Passage 1
The fridge is considered a necessity, it has been so since the 1960s when packaged food first appeared with the label: Store in the refrigerator.
In my fridgeless Fifties childhood, I was fed well and healthy. The milkman came daily, the grocer, the butcher , the baker, and the ice-cream man delivered two or three times a week. The Sunday meat would last until Wednesday and surplus bread and milk became all kinds of cakes. Nothing was wasted, and we were never troubled by rotten food. Thirty years on, food deliveries have ceased, fresh vegetables are almost unobtainable in the country.
The invention of the fridge contributed comparatively little to the art of food preservation. A vast way of well-tried techniques already existed―natural cooling, drying, smoking, salting, sugaring, bottling...
What refrigeration did promote was marketing―marketing hardware and electricity, marketing soft drinks, marketing dead bodies of animals around the globe in search of a good price.
Consequently, most of the worlds fridges are to be found, not in the tropics where they might prove useful, but in the wealthy countries with mild temperatures where they are climatically almost unnecessary. Every winter, millions of fridges hum away continuously, and at vast expenses, busily maintaining an artificially-cooled space inside an artificially-heated house―while outside, nature provides the desired temperature free of charge.
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