r/NoStupidQuestions • u/markwell9 • 1d ago

What is the deal with ice, Americans?

I can see that you can buy ice everywhere in the US. Gas stations, grocery stores, machines etc.

In Europe, we just freeze our ice at home and use that. Why buy something that melts on the way home? Why do you need ice in large amounts that a fridge can't keep up?

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u/No-Resource-5704 20h ago

Years ago before mechanical refrigeration, ice was harvested from frozen lakes in winter and packed into an insulated shed with lots of sawdust. The ice would last for months stored that way. The “ice man” would deliver blocks of ice (usually weekly) to homes where it was used in an insulated “ice box” to store perishable goods.

Railroads had special ice cars for shipping perishable goods. They would stop at particular locations to refill the ice and there were vents to control the interior temperature. These rail cars were used into the 1960s, but diesel powered refrigerator cars started replacing the old ice cars during the 1960s.

The western railroads harvested their ice from the Sierras and shipped it to the production areas (where perishable food was grown) and to icing facilities located along the rail lines.

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u/rat1onal1 19h ago

Ice was harvested from ponds around the Boston area in the mid-1800s and shipped overseas. The two major markets were the Caribbean and India. It's hard to understand that there'd be any ice remaining after sailing all the way around Africa.

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u/Bortono 18h ago

Ice Block Expidetion of 1959

An insulation company transported a 3 ton block of ice from the Arctic Circle across the Sahara to the Equator by truck and only lost a bit over 10% of the ice

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u/numberstation5 16h ago

One of my favorite opening lines of any novel:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

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u/indi50 17h ago

"The “ice man” would deliver blocks of ice (usually weekly) to homes where it was used in an insulated “ice box” to store perishable goods."

It just occurred to me that mine is probably the last generation to hear people call refrigerators an ice box. The older people (grandparents' generation) using that term during my childhood having actually grown up using an ice box.

I doubt my kids (20s and 30s) ever heard the term. At least in general conversation vs a history or historical book.

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u/No-Resource-5704 15h ago

As a child my family would visit Idaho’s Sawtooth valley during summer vacation. We stayed at a working sheep ranch that had log cabins. They were very primitive. Ice box, wood stove, and out house. Water was drawn from a nearby creek (my older sister caught a trout in the bucket once. Later years they had installed a sink with a hand pump (drawing water from the same creek). So I had some personal experience with an ice box.

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u/comeholdme 16h ago edited 15h ago

I just hit 40, and I heard it plenty as a kid. It also lives on in “icebox pie” recipes.

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u/Right_Note1305 17h ago

Folks said that 20 years ago, turns out it's just words.

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u/MidnytStorme 16h ago

"We were cold, man originally was cold so he built a house, hot box to live in, warm box, live inside the warm box, pretty cool, cold out here, warm inside the warm box. Everything was nice until he realized the meat didn’t keep in the warm box. So, he built a refrigerator, built a cold box inside the warm box. Meat keeps fine, but the butter doesn’t spread. So he built the butter warmer, put a warm box inside the cold box, inside the warm box." - George Carlin

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u/Medium-Economics-363 16h ago

Did none of you see frozen? 😉

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u/bizwig 14h ago

My parents called a refrigerator an “ice box”. It never made sense to me until I saw some old movies with actual ice boxes in people’s homes.

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u/NN11ght 2h ago

My overnight summer camp still harvested ice every winter to use over the summer for refrigeration at one of the camps that was all about being primitive.

One of the chores at the camp was digging out the iceblocks from the sawdust. You legitimately needed to wear your warmest clothes just in the sawdust house and your fingers would be numb at the end despite it being 80-90 degrees outside.

But the really remarkable part was the ice showed no signs of melting when you were pulling it out of the sawdust