December 26, 2024 • 31 mins
The “cold chain” that delivers our food is inconspicuous but vast. The US alone boasts around 5.5 billion cubic feet of refrigerated space; that’s 150 Empire State Buildings’ worth of freezers. Now, the developing world is catching up. On Zero, Nicola Twilley, author of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves, discusses how refrigeration became so ubiquitous and what our reliance on it means for our palates and the planet.
Explore further:
- Past episode with Stacey Abrams on how kitchen-table decisions can cut emissions
- Past episode with journalist George Monbiot on how the world’s food system needs a radical rethink
- Past episode with two vertical farming companies taking agriculture indoors
Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Mythili Rao. Special thanks this week to Kira Bindrim, Aaron Rutkoff and Monique Mulima. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at zeropod@bloomberg.net. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit https://www.bloomberg.com/green.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, it's sukshat. While some of us enjoy downtime, this week,
we're bringing you a cool, wintry episode that should pair
well with any leftovers from your holiday cooking. It's about
refrigeration and the nearly invisible cold chain that makes it
possible for us to eat the twenty first century diets
we enjoy, and it's something that Nicola Twilly, who I
(00:21):
spoke with earlier this year, thinks we don't pay enough
attention to. So take a listen and enjoy. We'll be
back in the new year with a fresh episode with
the writer Kim Stanley Robinson about his climate visions for
twenty twenty five. Welcome to Zero. I am Akshatrati.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
This week the Cold Rush.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
There's plenty of mistakes that happen in all that progres system,
full of little small decision. If your bat like ninety percent,
you're doing great, So I'd say ninety percent of what
comes over here is perfectly good. And then there's always
the second wave of our inspections.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
That's a guy inside of fridge, a really big fridge.
His name is Matthew de Rico, and he's giving a
tour of a cold storage facility in the bikes. Matthew's
family has been in this business for generations.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
We're dealing with a perishable product. It's grown under interesting
conditions that are all different.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
A century ago, they were responsible for the first transcontinental
shipment of broccoli from California to New York on a
refrigerated train. Those were the earliest days of the cold chain.
Now those of us in developed countries take it for granted.
Today three quarters of everything on the average American plate
(01:50):
is processed, packaged.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Shipped, stored, or sold cooled. You know cold.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Storage facilities exist, but I bet you don't know just
how big these spaces have become. The US alone boasts
around five point five billion cubic feet of refrigerated space.
That's like one hundred and fifty Empire State building's worth
of freezers, and developing countries are starting to catch up.
(02:18):
Between twenty eighteen and twenty twenty two, the whole world's
chilled and frozen warehouse space increased by twenty percent at
a time when ice caps are melting faster than ever.
The number of walk in refrigerators is also expanding. This
coal rush has huge implications for the planet. It's something
journalist Nicola Twilly has thought a lot about She's explored
(02:41):
quite a few giant freezers, like the one Matthew works in.
That's because she's the author of a new book about
how refrigeration has shaped our food, ourselves, and our planet.
It's called Frostbite, and it's a really fun read full
of crazy trivia, like the fact that the Irish independence
movement might have refrigerated beef from the US to thank
(03:04):
for its success. Now, refrigeration is considered a climate solution.
More than thirty percent of all food produced on farms
in poor nations never makes it to a store, and
a coal chain can help reduce that food waste. But
on the flip side, it turns out that having access
to refrigeration can also.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Lead to food waste.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Americans waste more than thirty percent of their food in
their homes because they hold so much in the fridge.
That's why I was excited to talk to Nicola, because
the humble fridge is going to play a big part
in our planet's future. Nikola, welcome to the show.
Speaker 4 (03:58):
Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Now, let's start at the beginning with the invention of refrigeration.
It's one of those modern miracles that few people think
about and most people take for granted. But the route
to inventing the fridge was quite long. Can you take
us back in time and talk us through how it happened.
Speaker 4 (04:19):
Yeah, if you think about it, humans have had control
of fire since before we were modern humans, and yet
we haven't been able to produce cold at will until
maybe one hundred and fifty years ago, Max. So it's
sort of an incredibly recent invention. And it's not that
early humans had no idea that cold would preserve food,
(04:42):
because they noticed that right away. It's just that there
wasn't a sense of how to control it or even
what cold was. It was actually all of the great
minds of scientific history Galileo, you know, Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle,
Leonardo da Vinci, they all kind of wrestled with what
(05:03):
is cold? And there was theories that, oh, it's maybe
you know, these frigorific atoms, or maybe it's sort of
a force that gets distributed from the north pole or
rises up from the ground down from the air. No
one had any idea. It was actually immensely frustrating for people.
Francis Bacon died while he was trying to figure it
(05:25):
out from a chill caused by trying to stuff a
chicken with ice. So it really took a long time
to work it out. And actually even when the first
person to sort of create cold artificially, a Scottish doctor
named William Cullen, he sort of did it as a
party trick because it wasn't something you could do at
(05:48):
at scale. It wasn't seen as something that would work
to refrigerate our whole food system, let alone. You know
the way we use air conditioning now, you know our factories, houses,
you know data centers. He just managed to evaporate some
ether under pressure and freeze a flask of water, and
no one looked at that and saw the potential for
(06:10):
another seventy five years. And the first refrigerating machines were
just enormous and blew up all the time and were
incredibly dangerous. All of the early pioneers just constantly losing
eyebrows and you know, fingers and all the rest of it.
So it took a very long time. You know, the
(06:31):
first commercial machine was the eighteen fifties. It doesn't become
domesticated something that we can actually have in our homes
until the nineteen twenties, so that's one hundred years ago.
It's really recent.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
And it was shocking to know that you just went
and built a refrigerator for yourself for this book. Is
it really that simple?
Speaker 4 (06:55):
Well, so, I was an embarrassingly long way through the
writing of this book when I realized I too, really
didn't understand how to make cold. I was like Galileo,
I had no idea. You know. I was looking at
how cold had reshaped what we eat, and where it's grown,
and how it tastes, and how good it is for
(07:15):
us and the planet. But I didn't understand how we
made it. So a friend of a friend runs an
HVAC startup and he said, well, come to my garage.
We can build a fridge. And I was like, you
can't just build a fridge. But it turns out you
can now. To be fair, this was a bit more
(07:38):
like when you make dinner from you know, jarred pasta
sauce and a retisserie chicken and some pre washed you know,
spinach leaves. Was something I wasn't actually building all the
elements from scratch. So we had purchased a compressor. We
had purchased an evaporator. We had purchased the various there's
(07:59):
sort of four main components, and what we did was
join them up in such a way and then charge
it with refrigerant, which is the chemical that evaporates under
pressure to create the cooling effect. Because if any of
your listeners are like me and have no idea what
cold is, still it's it's just the absence of heat.
And so cooling is that sense of loss as you
(08:21):
remove heat. And so what you want to do, if
you remember from high school physics, which I completely did not,
is when a liquid evaporates into a gas that takes energy,
and you suck that energy in from the atmosphere around
you as heat energy, thus creating the sort of sense
(08:42):
of losses. All that heat energy is pulled away the
cooling and so it's a really simple system. The trick is,
of course, to create you know, you do that once.
That's what William Cullen did in seventeen fifty five. The
trick is to keep doing it and create a circuit
where it just goes round and round and and keeps evaporating.
But even that is surprisingly simple once you've built it.
(09:05):
It's just something that I think is so invisible to
the majority of us that we never think about it.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
Yeah, and a major turning point came when this invention
was put to work at scale. And you write before
that most meat eaten in cities walked itself to market,
often over enormous distances, and of course when catalysts marching
(09:31):
miles to an urban slaughterhouse, it's getting skinnier along the way.
But once the problem of moving large quantities of frozen
meat was solved, all that changed, and soon beef was
being shipped across oceans from America to England. How did
this transform the way we eat?
Speaker 4 (09:54):
It's an astonishing transformation on so many levels. As you say,
I mean, the problem of getting meat and also dairy
into cities was really a huge one, not least of
which was that you then had to slaughter them in
the city. And so the area around Smithfield Market in
London or the slaughterhouses in New York was just I mean,
(10:19):
can you imagine slaughtering enough beef for a city in
the middle of that city in summer, say, I mean,
it was nauseating. There was blood, guts, foam, froth, it
was absolutely horrific. And bringing meat from places like Argentina,
(10:40):
New Zealand Australia, where there was vast amount of land
not a lot of people. It lowered the price of
meat immediately, I mean by a quarter at least, and
so suddenly poor people who had not been able to
have meat except on very special occasions could dine on
meat frequently. You know, red meat consumption went through the roof.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
And today we think of one of the climate solutions
is to try and eat less red meat because it
produces so much greena's gases, mostly from cow's belching methane. However,
this increase in meat consumption happened partly because of the
ability to move cheap meat around, but also because science
(11:27):
at the time, for some reason, at least in the West,
was telling people the only way to survive is to
have more protein, and the protein comes from meat.
Speaker 4 (11:38):
Right. This is sort of a sad mistake in the
history of science. Chemistry was a relatively recent field of
research in the eighteen hundreds. You know, previously there had
been alchemists and they were trying to turn things into
gold and find elixirs of eternal life. So it was
a relatively new field and one of the things that
(11:59):
chemists were doing. We're trying to sort out what it
is in food that we need, and in the early
eighteen hundred some mistaken experiments led them to the conclusion
that actually it was only protein. Carbohydrate and fat were
just sort of nice to have, not necessary, and no
one knew about vitamins. Vitamins didn't come along until the
(12:19):
nineteen thirties, so protein was the be all and end all,
And that discovery coincided with the expansion of cities to
the first time that London was sort of going from
a million people to two million people to three million people,
the largest cities the world had ever seen. And as
(12:42):
we talked about, getting meat into cities is really hard.
So you have this sudden sort of scientific realization that
if we were to have, you know, strong men to
work in factories and make the nation great, they must
be fed with protein, and the fact that we can't
get protein to them, so it was an utter panic.
(13:04):
Of course, you know, they could have had lentils, but
the scientists at the time weren't looking at lentils for
their protein content. They were looking at beef. So I mean,
we could have had a very different world if those
scientists had been like we all need to eat lentils.
It's all a sort of misunderstanding, but it shaped our
modern food system.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
We recently did a whole series on the show about
the power grid, and in a way, you can call
it the world's biggest machine because everything works in sync.
And when I was reading the book, it made me
think that the cold chain is kind of similar. It's
a giant system. Yes, it's not in one place, and
(13:45):
it's not connected all the time, but it is connected.
So was it one of your hopes that when people
read the book they realized this standalone home appliance that
you have is actually part of a huge system.
Speaker 4 (14:02):
Exactly, yes, And that's why I in the chapter where
I look at the domestic refrigerator, I call it the
tip of the iceberg. I mean, within the industry our food,
our perishable food supply system is called a cold chain,
with the idea chain that it is connected from your
farm to your fridge. The domestic fridge is really the
weak link because once you pick it up the supermarket,
(14:25):
then it sits in your car or in your bike
rack or you know, shopping bag and isn't refrigerated on
its way home. But up until that point, say a
green bean within an hour or two of harvest kind
have been brought down to a certain temperature and kept
there all the way to supermarket shelves. So I ended
up seeing it as a sort of distributed winter. And
(14:47):
it's entirely connected by this network of refrigerated chipping containers
and ships and trucks and trains, but it isn't visible
as one gigantic winter. It's a series of sort of
pockets of cold. This artificial winter that our food spends
time in, moves around in. It's actually enormous, but because
(15:11):
you never see it as a connected whole, you don't realize.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
Now, this artificial winter does sound very energy intensive. Were
you able to put a number on the amount of
emissions that are attached to refrigeration.
Speaker 4 (15:32):
Yes, it's a difficult one to get an exact number on,
and of course you're not taking into accounts sort of
the expanded emissions that come from, say, being able to
eat more red meat because you can cool it. So
leaving aside those sort of knock on effects, cold storage
companies are currently the third highest industrial consumers of energy,
(15:55):
so the power to run cooling equipment is more than
eight percent of global electric usage right now.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
There's energy used. But of course there's another warming impact
to consider in refrigeration, and that's to do with the refrigerant.
The gas that moves around, is compressed, is evaporated. In
the early days, that gas was a poisonous gas, typically
ammonia or sulfur dioxide, and it caused a bunch of
accidents and the industry was forced to find an alternative,
(16:22):
which it did and was pretty effective, except it was chlorofluorocarbons,
which turned out to not be poisonous but created a
hole in the ozone layer. So one of the most
successful environmental treaty comes out of that desire to change
the refrigerant one more time, from CFCs to what became hfc's,
(16:46):
which did not create a hole in the ozone layer,
but are super warming gases. There are thousands of times
more warming ton for ton for CO two. Now we
are at that point we need to eliminate hfc's as well.
So what are the choice of refrigerants that we have
(17:06):
today and what does innovation look like?
Speaker 4 (17:10):
So, yeah, that's a great question. There are lower global
warming potential as they call it GWP refrigerants coming on
the market. Many refrigerated warehouses and such like are moving
to ammonia systems. For example, we're going.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
It's very dangerous, except we can handle it better at
this time.
Speaker 4 (17:32):
I'm assuming well, I mean, if it leaks. I had
a graphic description from a guy who runs a refrigerated
warehouse who said, you know, when you see that white cloud,
you're seeing death. It wants your crevices. Apparently, it goes
for your eyeballs. It's just really a nasty chemical. And
so one of the problems actually is that the coal
(17:55):
chain is expanding everywhere. It's expanding even in countries that
seem as though they already have plenty of refrigerated space,
such as the United States. But it is expanding fastest
in parts of the world that don't have a cold
chain currently, so sub Saharan Africa, large parts of Southeast Asia.
Those places are building a cold chain from scratch right now.
(18:19):
And they are also not typically equipped with a lot
of trained engineers who can work with these dangerous gases,
and a lot of the replacement refrigerants are much harder
to use. Flammable, toxic, just difficult and require more sophisticated machinery.
(18:42):
So it's really a hard thing to replace these HCFCs
and HFCs with these new refrigerants in places that already
don't have enough engineers to make the simple non toxic
refrigerants work. So that's one of the huge issues. And
actually now there's a huge black market in hdfc's and
(19:03):
hfs c's because they're cheaper, easier to use. The old
equipment runs on them, and so even though they're being
phased out or even in some cases banned, they're still
widely traded and widely used because they work and people
know how to use them. So that's a huge problem.
But to me, I thought the most interesting thing was
(19:24):
not to think about the future of refrigeration beyond just okay,
how do we make a better refrigerant, but can we
make a better way of cooling? And even beyond that,
can we make a better way of food preservation? Food
preservation is the goal here, after all, cooling is just
(19:45):
how we do it.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
And you also travel to China as part of your reporting. Now,
I went to China last in twenty eighteen, so it's
been a while. But having traveled to the US and
the UK. Before I travel to China, I was kind
of shocked by how developed the country was. Infrastructure was fantastic,
the fast trades but really fast. The system to pay
(20:11):
was easier, you could use apps, et cetera. But you
found that the coal chain wasn't developed enough. And that
was a little bit surprising to me. Why is that
the case.
Speaker 4 (20:23):
Well, that's changing really really fast. So China made building
a cold chain, a modern cold chain, part of its
twelfth five year plan. And you know, when China sets
out to do something, they really do it. And so
it took a while and it was uneven. You know,
(20:44):
the major cities had much better refrigerated facilities. The rural
areas had nothing, and there were gaps, and you know,
people would say to me, oh, we would import you know,
chicken and it would come in beautiful and the port
would be kept cold, and then we would find it,
you know, five days later in a rural distribution warehouse
(21:07):
with just a wet towel over it to keep it
quote unquote fresh. So it was a work in progress
when I went, but it's accelerating fast. And I would say, China,
it's a huge country. It has a huge food system,
its cold chain is still only one sixth the size
of the US one, so there's still you could argue
(21:29):
that the US one is bigger than we need, but
there's definitely still room for growth in China. But you
can start seeing that it's really getting there. So for example,
Washington State cherries used to be air freighted to China
because they were popular as gifts, and you couldn't get
decent cherries imported from the countryside in China because the
(21:52):
cold chain didn't exist to get them to the cities.
So it's easier to import them air freight them from
Washington State than bring them in from the countryside in China,
just because the cold chain wasn't there. That's changing, so
now it's making less economic sense to air freight them,
and as the cold chain is built up in China,
more economic sense to bring them in from the countryside.
(22:14):
And you can see that change in sort of real time.
Washington State farmers are adjusting to that because the cold
chain in China is picking up.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
After the break. How refrigeration can reduce food waste or
if you're not careful, increase it.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
If you've been.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
Enjoying this episode, please take a moment to rate and
review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It helps
other listeners find the show. Having seen enough refrigerators in
America over the years of traveling to America, oh my god,
American fridges are huge and they really don't need to
(22:55):
be Aha. But on food waste itself, there are two
stories to be total when it comes to refrigeration. On
the one hand, in developing countries where you still get
a lot of agriculture being part of the economy, not
having a coal chain can lead to a lot of
food waste as the food travels from the farm to
the consumer because it rots in the process. On the
(23:21):
other hand, having access to refrigeration in developed countries means
people just buy a ton of food and think it's
going to be all okay in the fridge and it
isn't the case, and a lot of food is wasted
in refrigerators. So how do we actually try and figure
out how to reduce food waste and use refrigeration as
(23:44):
a benefit not a loss.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
Yeah, it's a really interesting problem. You know. Food waste
is often touted as the reason to build a cold
chain in countries like I visited Rwanda with a un
sponsored sort of effort to bring the cold chain. I mean,
people are losing thirty to forty percent of the harvest
before it ever gets to market. Now, that's a horrific
(24:09):
waste in a country as poor, and you can't afford
to be losing that much food. So you can see
why there's a desire for a cold chain. The problem,
as you say, is that in the developed world, we
are throwing away thirty to forty percent of our food.
At the retail and consumer end. The abundance that refrigeration
(24:29):
has given us is translated into a sort of lack
of care, a willingness to waste. The food is so
plentiful and so cheap that people would rather go and
buy something else, I mean, honestly, rather than sniff their milk,
because obviously sniffing off milk will kill you. Everyone knows
that they would rather pour it out and buy you know,
(24:51):
just trust the cell by label and buy another pint.
And that's that isn't an impact of refrigeration too. So
some of the things I looked at here are first
of all, sell by dates ridiculous. There is no sort
of logic to them. I mean, in the US, it's
a particular mess you have because it can be state
(25:11):
by state. So in Montana milk will expire a week
earlier than it will in the rest of the country.
There's nothing particularly you know, poisonous to milk about Montana.
It's just the system. So that's ridiculous. You know, people
have tried to come up with all kinds of smart
fridges and technological solutions. Here, to my mind, the things
that work most effectively are actually ways to save food
(25:36):
from the refrigerator and make it visible. So there's a
few different things. I mean, one, there's a quote from
an architect I love that says small fridges make good cities.
But we know this with motorways. When you build a
bigger motorway, you get more traffic. Is what actually happens.
People think it's going to be great and you know
traffic what No, it's the theory of induced demand. Well
(25:56):
it applies to fridges too. As your fridge expands, you
just stock get and then more goes to waste, and
so small fridges shopping on a more frequent basis, so
you have to go to the store and you're actually
thinking about what you're going to eat for dinner. That evening,
rather than shopping for some distant sort of two week
(26:17):
horizon when obviously things are going to change and you're
not going to feel like, I don't know, spaghetti bolone
is when it turns out to be a sunny weekend,
you know. And so so a lot of those sorts
of things are important in people's minds. A fridge nowadays
is actually like a bank vault, like you put things
in it and they stay safe. That's not actually the case.
(26:40):
The you know, the produce is still dying. The meat,
the bacteria on the meat are still reproducing. It's just
happening more slowly. But it is not a safety vault
that will keep your food good forever. And so I
think I find keeping food out of the fridge. Not
milk and meat obviously, but fruit and vegetables actually reminds
(27:00):
you that it's there. It tastes better when you eat it.
As tomatoes, peaches, things like that should never be in
the fridge anyway. That knocks out their flavor producing mechanisms.
They will taste worse. Bread should never be in the fridge, potatoes, onions,
these things should never be in the fridge. So yes,
saving food from the fridge shopping, buying less those kinds
(27:21):
of things. One of the refrigeration experts I spoke to
found that she's working on a project that was using
urban agriculture, not to try and feed the city because
you can't do it at that scale, but as a
way to remind people, oh, right, this is living produce.
It is fresh when it is harvested, and it isn't
(27:42):
fresh a week later, and once you are aware of
the work that goes in the seasonality things like that,
people were wasting less food. That was what she found.
So growing food actually had the benefit of people wasting
less food.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
Writing this book, did it change the way you eat?
Speaker 2 (28:00):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (28:01):
It did. I mean I was already you know, I
make a podcast about food science and history. I write
about food, so I was already a relatively conscious of
sort of thinking about where my food came from and
things like that. But and you know, knowing what's in
season when and such like. But absolutely it made me
(28:22):
much more aware of the fact that say you buy
a bag of spinach, you put it in your fridge,
you eat it a week later, you're patting yourself on
the back, thinking you did yourself. You know, a favor
there you had a healthy bag of spinach. You didn't
waste it, You got all those vitamins. No, after a
week in your fridge, that spinach has half the vitamins
(28:44):
and minerals it did when you first bought it. So
having that realization, I think seeing those statistics, it reinforced
the fact that it's not getting any better in the fridge. Now,
something's get better in the fridge. A curry left over night,
that gets better. But you know, as bolonnaise sauce, yes,
(29:09):
because you know, the fat and the collagen has time
to sort of solidify and then redisperse and it becomes silkier.
But fruit and vegetables, no, don't stockpile them, you know,
buy it and eat it. So it really has changed
sort of how I shop and eat. And it has
definitely made me focus on seasonality too, Like I just
(29:31):
don't eat apples outside of the autumn. And you know what,
that's great because there's other fruits you can have in
the summer and other fruits. I have citrus in the
spring and I have berries in the summer. And it's
annoying and obnoxious and I try not to be preachy
about it, but also it all tastes better, like you
really don't need to have a tomato and December it's
(29:52):
gonna taste like nothing anyway, Just don't do it.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
I learned a lot from the book. Thank you, Nichola,
Thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
This is fun.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
Thank you for listening to Zero. And now for the
sound of the week. That's the hum of a refrigerator.
John Klee of the band Velvet Underground calls it the
drone of Western civilization. It's so constant. He says that
the band would use its steady sixty cycle hum to
(30:30):
tune their instruments. That's another great piece of trivia from
nicholas book. And also check out gastropod her podcast about
How We Eat. If you liked this episode, please take
a moment to rate and review the show on Apple
Podcasts on Spotify. Share this episode with a friend or
with Joe Biden and other lovers of ice cream. You
(30:52):
can get in touch at zero pod at bloomberg dot net.
Zero's producer is Mighty Lee Rau. Bloomberg's head of podcast
is Sage Powman and head of Talk is Brendan newnam Our.
Theme music is composed by Wonderley Special Thanks to Kira Bendrum,
Aaron Rudkoff and Matthew Griffith.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
I am Ashadrati back so
Hi, it's sukshat. While some of us enjoy downtime, this week,
we're bringing you a cool, wintry episode that should pair
well with any leftovers from your holiday cooking. It's about
refrigeration and the nearly invisible cold chain that makes it
possible for us to eat the twenty first century diets
we enjoy, and it's something that Nicola Twilly, who I
(00:21):
spoke with earlier this year, thinks we don't pay enough
attention to. So take a listen and enjoy. We'll be
back in the new year with a fresh episode with
the writer Kim Stanley Robinson about his climate visions for
twenty twenty five. Welcome to Zero. I am Akshatrati.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
This week the Cold Rush.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
There's plenty of mistakes that happen in all that progres system,
full of little small decision. If your bat like ninety percent,
you're doing great, So I'd say ninety percent of what
comes over here is perfectly good. And then there's always
the second wave of our inspections.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
That's a guy inside of fridge, a really big fridge.
His name is Matthew de Rico, and he's giving a
tour of a cold storage facility in the bikes. Matthew's
family has been in this business for generations.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
We're dealing with a perishable product. It's grown under interesting
conditions that are all different.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
A century ago, they were responsible for the first transcontinental
shipment of broccoli from California to New York on a
refrigerated train. Those were the earliest days of the cold chain.
Now those of us in developed countries take it for granted.
Today three quarters of everything on the average American plate
(01:50):
is processed, packaged.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Shipped, stored, or sold cooled. You know cold.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Storage facilities exist, but I bet you don't know just
how big these spaces have become. The US alone boasts
around five point five billion cubic feet of refrigerated space.
That's like one hundred and fifty Empire State building's worth
of freezers, and developing countries are starting to catch up.
(02:18):
Between twenty eighteen and twenty twenty two, the whole world's
chilled and frozen warehouse space increased by twenty percent at
a time when ice caps are melting faster than ever.
The number of walk in refrigerators is also expanding. This
coal rush has huge implications for the planet. It's something
journalist Nicola Twilly has thought a lot about She's explored
(02:41):
quite a few giant freezers, like the one Matthew works in.
That's because she's the author of a new book about
how refrigeration has shaped our food, ourselves, and our planet.
It's called Frostbite, and it's a really fun read full
of crazy trivia, like the fact that the Irish independence
movement might have refrigerated beef from the US to thank
(03:04):
for its success. Now, refrigeration is considered a climate solution.
More than thirty percent of all food produced on farms
in poor nations never makes it to a store, and
a coal chain can help reduce that food waste. But
on the flip side, it turns out that having access
to refrigeration can also.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Lead to food waste.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Americans waste more than thirty percent of their food in
their homes because they hold so much in the fridge.
That's why I was excited to talk to Nicola, because
the humble fridge is going to play a big part
in our planet's future. Nikola, welcome to the show.
Speaker 4 (03:58):
Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Now, let's start at the beginning with the invention of refrigeration.
It's one of those modern miracles that few people think
about and most people take for granted. But the route
to inventing the fridge was quite long. Can you take
us back in time and talk us through how it happened.
Speaker 4 (04:19):
Yeah, if you think about it, humans have had control
of fire since before we were modern humans, and yet
we haven't been able to produce cold at will until
maybe one hundred and fifty years ago, Max. So it's
sort of an incredibly recent invention. And it's not that
early humans had no idea that cold would preserve food,
(04:42):
because they noticed that right away. It's just that there
wasn't a sense of how to control it or even
what cold was. It was actually all of the great
minds of scientific history Galileo, you know, Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle,
Leonardo da Vinci, they all kind of wrestled with what
(05:03):
is cold? And there was theories that, oh, it's maybe
you know, these frigorific atoms, or maybe it's sort of
a force that gets distributed from the north pole or
rises up from the ground down from the air. No
one had any idea. It was actually immensely frustrating for people.
Francis Bacon died while he was trying to figure it
(05:25):
out from a chill caused by trying to stuff a
chicken with ice. So it really took a long time
to work it out. And actually even when the first
person to sort of create cold artificially, a Scottish doctor
named William Cullen, he sort of did it as a
party trick because it wasn't something you could do at
(05:48):
at scale. It wasn't seen as something that would work
to refrigerate our whole food system, let alone. You know
the way we use air conditioning now, you know our factories, houses,
you know data centers. He just managed to evaporate some
ether under pressure and freeze a flask of water, and
no one looked at that and saw the potential for
(06:10):
another seventy five years. And the first refrigerating machines were
just enormous and blew up all the time and were
incredibly dangerous. All of the early pioneers just constantly losing
eyebrows and you know, fingers and all the rest of it.
So it took a very long time. You know, the
(06:31):
first commercial machine was the eighteen fifties. It doesn't become
domesticated something that we can actually have in our homes
until the nineteen twenties, so that's one hundred years ago.
It's really recent.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
And it was shocking to know that you just went
and built a refrigerator for yourself for this book. Is
it really that simple?
Speaker 4 (06:55):
Well, so, I was an embarrassingly long way through the
writing of this book when I realized I too, really
didn't understand how to make cold. I was like Galileo,
I had no idea. You know. I was looking at
how cold had reshaped what we eat, and where it's grown,
and how it tastes, and how good it is for
(07:15):
us and the planet. But I didn't understand how we
made it. So a friend of a friend runs an
HVAC startup and he said, well, come to my garage.
We can build a fridge. And I was like, you
can't just build a fridge. But it turns out you
can now. To be fair, this was a bit more
(07:38):
like when you make dinner from you know, jarred pasta
sauce and a retisserie chicken and some pre washed you know,
spinach leaves. Was something I wasn't actually building all the
elements from scratch. So we had purchased a compressor. We
had purchased an evaporator. We had purchased the various there's
(07:59):
sort of four main components, and what we did was
join them up in such a way and then charge
it with refrigerant, which is the chemical that evaporates under
pressure to create the cooling effect. Because if any of
your listeners are like me and have no idea what
cold is, still it's it's just the absence of heat.
And so cooling is that sense of loss as you
(08:21):
remove heat. And so what you want to do, if
you remember from high school physics, which I completely did not,
is when a liquid evaporates into a gas that takes energy,
and you suck that energy in from the atmosphere around
you as heat energy, thus creating the sort of sense
(08:42):
of losses. All that heat energy is pulled away the
cooling and so it's a really simple system. The trick is,
of course, to create you know, you do that once.
That's what William Cullen did in seventeen fifty five. The
trick is to keep doing it and create a circuit
where it just goes round and round and and keeps evaporating.
But even that is surprisingly simple once you've built it.
(09:05):
It's just something that I think is so invisible to
the majority of us that we never think about it.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
Yeah, and a major turning point came when this invention
was put to work at scale. And you write before
that most meat eaten in cities walked itself to market,
often over enormous distances, and of course when catalysts marching
(09:31):
miles to an urban slaughterhouse, it's getting skinnier along the way.
But once the problem of moving large quantities of frozen
meat was solved, all that changed, and soon beef was
being shipped across oceans from America to England. How did
this transform the way we eat?
Speaker 4 (09:54):
It's an astonishing transformation on so many levels. As you say,
I mean, the problem of getting meat and also dairy
into cities was really a huge one, not least of
which was that you then had to slaughter them in
the city. And so the area around Smithfield Market in
London or the slaughterhouses in New York was just I mean,
(10:19):
can you imagine slaughtering enough beef for a city in
the middle of that city in summer, say, I mean,
it was nauseating. There was blood, guts, foam, froth, it
was absolutely horrific. And bringing meat from places like Argentina,
(10:40):
New Zealand Australia, where there was vast amount of land
not a lot of people. It lowered the price of
meat immediately, I mean by a quarter at least, and
so suddenly poor people who had not been able to
have meat except on very special occasions could dine on
meat frequently. You know, red meat consumption went through the roof.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
And today we think of one of the climate solutions
is to try and eat less red meat because it
produces so much greena's gases, mostly from cow's belching methane. However,
this increase in meat consumption happened partly because of the
ability to move cheap meat around, but also because science
(11:27):
at the time, for some reason, at least in the West,
was telling people the only way to survive is to
have more protein, and the protein comes from meat.
Speaker 4 (11:38):
Right. This is sort of a sad mistake in the
history of science. Chemistry was a relatively recent field of
research in the eighteen hundreds. You know, previously there had
been alchemists and they were trying to turn things into
gold and find elixirs of eternal life. So it was
a relatively new field and one of the things that
(11:59):
chemists were doing. We're trying to sort out what it
is in food that we need, and in the early
eighteen hundred some mistaken experiments led them to the conclusion
that actually it was only protein. Carbohydrate and fat were
just sort of nice to have, not necessary, and no
one knew about vitamins. Vitamins didn't come along until the
(12:19):
nineteen thirties, so protein was the be all and end all,
And that discovery coincided with the expansion of cities to
the first time that London was sort of going from
a million people to two million people to three million people,
the largest cities the world had ever seen. And as
(12:42):
we talked about, getting meat into cities is really hard.
So you have this sudden sort of scientific realization that
if we were to have, you know, strong men to
work in factories and make the nation great, they must
be fed with protein, and the fact that we can't
get protein to them, so it was an utter panic.
(13:04):
Of course, you know, they could have had lentils, but
the scientists at the time weren't looking at lentils for
their protein content. They were looking at beef. So I mean,
we could have had a very different world if those
scientists had been like we all need to eat lentils.
It's all a sort of misunderstanding, but it shaped our
modern food system.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
We recently did a whole series on the show about
the power grid, and in a way, you can call
it the world's biggest machine because everything works in sync.
And when I was reading the book, it made me
think that the cold chain is kind of similar. It's
a giant system. Yes, it's not in one place, and
(13:45):
it's not connected all the time, but it is connected.
So was it one of your hopes that when people
read the book they realized this standalone home appliance that
you have is actually part of a huge system.
Speaker 4 (14:02):
Exactly, yes, And that's why I in the chapter where
I look at the domestic refrigerator, I call it the
tip of the iceberg. I mean, within the industry our food,
our perishable food supply system is called a cold chain,
with the idea chain that it is connected from your
farm to your fridge. The domestic fridge is really the
weak link because once you pick it up the supermarket,
(14:25):
then it sits in your car or in your bike
rack or you know, shopping bag and isn't refrigerated on
its way home. But up until that point, say a
green bean within an hour or two of harvest kind
have been brought down to a certain temperature and kept
there all the way to supermarket shelves. So I ended
up seeing it as a sort of distributed winter. And
(14:47):
it's entirely connected by this network of refrigerated chipping containers
and ships and trucks and trains, but it isn't visible
as one gigantic winter. It's a series of sort of
pockets of cold. This artificial winter that our food spends
time in, moves around in. It's actually enormous, but because
(15:11):
you never see it as a connected whole, you don't realize.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
Now, this artificial winter does sound very energy intensive. Were
you able to put a number on the amount of
emissions that are attached to refrigeration.
Speaker 4 (15:32):
Yes, it's a difficult one to get an exact number on,
and of course you're not taking into accounts sort of
the expanded emissions that come from, say, being able to
eat more red meat because you can cool it. So
leaving aside those sort of knock on effects, cold storage
companies are currently the third highest industrial consumers of energy,
(15:55):
so the power to run cooling equipment is more than
eight percent of global electric usage right now.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
There's energy used. But of course there's another warming impact
to consider in refrigeration, and that's to do with the refrigerant.
The gas that moves around, is compressed, is evaporated. In
the early days, that gas was a poisonous gas, typically
ammonia or sulfur dioxide, and it caused a bunch of
accidents and the industry was forced to find an alternative,
(16:22):
which it did and was pretty effective, except it was chlorofluorocarbons,
which turned out to not be poisonous but created a
hole in the ozone layer. So one of the most
successful environmental treaty comes out of that desire to change
the refrigerant one more time, from CFCs to what became hfc's,
(16:46):
which did not create a hole in the ozone layer,
but are super warming gases. There are thousands of times
more warming ton for ton for CO two. Now we
are at that point we need to eliminate hfc's as well.
So what are the choice of refrigerants that we have
(17:06):
today and what does innovation look like?
Speaker 4 (17:10):
So, yeah, that's a great question. There are lower global
warming potential as they call it GWP refrigerants coming on
the market. Many refrigerated warehouses and such like are moving
to ammonia systems. For example, we're going.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
It's very dangerous, except we can handle it better at
this time.
Speaker 4 (17:32):
I'm assuming well, I mean, if it leaks. I had
a graphic description from a guy who runs a refrigerated
warehouse who said, you know, when you see that white cloud,
you're seeing death. It wants your crevices. Apparently, it goes
for your eyeballs. It's just really a nasty chemical. And
so one of the problems actually is that the coal
(17:55):
chain is expanding everywhere. It's expanding even in countries that
seem as though they already have plenty of refrigerated space,
such as the United States. But it is expanding fastest
in parts of the world that don't have a cold
chain currently, so sub Saharan Africa, large parts of Southeast Asia.
Those places are building a cold chain from scratch right now.
(18:19):
And they are also not typically equipped with a lot
of trained engineers who can work with these dangerous gases,
and a lot of the replacement refrigerants are much harder
to use. Flammable, toxic, just difficult and require more sophisticated machinery.
(18:42):
So it's really a hard thing to replace these HCFCs
and HFCs with these new refrigerants in places that already
don't have enough engineers to make the simple non toxic
refrigerants work. So that's one of the huge issues. And
actually now there's a huge black market in hdfc's and
(19:03):
hfs c's because they're cheaper, easier to use. The old
equipment runs on them, and so even though they're being
phased out or even in some cases banned, they're still
widely traded and widely used because they work and people
know how to use them. So that's a huge problem.
But to me, I thought the most interesting thing was
(19:24):
not to think about the future of refrigeration beyond just okay,
how do we make a better refrigerant, but can we
make a better way of cooling? And even beyond that,
can we make a better way of food preservation? Food
preservation is the goal here, after all, cooling is just
(19:45):
how we do it.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
And you also travel to China as part of your reporting. Now,
I went to China last in twenty eighteen, so it's
been a while. But having traveled to the US and
the UK. Before I travel to China, I was kind
of shocked by how developed the country was. Infrastructure was fantastic,
the fast trades but really fast. The system to pay
(20:11):
was easier, you could use apps, et cetera. But you
found that the coal chain wasn't developed enough. And that
was a little bit surprising to me. Why is that
the case.
Speaker 4 (20:23):
Well, that's changing really really fast. So China made building
a cold chain, a modern cold chain, part of its
twelfth five year plan. And you know, when China sets
out to do something, they really do it. And so
it took a while and it was uneven. You know,
(20:44):
the major cities had much better refrigerated facilities. The rural
areas had nothing, and there were gaps, and you know,
people would say to me, oh, we would import you know,
chicken and it would come in beautiful and the port
would be kept cold, and then we would find it,
you know, five days later in a rural distribution warehouse
(21:07):
with just a wet towel over it to keep it
quote unquote fresh. So it was a work in progress
when I went, but it's accelerating fast. And I would say, China,
it's a huge country. It has a huge food system,
its cold chain is still only one sixth the size
of the US one, so there's still you could argue
(21:29):
that the US one is bigger than we need, but
there's definitely still room for growth in China. But you
can start seeing that it's really getting there. So for example,
Washington State cherries used to be air freighted to China
because they were popular as gifts, and you couldn't get
decent cherries imported from the countryside in China because the
(21:52):
cold chain didn't exist to get them to the cities.
So it's easier to import them air freight them from
Washington State than bring them in from the countryside in China,
just because the cold chain wasn't there. That's changing, so
now it's making less economic sense to air freight them,
and as the cold chain is built up in China,
more economic sense to bring them in from the countryside.
(22:14):
And you can see that change in sort of real time.
Washington State farmers are adjusting to that because the cold
chain in China is picking up.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
After the break. How refrigeration can reduce food waste or
if you're not careful, increase it.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
If you've been.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
Enjoying this episode, please take a moment to rate and
review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It helps
other listeners find the show. Having seen enough refrigerators in
America over the years of traveling to America, oh my god,
American fridges are huge and they really don't need to
(22:55):
be Aha. But on food waste itself, there are two
stories to be total when it comes to refrigeration. On
the one hand, in developing countries where you still get
a lot of agriculture being part of the economy, not
having a coal chain can lead to a lot of
food waste as the food travels from the farm to
the consumer because it rots in the process. On the
(23:21):
other hand, having access to refrigeration in developed countries means
people just buy a ton of food and think it's
going to be all okay in the fridge and it
isn't the case, and a lot of food is wasted
in refrigerators. So how do we actually try and figure
out how to reduce food waste and use refrigeration as
(23:44):
a benefit not a loss.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
Yeah, it's a really interesting problem. You know. Food waste
is often touted as the reason to build a cold
chain in countries like I visited Rwanda with a un
sponsored sort of effort to bring the cold chain. I mean,
people are losing thirty to forty percent of the harvest
before it ever gets to market. Now, that's a horrific
(24:09):
waste in a country as poor, and you can't afford
to be losing that much food. So you can see
why there's a desire for a cold chain. The problem,
as you say, is that in the developed world, we
are throwing away thirty to forty percent of our food.
At the retail and consumer end. The abundance that refrigeration
(24:29):
has given us is translated into a sort of lack
of care, a willingness to waste. The food is so
plentiful and so cheap that people would rather go and
buy something else, I mean, honestly, rather than sniff their milk,
because obviously sniffing off milk will kill you. Everyone knows
that they would rather pour it out and buy you know,
(24:51):
just trust the cell by label and buy another pint.
And that's that isn't an impact of refrigeration too. So
some of the things I looked at here are first
of all, sell by dates ridiculous. There is no sort
of logic to them. I mean, in the US, it's
a particular mess you have because it can be state
(25:11):
by state. So in Montana milk will expire a week
earlier than it will in the rest of the country.
There's nothing particularly you know, poisonous to milk about Montana.
It's just the system. So that's ridiculous. You know, people
have tried to come up with all kinds of smart
fridges and technological solutions. Here, to my mind, the things
that work most effectively are actually ways to save food
(25:36):
from the refrigerator and make it visible. So there's a
few different things. I mean, one, there's a quote from
an architect I love that says small fridges make good cities.
But we know this with motorways. When you build a
bigger motorway, you get more traffic. Is what actually happens.
People think it's going to be great and you know
traffic what No, it's the theory of induced demand. Well
(25:56):
it applies to fridges too. As your fridge expands, you
just stock get and then more goes to waste, and
so small fridges shopping on a more frequent basis, so
you have to go to the store and you're actually
thinking about what you're going to eat for dinner. That evening,
rather than shopping for some distant sort of two week
(26:17):
horizon when obviously things are going to change and you're
not going to feel like, I don't know, spaghetti bolone
is when it turns out to be a sunny weekend,
you know. And so so a lot of those sorts
of things are important in people's minds. A fridge nowadays
is actually like a bank vault, like you put things
in it and they stay safe. That's not actually the case.
(26:40):
The you know, the produce is still dying. The meat,
the bacteria on the meat are still reproducing. It's just
happening more slowly. But it is not a safety vault
that will keep your food good forever. And so I
think I find keeping food out of the fridge. Not
milk and meat obviously, but fruit and vegetables actually reminds
(27:00):
you that it's there. It tastes better when you eat it.
As tomatoes, peaches, things like that should never be in
the fridge anyway. That knocks out their flavor producing mechanisms.
They will taste worse. Bread should never be in the fridge, potatoes, onions,
these things should never be in the fridge. So yes,
saving food from the fridge shopping, buying less those kinds
(27:21):
of things. One of the refrigeration experts I spoke to
found that she's working on a project that was using
urban agriculture, not to try and feed the city because
you can't do it at that scale, but as a
way to remind people, oh, right, this is living produce.
It is fresh when it is harvested, and it isn't
(27:42):
fresh a week later, and once you are aware of
the work that goes in the seasonality things like that,
people were wasting less food. That was what she found.
So growing food actually had the benefit of people wasting
less food.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
Writing this book, did it change the way you eat?
Speaker 2 (28:00):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (28:01):
It did. I mean I was already you know, I
make a podcast about food science and history. I write
about food, so I was already a relatively conscious of
sort of thinking about where my food came from and
things like that. But and you know, knowing what's in
season when and such like. But absolutely it made me
(28:22):
much more aware of the fact that say you buy
a bag of spinach, you put it in your fridge,
you eat it a week later, you're patting yourself on
the back, thinking you did yourself. You know, a favor
there you had a healthy bag of spinach. You didn't
waste it, You got all those vitamins. No, after a
week in your fridge, that spinach has half the vitamins
(28:44):
and minerals it did when you first bought it. So
having that realization, I think seeing those statistics, it reinforced
the fact that it's not getting any better in the fridge. Now,
something's get better in the fridge. A curry left over night,
that gets better. But you know, as bolonnaise sauce, yes,
(29:09):
because you know, the fat and the collagen has time
to sort of solidify and then redisperse and it becomes silkier.
But fruit and vegetables, no, don't stockpile them, you know,
buy it and eat it. So it really has changed
sort of how I shop and eat. And it has
definitely made me focus on seasonality too, Like I just
(29:31):
don't eat apples outside of the autumn. And you know what,
that's great because there's other fruits you can have in
the summer and other fruits. I have citrus in the
spring and I have berries in the summer. And it's
annoying and obnoxious and I try not to be preachy
about it, but also it all tastes better, like you
really don't need to have a tomato and December it's
(29:52):
gonna taste like nothing anyway, Just don't do it.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
I learned a lot from the book. Thank you, Nichola,
Thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
This is fun.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
Thank you for listening to Zero. And now for the
sound of the week. That's the hum of a refrigerator.
John Klee of the band Velvet Underground calls it the
drone of Western civilization. It's so constant. He says that
the band would use its steady sixty cycle hum to
(30:30):
tune their instruments. That's another great piece of trivia from
nicholas book. And also check out gastropod her podcast about
How We Eat. If you liked this episode, please take
a moment to rate and review the show on Apple
Podcasts on Spotify. Share this episode with a friend or
with Joe Biden and other lovers of ice cream. You
(30:52):
can get in touch at zero pod at bloomberg dot net.
Zero's producer is Mighty Lee Rau. Bloomberg's head of podcast
is Sage Powman and head of Talk is Brendan newnam Our.
Theme music is composed by Wonderley Special Thanks to Kira Bendrum,
Aaron Rudkoff and Matthew Griffith.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
I am Ashadrati back so
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