, those of the hairy woolly mammoth hunters who hailed from Arctic regions found that mammoth meat lasted a bit longer if it was frozen. What was new was the artificial manipulation of temperature.

It was a straight line from 1882, when the first shipment of frozen meat left New Zealand for England, to 1929 when Clarence Birdseye (can you believe that name?) started producing consumer-sized packets of frozen foods. He got the idea when he saw some trappers in Labrador freezing picnic packs of fruit and veges to get them through the winters of 40deg north.

Clarence's real contribution to the murder of the seasons was that he, above all others, found the way to freeze vegetables and fruit and preserve the original flavour. Thereafter Harvard-trained marketing magicians, from Wall St to Parnell Rd, progressively promulgated and peddled the mesmeric benefits of fine, frozen food to the world, aided and abetted by the one monumental tool that's turned winter into summer, autumn into spring and all the seasons into nothing - the fridge/freezer.

Where will it end, this technology? Perhaps somewhere there's a Francois Appert or a Clarence Birdseye working on a way to preserve the weather. Perhaps, soon, each day will be neither hot nor cold, neither wet nor dry, the sky partly cloudy.

Then every day we'll eat unseasonable fruits and eternal vegetables and the dried flowers will give up their continuous scents to stuffed bees. Perhaps they'll find a way to merge night and day. Perhaps we'll all live forever preserved in a giant freezer. No ... not a good idea. Let's can it.

* Don Donovan is an Auckland writer.