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General Motors on Monday filed for bankruptcy protection, even after $19.4 billion in federal bailout money. It now appears that taxpayers will end up with a 60% stake in the restructured company. Cato scholar Daniel Ikenson has long suggested bankruptcy as the best course for GM, and now worries about Ford's future: "The government has a 60 percent stake in GM. Who's going to want to own Ford stock—and therefore, will Ford be able to raise capital—when the U.S. government has an incentive to tip the balance in GM's favor wherever it can?"

• Full statement from Ikenson


• "An Overdue Reckoning in the Auto Sector," by Daniel Ikenson


• "Don't Bail Out the Big Three," by Daniel Ikenson

In 1927, General Electric introduced the "Monitor Top," the first commercially successful home-use refrigerator (the unit was so-named because the motor sat on top of the fridge). This marked the beginning of a near-wholesale change in the eating habits of Americans and, eventually, the entire industrialized world. It also represented a major shift in the way we define food products as "fresh." As Susanne Freidberg writes in Fresh: A Perishable History, the introduction of home refrigeration (buoyed by the proliferation of electricity in urban neighbourhoods) reflected a new idea "that freshness depend[ed] less on time or distance than on the technology that protect[ed] it."

Before the Monitor Top, most households employed ice boxes to keep food fresh. But the ice box was never a particularly useful contraption: As the ice inside melted (and was replaced, often multiple times daily, with new ice), the temperature would fluctuate dramatically -- food might initially freeze and then rapidly thaw. This created an awful mess, not to mention a toxic environment in which the natural bacteria and enzymes in various foods mixed and melded to create unnatural smells and unhealthy tastes.

An ice box would be considered a serious health concern these days. But the upshot of owning one in the late-19th century and early-20th century was that you were more likely -- specifically because of the technological limitations -- to eat food that was fresher. You had to eat local -- because there was a serious possibility that anything grown or raised outside your neighbourhood (or on another continent) would be spoiled or even poisonous by the time it reached the market.

Ironically, the refrigerator, an appliance designed to keep our food fresher for a longer period of time, has actually meant that we eat things that are not at all, in the classic sense, fresh.

The advent of cold storage (refrigeration on an industrial scale) in the mid-to late-1800s

also meant that food producers gained a stronger hand in what we eat and when we eat it. Cold storage even gave manufacturers power over how much we pay for our food. When U. S. food prices rose dramatically in 1910-11, many argued that cold storage was the culprit -- now that producers and marketers had the power to keep meat, eggs and produce "fresher" for extended periods, it was argued, they could manipulate the laws of supply and demand to drive up prices. (U. S. lawmakers would eventually step in to regulate the cold storage

industry and how much product manufacturers could stockpile at a given time.)

Then there is the matter of whether refrigeration really does maintain freshness. Answer: It depends. Milk and eggs will stay fresher for longer, but meat and fish might not (especially the latter). As for fruits and vegetables, oftentimes sticking them in cold storage will do more harm than good. According to Freidberg, "refrigeration slows wilting and rot," but "it can damage the flavour, texture and appearance" of vegetables. Same thing goes for many fruits, which are often the most tasty just before they rot.

There are good and bad sides to using a refrigerator. But in a very real sense, the rapid globalization of the food industry from the mid-1800s on has made having a refrigerator at home--not to mention those massive walls of cold storage at the supermarket --a necessity. The food we buy comes from all over the world, partially because we demand greater variety than our great-great-grandparents, but more significantly because the cheapest places to grow produce, milk cows and slaughter chickens are quite often very far away from where those products are eventually consumed. Keeping all that food edible as it crosses land and sea on the way to your dinner table necessarily involves keeping it cold.

There is only one alternative, and it's a throwback to the days before the Monitor Top: Buy local. This might be perfectly plausible for farmers and environmentalists, but for average people, exclusively eating food grown within a 20-kilometre radius of your house is inconvenient and culinarily limiting.

"Nothing is as pure or natural as we'd like," writes Freidberg at the end of Fresh. This is very true -- who wouldn't want a glass of freshly milked milk and a couple of just-hatched eggs in the morning? Alas, those items aren't on the menu.

Refrigeration doesn't mean freshness -- not by a long shot. But at least it allows us to eat the food we want, when we want it. This is, I suppose, the next best thing to slapping a juicy steak cut from a newly slaughtered cow on the grill at supper time.

ygoldstein@nationalpost.com

St. Paul's Webster Magnet Elementary School changed its name last month to the Barack and Michelle Obama Service Learning Elementary. What's wrong with that? Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editor David Shribman makes an impassioned plea on behalf of the school's namesake:

Webster was the greatest orator in the age of great oratory; some of his words remain in the American memory, even in this ahistorical age. He was probably the most eminent Supreme Court lawyer in American history, having argued 249 cases before the court, including several of the landmark cases of the early 19th century that shaped constitutional law in the United States for generations. And he was one of the greatest secretaries of state ever (and the first to serve non-consecutive terms, one under William Henry Harrison and John Tyler, another under Millard Fillmore).

"He achieved great distinction," says Kenneth E. Shewmaker, editor of the "Diplomatic Papers of Daniel Webster." "Barack Obama may have greater distinction because he had the chance to be president. A senator doesn't have that kind of power, but if we understand his legacy, including his role in creating the sense of American nationalism, we wouldn't wipe Webster's name off our buildings."

After pleading Webster's case, Shribman makes the larger case for the preservation of historical memory:

Changing the name of a school from Webster to Obama is a symptom of a larger problem in American life.

"The kind of present-mindedness that wipes out historical knowledge is a cultural fault of American society," says Hyman Berman, an emeritus history professor at the University of Minnesota. Alan Berolzheimer, a Norwich, Vt., historian who as a young man worked on cataloging and publishing the "Webster Papers," adds: "You don't make light of a long-standing historical figure whom a community honored in the first place."

Americans like to name schools after political figures. In Minnesota, there is an elementary school in St. Paul and a high school in Minneapolis named for the late Sen. Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash while running for re-election in 2002. The University of Minnesota has the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, named for the mayor, senator and vice president who is the state's greatest historical figure. And the University of Minnesota Law School is housed in Walter F. Mondale Hall, named for the former senator and vice president. Mondale is very much alive.

"There should be room for Daniel Webster on our schools," says Mondale, who is 81. "He would want it that way, and he deserves a place. And though I know names can go up and they can go down, let's leave Mondale Hall alone for a while."

In working on the column, Shribman found the powers-that-be at Webster Magnet School present a case study in historical amnesia:

There is no trace at all of Webster in the Obama Service Learning Elementary school today, not even a picture of Webster, who may have been the subject of more formal portraits of any man of his time, if not of all American history. Indeed, in the period leading up to the vote on the name change, the principal of the school, Lori Simon, actually had to figure out for whom the school was named originally.

If Webster had been remembered at the school, I am quite certain that what was "remembered" would have been wrong. Such is certainly the case with what high school students are taught, for example, about Lincoln, whose political hero was Webster, when they are taught anything at all.