August 8, 2024 • 44 mins
Refrigeration is an underrated technology. It completely transformed what billions of people eat every day.
Today’s guest, Nicola Twilley, tells the story of refrigeration in her new book, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. Topics under discussion include: Why brewers were key drivers of refrigeration technology; the extraordinary technology inside a bag of lettuce; and why the technological frontier in food preservation may mean that we don't need to keep so much stuff so cold.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin the late twentieth and early twenty first century. This
era we've just been living through has obviously been this
period of incredible technological change. But in terms of technology
transforming everyday life, our era is not unprecedented, which is
(00:38):
to say our era is precedented, I would argue, In fact,
I have argued that in terms of everyday life, there
was an even bigger technology driven transformation in the period
one hundred years earlier, in the period of the late
eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds. That period saw the
coming of cars and planes, the spread of telephones and
(01:00):
the electric grid, and the spread of refrigeration. Refrigeration allowed
us to preserve and transport food like never before, and
in fact wound up really completely transforming the way people
eat the food we eat every day. I recently interviewed
a journalist named Nikola Twilly who just wrote a book
(01:21):
on refrigeration and how it changed us. The book is
called Frostbite, and one of the things the book really
made clear is how refrigeration changed daily life in this
really profound way. Niki describes this transformation in microcosm via
the work of this husband and wife sociologist team, The
(01:41):
husband and wife visited a town in Indiana, first in
eighteen ninety and then again in nineteen twenty five, and
they talk about the different ways life has changed in
this town, and Niki focuses on the way refrigeration changed
the way people eat.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
In eighteen ninety, what they found is that the city
had two diets. It had a winter and a summer diet,
and then the winter diet was just really meet start carbs, pastry, potatoes,
things like that, and the only sort of vegetables to
enliven it were either root vegetables, turnips, cabbages, apples you
(02:20):
could store in the root cellars, or things you had
pickled or preserved from summer. But fresh fruit, green vegetables, leaves, berries,
none of that.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
And you talk about how people would be sick essentially,
like everybody in town would get sick by the end
of winter.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Yeah, they called it spring sickness. Today we'd call it
sort of a prescore buttic syndrome.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
So like about to have scurvy, like about.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
To have scarvy, not full blown scurvy, but yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
The mild scurvy that everybody got every winter exactly. And
so then these academics, these sociologists come back in the
nineteen twenties once, you know, refrigeration is clearly not ubiquitous
by that point, but it's in the world. And what
do they find, how do they find? The diet in
(03:13):
this town has changed.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
It has changed utterly. They can buy oranges and lettuce
shipped from California, and bananas shipped all the way from
Central America.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
All but the very, very poorest.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Are beginning to be able to enjoy some of the
sort of what I call the supermarket in the US today,
permanent global summertime. You know, you can have anything you
want at any time. Spring sickness has been alleviated. No
one speaks of spring sickness anymore. And it's totally a
you know, the older generation remember it, the younger don't.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is what's your problem. My
guest today is Nikki Twilly. Her new book, Frostbite is
full of useful insights into science and markets and technological change. Also,
the book has just a bunch of good stories, including
but not limited to the central role of beer in
human history, the shockingly complex technology that goes into the
(04:17):
bags of salad greens on the shelf at the grocery store,
and why the technological frontier and refrigeration may mean that
we don't need to keep so much stuff so cold.
My conversation with Nikki started more or less at the beginning.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Humans have been able to control fire since before we
were even modern humans. That goes way back heat.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Heat we got, heat came early all.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
Over it, and some people argue that's what made us human,
you know, the ability to cook and then feed our
big brains, et cetera.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
Cold much trickier.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
All the great minds you know, Newton, Galileo, Robert Boyle,
all of the scientists that you've heard of. Leonardo da
Vinci tried to figure out where on Earth cold came from.
But yeah, seventeen fifty five, a Scottish doctor, almost as
a party trick, figured out how to freeze water. His
(05:18):
A pupil of his had noticed that if you put
a thermometer in ether, which evaporates very quickly, and when
something evaporates it pulls heat away. The energy of turning
that thing that liquid into gas pulls heat away, so
you get a cooling sensation. He used a bunch of
different liquids to try and make this work. He used
(05:40):
chili oil, he used brandy, he used menthol he you know,
he was going for all the sort of ones that
give you a tingly sensation logic. But in the end
he did manage to create a setup that froze water
for the first time. First it was this was the
first time seventeen fifty five that humans were able to
(06:02):
make cold on demand. And he was just like, well,
this seems kind of interesting, but I don't really know
what to do with it, so others should investigate. And
no one did anything for one hundred years because it
was like, what are we going to do with this?
It's a party trick.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
Yeah, that part is wild, right, It's like, here's this
giant breakthrough, We're ready, and then crickets.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
It's you know, there's I quote a line from Robert
Browning in the book, humanity's reach had exceeded its grasp.
We could we had figured out how to do something,
but we didn't know what to do with it. You know.
It just that, yes, the picture of what you could
do with cold wasn't there yet, right.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
And and you write about that, right. You point out
that in the eighteen hundreds, the first kind of industrialization
of cold that emerges is not from this new technology
but from a guy just selling ice, just like cutting
ice out of frozen lakes and putting it on ships
and sending that around the world and selling that. And
it's not until like one hundred years after that Scottish
(07:04):
doctor inventing refrigeration that this guy in Australia, James Harrison,
who you write about, He's like, oh, maybe refrigeration could
be you know, a business, So tell me about that
piece of it. Tell me about James Harrison.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
So, as with many things with technology, a few different
people are fiddling about with us at the same time
and making prototypes, and it's to do with who actually
gets it going. But James Harrison, son of a Scottish
salmon farmer, went to emigrated to Australia, as many British
people did at the time, worked as a printer. He
was actually a journalist, wrote and printed the local newspaper
(07:42):
near Brisbane, and he printing in Australia's summer heat. He
noticed that if he wiped ether over the type, then
the ink didn't smudge because of that cooling effect. Again,
it would evaporate off and at the time natural ice
was reaching Australia, but it was expensive, the amount that
(08:03):
had melted by the time it had got to Australia
in the distance, etc. It was expensive and it was rare.
It was like, I bet I could use this either
thing and build a refrigeration machine. I mean, he blew
himself up several times. There was many sets of eyebrows
were lost, but he ended up with a functioning machine.
And he was the first one to sell a refrigeration machine,
(08:26):
something that was capable at first, not of cooling things,
but of cooling water, of making ice. This is another
funny thing, like humans didn't think, oh, we could just
cool a room. They thought they were only used to
natural cold.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Ice is cold. If we want something to be cold,
let's freeze water and make it ice. Right, That's like
step one exactly. And who is his who is his market?
Who's he selling ice to brewers?
Speaker 2 (08:52):
One hundred percent brewers? You know some people credit beer
with being you know why humans got into agriculture and
domesticating grain and settling down forming civilization because we wanted
to drink.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
Yeah, you mentioned that in passing in the book. That's
like one sentence in the book. And I read it
and I thought, is it true? I mean, nobody knows
if it's true, but like, how plausible is that theory?
Speaker 3 (09:15):
It's a pretty plausible theory.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Like this is a theory that is subscribed to by
many archaeologists and reasonably backed up by residue in pots.
People were definitely making alcohol almost the first thing they
did with their grains.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
What is the Homer Simpson line? Beer the cause of
and solution to all of our problems? Pretty much but
perhaps historically true, right if you think of the rise
of agriculture, as you know, the creation of many many
problems and then the solution to many many problems exactly.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
And ditto refrigeration.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
So yeah, so why are brewers the first market for
artificial refrigeration?
Speaker 2 (09:59):
So you can make beer without refrigeration, it's just and
if you can drink it warm. I grew up in
England and people do still it's not my taste, but you.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Know, technology, one hundred years of technology notwithstanding.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Notwithstanding it, did you know why? It's actually a flavor thing.
Things taste more bitter when they're warmer, and if you
are looking for that taste in your beer, as British
people are, like oh, I'll have a pint of bitter.
They say, well, then warmer is better. But the point
is that lager was having a boom in popularity, in
(10:37):
particular because Germans were emigrating everywhere and bringing with them
their love for lagger and lagger yeast doesn't really function
particularly well above fifty degrees and so in the Laggering
caves in Saint Louis and Brooklyn it was getting too
hot in summer to make beer. And I mean summer
is when beer tastes best. So this was a crisis.
(11:02):
And the brewers were huge consumers of natural ice. But
then you know, there would be natural ice famines. If
there was a warm winter, there wouldn't be enough natural
ice to go around. The price would go up, and
also increasingly as cities got bigger, and in an era
before you know sanitation, the natural ice was getting polluted
(11:25):
and really dirty.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
So yes, it.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
Seeing of ice in a cave in a basement in
Brooklyn in eighteen seventy like that is nasty.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
There was a certain in the summer, certain funkiness, certain funkiness,
let's put it that way. So they were the early
adopters of this, this refrigeration technology. The first refrigerating machines
ever sold were both to breweries, one in London, one
in Australia, and they are the ones who also pioneered
(11:56):
the whole idea of like, wait, we don't have to
make ice, we could just cool the cellar. And that
was actually a brewer in Brooklyn figured that out.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Sort of cutting out the middleman. Right, there's this moment
which is kind of beautiful in a like history of
technology way, where they're like, we want the room to
be cool. We know ice is cold. We've got this machine,
and it just takes what years? How long does it
take before anybody figures out that you don't actually need
to melt water into ice put the ice in the room,
you can just cool the room.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
About five years?
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Wow? Yeah, like a generation. Yeah, the technology is right there.
It's just like an insight problem exactly.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
They did just I mean, if you're used to thinking
of cold as a property of ice, yea, then seeing
it as not is sort.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Of a leap. Yeah. No one in history has ever
used a machine to cool air exactly until somebody.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
Yeah, until until you know, this brewer in Brooklyn came
along and did that. And it was a huge improvement.
You can imagine like ice melts, it's funky, it's disgusting.
Now you have this clean, dry refrigeration machine just cooling
the room. The only problem was these were all prototypes.
(13:11):
They're massive, they use very explosive chemicals, and they're steam powered,
so they're constantly blowing up. They're unensurable, they're unreliable. Every
single one is unique because they're all prototypes. So it
just took Whenever I sort of look back at this history,
I have to remind myself it took a long time
because there was a lot to figure out. It was
(13:33):
a French monk who eventually figured, oh, if we put
the compressor, the thing that sort of compresses the refrigerant
so that it can evaporate again, if we put that
in an enclosed container, that's going to work much better
because then it won't you know, keep breaking down. And
he did that because he wanted, you know, to chill
the communion wine in the south of front, so you're adjacent.
(13:57):
It's all alcohol in the end.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
And by the way that you know, that insight that
the monk had of using a hermetically sealed compressor, like
that's basically the way referreerators work today, right, Like, that's
the basic idea.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
Still, everything about the early refrigerator is basically the same
as the refrigerator we use today, except we're using electricity
rather than steam, and the chemicals we use are you know,
we're not using ether anymore. We're using various things with
extremely long names, but otherwise the principle, the mechanics identical.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
So you're right about the way people take this technology
and extend it so that you can keep trucks cold
and you can keep ships cold. Right, and then we
get this world, this thing that becomes called the cold chain,
which is a world where we can keep food cold
from the moment you know, a vegetable is picked or
an animal is slaughtered, basically until the time I pull
(14:56):
it out of my fridge or my freezer to cook it.
And once we have this cold chain, people start to
kind of rethink food in a bigger way. And there's
a few pieces of that of that kind of rethinking
that I want to talk about from the book. So
tell me about this thing called the low temperature research station.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
No one had any clue what temperature things should be
at to last the longest, but not freeze and not
you know, or not turned brown or whatever. No one
had any clue like what should be stored with what
and for how long. All of that had to be
figured out, and so the Low Temperature Research Station was
(15:36):
really the first attempt to do that. It was set
up by the British government post World War One. Britain
is a very small little island filled with a lot
of people, and even back then it imported most of
its food and as German you boats were sinking ships
bringing food from the colonies. The British government were like, huh,
we should figure out how to keep a supply on hand,
(15:59):
sort of a reserve. This is a matter of national security.
We can't just do a just in time system, you know.
And so they set up this Low Temperature Research Station
where a bunch of scientists tackled everything. I mean, they
looked into meat. In the book, I spend most of
(16:19):
my time looking at how they studied apples. Apples were
a huge fruit at the time. This is before the
rise of the banana, so to speak, and the apple
was kind of it and apples would come from the
colonies and need to be stored, and there was you know,
a whole set of research going on into how do
(16:42):
you store apples, And it's not just a matter of temperature,
as it turns out, it's also a matter of what
the apple is breathing. And this was the thing I
didn't really realize until I wrote this book. But when
you harvest produce, it's still alive, it's still metabolizing, it's
still breathing, and like us, it has a certain number
(17:02):
of breaths left until it dies.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
When you say breathing, it's taking in what it's not
is it oxygen? It's so, it's not the usual.
Speaker 3 (17:13):
It's not it's not so distance No, huh.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
So what what is it taking in? And what is
it putting out?
Speaker 2 (17:20):
It's taking an oxygen and putting out carbon dioxide, just
like us.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
Just like us.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
Yeah, it's just they're just like us, and just like us,
they have a certain number of breaths before they die.
We know this about ourselves so that we don't tend
to think about.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
It very much a lot, to be honest. But whatever.
So what do they figure out about apples at the
at the Low Temperature Research Station.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
Well, they figure out that you can make an apple
breathe much more slowly if you reduce the oxygen levels.
And they figure this out by putting apples in a
in a vasoline lined coffin, they call it sitting them
in there. You suck out the oxygen, and there's this,
there's this sort of it's a finely tuned thing. You
(18:09):
can't remove all the oxygen because then the apples will
just ferment, and that is then it's all over your cider. Yeah,
so you need to get it low enough so that
they're still breathing, just breathing as slowly as possible. And
that actually varies by apple species. So you might be
able to take a Pink Lady down to you know,
(18:30):
zero point five percent oxygen, but a Red Delicious only
down to two percent. But the point is you're sort
of putting the apple into almost suspended animation. It's just
breathing as slowly as possible, and it's it's sort of
like if you play the podcast on like half speed,
it takes twice as long, while the apple that is
(18:53):
breathing at you know, half speed, lives twice as long.
And so they figured this out, put it into commercial practice,
and this is how apples are stored today. This is
why you can go to the store right now, which
is before the apple season starts, and by a Washington
State apple and it will be juicy and fresh and
also nearly a year old.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
And is temperature also a part of that formula to
sort of induce this hibernation.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
Oh yeah, you have to bring the temperature down. And
again that varies based on the species. But cold's main
method of preserving things is to slow things down. We
know this, like we are slower in the cold. Bacteria
and fungi are slower in the cold. Apples are slower
in the cold. You're just adding the atmospheric effect to
(19:41):
it as a sort of additive, so it slowed down
even more.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
Still to come on the show the technological marvel that
is a plastic bag full of lettuce. So apples are
a good one. I mean, there's a lot of specific
(20:07):
innovations for different foods. But another one I want to
talk about is lettuce. Tell me the lettuce story.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
For a long time, lettuce had to be grown near
where it was consumed. And then once ice you know,
ice making machines came along, well that's when California got
into the lettuce business and the Salinas Valley became the
largest ice producing uh you know area of the world,
(20:38):
second only to New York City, and the amount of
ice they made there because they were icing down all
the lettuce, and that meant the lettuce itself had to
change because you know, the soft Boston bib type they
don't do so well when they're ice. You need something sturdy,
like oh, an iceberg, which gets its name supposedly from
(21:02):
the fact that when these crisped lettuces were jammed into
railcars and topped with the load of ice and retopped,
you know, every couple hundred miles along the railway, it
would look like icebergs were coming, you know, like a
train car set of icebergs was coming towards you.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
Yeah, you wrote that. Before this time, the kind of
lettuce that we call iceberg was called Los Angeles right,
Los Angeles lettuce and like kind of I mean, I
guess people like it, but like not a real lettuce
lettuce right if you want your like green vegetables, icebery
lettuce is notably not that green. And I mean, as
(21:45):
I read the book, it just takes off as lettuce
because it's the lettuce that you could send across the country.
In a railcar full of ice one.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
And that happens again and again with the refrigeration. It
happens with apples too. The apples we have on our
grocery store shelves are the apples you can store in
controlled storage. Lots of very tasty heirloom varieties do not
do well in controlled storage. They can't be kept that long,
and so we don't see them on supermarket shelves. It's
just a it's sort of an ecological filter where things
(22:17):
that cannot be stored in this mass market industrial refrigerated
way no longer make it onto the grocery store shelves.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
But people are figuring out ways to store more things
in this mass market industrialized way, which is what happens
with lettuce right, which is why we can get so
much lettuce now. So like any in particular bagged lettuce,
to my surprise, turns out to be like a wild
technological breakthrough.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
I know, this is a thing where you just think, oh,
it's convenient, whatever, it's plastic bag, that's nice, maybe they
washed it, big whoop. And actually it turns out that
that bag that you just kind of crumple up and
throw away is this super high tech respiratory apparatus for
the lettuce leaves, and it all came about surprisingly recently,
(23:06):
and what it really is is that the bag is
essentially a miniature plastic version of a big controlled atmosphere
Apple warehouse. It's the same idea. The plastic is actually
not just plastic. It's several layers of what is called
differentially permeable membrane, which is basically just plastic with different
(23:30):
kinds of holes in it to let different gases through
at different rates that you have designed when you specified
the plastic and manufactured the plastic, and you glue all
that together minimum kind of seven layers, as many as
twelve to get exactly the atmospheric blend you want in
(23:51):
that bag of lettuce. So at first it was just
chopped lettuce, and it was the idea was just keeping
that in a controlled atmosphere. Then it was like, you know, what,
people want a salad, not just one kind of lettuce,
So we need to throw some arugula in there and
some baby spinach. And to do that you have to
calculate how fast each of those leaves are breathing, and
(24:12):
they breathe at a different rate, so baby spinach. Because
it's so young, it's breathing very very fast. En dive
is like kind of sturdier, more chill breathing more slowly.
You have to mix your leaves in the correct ratio
to get an even kind of breathing pattern. So the
spinach breathing super fast. You put enough and dive in
(24:35):
to kind of chill things down and take the overall
bags metabolism down. So it's this entirely. You think, oh,
they put in too much and dive. I don't like that. No,
it's all engineered to.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
And when they're like different. You know, you can buy
a bag of baby spinach. Is the plastic bag for
the baby spinach like different than the plastic bag for whatever,
the pre mixed Koleslaw or whatever.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
Yes, one hundred percent, because they're delivering a different atmospheric ratio.
I mean, this is the most high. It's using Cold
War era submarine technology, which is when people started spending
so long under the water that you know, people had
to figure out how to deliver controlled atmospheres.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
It's like a submarine. It's like a submarine for greens
basically exactly.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
Yeah, they and the guy who invented it who's still alive.
Speaker 3 (25:32):
Has anyone heard of this man?
Speaker 1 (25:34):
No, you know J's name, We haven't even said it.
Say the name.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
Jim Lug, James Lug. It's like this bold step forward
for salad that has been completely forgotten. And I'm guilty
of this as anyone else. Like you bring a bag
of salad home, if it doesn't fit in your crisper drawer,
you kind of open it to squish out some of
the air and put it in there. Now that I
know the effort that has gone into creating that little
(26:00):
atmospheric bubble, I'm like, I'm so sorry.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
Sorry, Jim. What about the so that the soft play
bag is what we're talking about, They also sell salid
now in the like hard plastic clamshell. Is that some
crazy technology that I don't even know about.
Speaker 3 (26:18):
No, that's been that's been.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
There's actually less effective, but it's been flushed with more
of an inert gas to the best of my knowledge.
But it's but actually not as high tech. The bags
are more high tech.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Huh. And do the bags work better? Do the bags
preserve the greens longer than the hard shell?
Speaker 3 (26:35):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (26:36):
Huh, not intuitive?
Speaker 3 (26:38):
I know now you know, so one of the things.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
That's interesting to me in the book is you seem
ambivalent about refrigeration. You spent ten years on the book,
and like, clearly you admire a lot of the people
who figured things out, but you seem, yeah, you seem
ambivalent about the effects of refrigeration on humanity in the world. Like,
(27:06):
how do you weigh how do you weigh the effects
of refuge?
Speaker 2 (27:10):
Well, yeah, so, first of all, I think the important
thing is to weigh it. And here's one thing I
came to realize as I worked on this book is
that refrigeration is just so taken for granted as a
central sort of you know.
Speaker 3 (27:24):
This is how we eat.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
It doesn't get evaluated for its costs or benefits. It
just is you know, it's one of those things like
air where it's like is air good or bad?
Speaker 3 (27:35):
You know, we need it.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
So I actually thought it was important to say, well,
you know what, it's a very recent technology, extremely recent.
Wasn't commercialized till you know, just over one hundred and
fifty years ago, wasn't commonplace till a century ago.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
If that, like, this is a very.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Recent transformation of our food system, why are we assuming
that it has to be that it is, you know, inevitable.
When you're starting to write a book, you go and
look at see has anyone else written about this? And
I went I went to the New York Public Library
and I looked at the most recent book on refrigeration,
and it was from the nineteen fifties, and it said, well, like,
(28:17):
refrigeration's great, and you know, human progress continues, and no
doubt the next food preservation thing will be along shortly.
No one at the time thought refrigeration.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
Was the end, uh huh, and yet it has sort
of become the end.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
It's interesting because I feel like mid century was that
with a number of things, right, like with air travel
comes to mind famously. Right if the fifty years from whatever,
nineteen hundred to nineteen fifty, nineteen ten to nineteen sixty
were like this incredible thing, and then we basically got
the same thing now that we had then.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
Yeah, a little better, but you know, like moderate iterations,
but the same thing. And the reason, h I think
it's important to look at. I mean, there are a
few different reasons. One is the super pressing one, which
is refrigeration actually turns out to have a huge climate
change impact. The refrigerants themselves are super greenhouse gases. A
(29:14):
lot of the time the power to make things cold,
you know, the energy required to make things cold is
a huge burden. And if the rest of the world
refrigerates like America does, which it doesn't right now. You know,
the US is sort of Europe as well, but unique
(29:35):
in having a cold chain of the scale we have.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
It's sort of a microcosm of the broader like, oh,
there is a developing world. Reasonably everybody wants to have
the same standard of living we do. But if that happens,
we're screwed in terms of climate change, among.
Speaker 3 (29:49):
Other things, completely screwed in.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
The absence of other innovations, at least exactly.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
And whereas people sort of seem to recognize that with like, oh, hey,
if everyone has a car in Africa, we're screwed, they
aren't talking about it when it comes to well, if
the entire food system is refrigerating.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
World, if the cold chain that we have in the
developed world becomes global.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
Yeah exactly.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
Okay, Well let's do this way. You wrote a book,
you spent ten years. What has happened has happened? On balance,
you think we're better off or worse off for refrigeration.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
I think better off as long as we figure out
what to do about the climate change aspect of it.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
So let's let's talk about what comes next. Yeah, what
people are trying to figure out. It is an excellent
point that seventy years ago, everybody's like, surely the next
cold making, surely the next refrigeration breakthrough is imminent, and
nothing right, So what are people working on? What is
(30:57):
the frontier of refrigeration.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
It's very underfunded. And that's also before you think about
you know, there's cooling things more sustainably, or there's preserving food. Differently,
when refrigeration was first, you know, introduced, people were thinking
that the big preservation breakthrough that people needed to feed
cities was not going to be cold cold was you know,
(31:24):
this fleeting natural ephemeral ice thing. There was no way
it would work at scale, so they were looking into
all sorts of you know, fumigation, coatings, shredding things and
drying them. You get the invention of the bullion cube
as a way to say, oh, how do we kind
of extract the nutritional value of meat and at least
(31:46):
preserve that. So it's at the time people were aware
that you know, preservation could take many forms, and I
think that's one of the things I look at in
the book is like, what if the future of you know,
some things have to be cold. Ice cream has to
be cold, beer has to be cold in my book,
(32:07):
but you know, an apple doesn't actually have to be cold,
it just has to be preserved.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
Most of refrigeration is not keeping things cold so that
we can eat them cold. It's so that they don't
spoil exactly.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
So if there are other ways for them not to spoil, well,
then you could have a vastly slimmed down cold chain.
Or listen, we've built our system in the US, it
is what it is. You could say, well, hey, in
countries that haven't built their cold chain yet, maybe they
could build this leaner, meaner model in the same way
(32:41):
that you know, they didn't get checkbooks, they went straight
to digital banking on their phones, and they didn't get landlines,
they went straight to cell phones, et cetera. So could
we find better preservation solutions if what we're trying to
do is keep food fresh that don't require cold chain
where possible.
Speaker 1 (32:59):
What are people working on in terms of preserving food
without cold so.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
Some people are working on high pressure process. So if
you can just apply enough pressure, you can sort of
squeeze out the bacteria and fungi. This works with meat
apparently quite well. It's expensive right now. It's very much
at the experimental stage. This is not something that is
done like commercially right now. Where is the one that
(33:29):
I went to see is done commercially right now, which
is a coating. And so it's funny, it's like what
goes around comes around. All of these you know, pressure, coating, fumigation, like,
all of these things were things that were thought of
in the seventeen fifties and now are being tried again,
and coatings is one of them.
Speaker 3 (33:50):
Really, the trick.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
With this one coating company appeal is they're taking the
same logic of the apple warehouse and the salad bag.
They're just putting it on to the produce item as
a nanoscale coating that is made out of food particles.
It is exactly the semi permeable membrane. But your salad
(34:14):
bag is it's just not plastic. It's just sprayed directly
onto your cucumber and it's controlling the cucumbers breathing that way.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
I mean it seems cool, but as you describe it,
it sounds like a thing one does not want to eat.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
That's where you're wrong. Licked, I licked the produce with
this on. I'm here to tell the tale.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
So, like, what is actually going on? What are they doing?
Speaker 2 (34:37):
It's a different formulation for each fruit and vegetable because
you're trying to create a different modified atmosphere.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
And you.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
Create this formulation, there's a lot of trial and era
you spray it on. It's nanoscale. Part of how it
works is people think of it as like wax or
something like it's a thick layer that's blocking things. No,
it came out of research into solar panels that was
all about how if they dry at different rates, they
like assemble slightly different at the nanoscale, have different You know,
(35:11):
a solar panel can be like twice as efficient if
you'll let it dry two times more slowly. So this
is a similar It's out of this same thin film
polymer physics, and you just have to spread it on
and dry it a certain way. It assembles with these properties.
It's nanoscale, so like undetectable made out of food waste
(35:32):
and what it's doing. Is this exact same thing that
the salad bag is doing, which is slowing down how
fast that piece of produce breaths so that it takes
its allotted number of breaths over a longer time. And
it's kind of astonishing. I like, I, you know, I
was went in as a skeptical journalist and then I
(35:54):
saw the bell peppers that had been sitting out for
eight weeks at room temperature, and I feel, we all
know that after eight weeks at room temperature, a bell
pepper is not in great shape. It's you know, it's
no longer something you want to eat. These bell peppers
with the you know, the nanoscale coating, they weren't crude
(36:17):
to tabared ready, but they were definitely stir fry, were
they They were. They were a little sad looking, but
they hadn't gone And eight weeks, yeah.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
Two months a long time for a bell pepper to
sit on the counter.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
No killing.
Speaker 1 (36:33):
So are they are they in out in the world now? Like,
are there fruits that you can buy that have this
coating on them?
Speaker 3 (36:41):
There are?
Speaker 2 (36:41):
In fact, Walmart just announced that it's ditching plastic on
its English cucumbers in favor of appeal.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
This coating Okay, yeah, the English cucumber they sell that,
that's the like the hothouse, the long the long one
and far more tasty cucumber that it is like shrink wrapped, right,
it has like, yeah, it's basically shrink wrapped when you
buy it. And so Walmart's going to start selling it
with this lipid coating instead of plastic exactly.
Speaker 3 (37:07):
And it works better. It like keeps the product fresher.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
And this is one of the fascinating things about it
because over time, refrigeration has totally changed our understanding of
what freshness means. It used to mean something that had
been harvested or slowtered really recently and really nearby. It
was something to do with time and distance. Then refrigeration
changed all of that because suddenly it could have been
slowtered six months ago and looked like it was slowdered yesterday.
(37:35):
So the definition of fresh changed, and what appeal does
is sort of say it could change again. It could
be fresh doesn't have to mean refrigerated. It could just
mean with more of the nutrients and the flavor that
it had when it was on the plant. It could
be a chemical definition, not a you know, not something
(37:56):
that we at the moment. The definition of fresh is
it needs to go in the fridge, right, I mean
that's or it comes from the fridge. That's how people
think of freshness. It could be. It could be to
do with the actual youth relative of the fruit and
vegetable itself, how few breaths it's taken.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
We'll be back in a minute with the lighting round.
Let's finish with the lightning round.
Speaker 3 (38:30):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
In the book, you cite a number of publications with
amazing names, including, but not limited to, Food Engineering Magazine,
Container Management Magazine, Palette Enterprise Magazine, and Food Technology Magazine.
(38:54):
If I am going to read one trade publication, any
trade publication, which one should it be?
Speaker 2 (39:01):
Does it have to be one that's still in print?
Because the old school ice in refrigeration, which was imprint
from like the eighteen eighties to the nineteen, I want
to say, twenties thirties, is I could spend all day
reading that. It's incredible.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
Tell me more, what with the John McPhee of ice
in refrigeration.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
None of the articles assigned, all of them are delightful.
They are entire articles about how cold affected Napoleon's Army,
for example. It's just a much more wide ranging look
at you know, cold is this sort of phenomenon.
Speaker 3 (39:36):
Yeah, I love.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
It's the magazine for people who are into cold exactly.
Speaker 3 (39:41):
So I'd say start there.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
What's your favorite thing that you can eat because of refrigeration?
Speaker 2 (39:47):
Oh well, I mean this is a hard call between.
I mean, if it's eat ice cream obviously, although you know,
if it's drink, then think of all the world of
cocktails that previously didn't have ice in them and are
(40:09):
now so so good.
Speaker 1 (40:11):
I mean, there's even things that like aren't cold, but
like mangoes. Like I live in New York and like,
theoretically in the world I could eat a mango without refrigeration.
But the idea that a mango could be like a
quasi stable fruit in my house is amazing and great.
I think, like, yes, I know they are costs, but
like I love mangoes.
Speaker 3 (40:32):
Yeah, I think.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
One of the sad things that's happened to me as
I've researched this book and made my podcast is I've
realized how much worse things taste when they are refrigerated.
Speaker 1 (40:43):
I mean, but it's not worse than no mango. I'm
sure the best mango in the world is amazing, but
I love the mangoes that I get.
Speaker 3 (40:51):
It depends if you've had the really good mangoes.
Speaker 1 (40:54):
Once you've got, then I'm glad that I haven't.
Speaker 3 (40:56):
Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
What's the most surprising detail you learned working on the book?
Speaker 3 (41:03):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (41:03):
Man, I mean, just because it's the most recent thing
we were talking. Came about ice cream. The non premium
brands are fifty percent air, and you can't truck them
across the country because they'll explode as you go over
the rockies. Really, yeah, so the companies have to come
up with different formulations for you know, the higher altitude
(41:26):
parts of the country, and you can't bring you know,
you can't truck your ice cream from your factory in
Georgia to sell and Denver is not going to work.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
So basically, the as you go up in altitude, the
atmospheric pressure declines and the air inside the container expands
and blows the lid off.
Speaker 3 (41:46):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
And so when you say non premium, it's like the
old school, like pre Hogendaws, pre Ben and Jerry's where
you get the big half gallon, not the little pint,
Yes exactly. So like hogandaws and Ben and Jerry's are
dense enough that you can take those over the rockies.
Speaker 2 (42:01):
Yeap, they are less air by you know, volume, and
thus you know, yes, they still expand a little, but
not enough to blow their lids off, so.
Speaker 1 (42:11):
They're not as much more expensive than the cheaper kind
once you account for the fact that the cheaper kind
has more air.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
Yeah, exactly, but some people like the air, you know,
it gives a different texture.
Speaker 3 (42:24):
Fair.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
What's one thing that people refrigerate that they should not
refrigerate so much?
Speaker 2 (42:30):
I mean, for example, never put stone fruit in your refrigerator.
It is the stone fruit killing zone. It literally disables
the genetic machinery that makes that the fruit uses to
make flavor.
Speaker 3 (42:44):
So just don't do it.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
Eat the peach or make the peach into a pie.
Do not put the peach in the fridge. There's a
ton onions and potatoes. Actually, I mean potatoes actually become
toxic in the fridge.
Speaker 3 (42:57):
Never do that. A lot of people have.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
This idea that the fridge is just this miraculous box
that keeps everything safe, and that is not the case.
It's not the ideal environment for a lot of things things.
Speaker 1 (43:10):
What's something that people don't refrigerate that they should h.
Speaker 3 (43:14):
Nuts? Us, Yeah, I see as news I can use
if you have.
Speaker 2 (43:21):
If you don't go through nuts that you're going to
go through on a relatively quick basis, Like if you
just grab a handful of almonds every day and you
go through the bag pretty quickly. Fine, doesn't need to
be in the fridge. But if you have, say some
pine nuts or some Macadamian nuts that you only use
in certain recipes, they will go rancid out of the
(43:42):
fridge and they will last longer. I actually keep my
Macadamius in the freezer.
Speaker 1 (43:50):
Nikki Twilly is the author of the book Frostbite and
the host of the podcast Gastropod. Thanks for listening to
the show. You can email us at problem at pushkin
dot fm. We're going to take a couple weeks off
for a summer break, but we'll be back soon. Today's
show was edited by Lydia Jane Kott. It was produced
by Gabriel Hunter Chang and engineered by Sarah Bruguer. I'm
(44:11):
Jacob Goldstein.
Pushkin the late twentieth and early twenty first century. This
era we've just been living through has obviously been this
period of incredible technological change. But in terms of technology
transforming everyday life, our era is not unprecedented, which is
(00:38):
to say our era is precedented, I would argue, In fact,
I have argued that in terms of everyday life, there
was an even bigger technology driven transformation in the period
one hundred years earlier, in the period of the late
eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds. That period saw the
coming of cars and planes, the spread of telephones and
(01:00):
the electric grid, and the spread of refrigeration. Refrigeration allowed
us to preserve and transport food like never before, and
in fact wound up really completely transforming the way people
eat the food we eat every day. I recently interviewed
a journalist named Nikola Twilly who just wrote a book
(01:21):
on refrigeration and how it changed us. The book is
called Frostbite, and one of the things the book really
made clear is how refrigeration changed daily life in this
really profound way. Niki describes this transformation in microcosm via
the work of this husband and wife sociologist team, The
(01:41):
husband and wife visited a town in Indiana, first in
eighteen ninety and then again in nineteen twenty five, and
they talk about the different ways life has changed in
this town, and Niki focuses on the way refrigeration changed
the way people eat.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
In eighteen ninety, what they found is that the city
had two diets. It had a winter and a summer diet,
and then the winter diet was just really meet start carbs, pastry, potatoes,
things like that, and the only sort of vegetables to
enliven it were either root vegetables, turnips, cabbages, apples you
(02:20):
could store in the root cellars, or things you had
pickled or preserved from summer. But fresh fruit, green vegetables, leaves, berries,
none of that.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
And you talk about how people would be sick essentially,
like everybody in town would get sick by the end
of winter.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Yeah, they called it spring sickness. Today we'd call it
sort of a prescore buttic syndrome.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
So like about to have scurvy, like about.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
To have scarvy, not full blown scurvy, but yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
The mild scurvy that everybody got every winter exactly. And
so then these academics, these sociologists come back in the
nineteen twenties once, you know, refrigeration is clearly not ubiquitous
by that point, but it's in the world. And what
do they find, how do they find? The diet in
(03:13):
this town has changed.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
It has changed utterly. They can buy oranges and lettuce
shipped from California, and bananas shipped all the way from
Central America.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
All but the very, very poorest.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Are beginning to be able to enjoy some of the
sort of what I call the supermarket in the US today,
permanent global summertime. You know, you can have anything you
want at any time. Spring sickness has been alleviated. No
one speaks of spring sickness anymore. And it's totally a
you know, the older generation remember it, the younger don't.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is what's your problem. My
guest today is Nikki Twilly. Her new book, Frostbite is
full of useful insights into science and markets and technological change. Also,
the book has just a bunch of good stories, including
but not limited to the central role of beer in
human history, the shockingly complex technology that goes into the
(04:17):
bags of salad greens on the shelf at the grocery store,
and why the technological frontier and refrigeration may mean that
we don't need to keep so much stuff so cold.
My conversation with Nikki started more or less at the beginning.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Humans have been able to control fire since before we
were even modern humans. That goes way back heat.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Heat we got, heat came early all.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
Over it, and some people argue that's what made us human,
you know, the ability to cook and then feed our
big brains, et cetera.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
Cold much trickier.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
All the great minds you know, Newton, Galileo, Robert Boyle,
all of the scientists that you've heard of. Leonardo da
Vinci tried to figure out where on Earth cold came from.
But yeah, seventeen fifty five, a Scottish doctor, almost as
a party trick, figured out how to freeze water. His
(05:18):
A pupil of his had noticed that if you put
a thermometer in ether, which evaporates very quickly, and when
something evaporates it pulls heat away. The energy of turning
that thing that liquid into gas pulls heat away, so
you get a cooling sensation. He used a bunch of
different liquids to try and make this work. He used
(05:40):
chili oil, he used brandy, he used menthol he you know,
he was going for all the sort of ones that
give you a tingly sensation logic. But in the end
he did manage to create a setup that froze water
for the first time. First it was this was the
first time seventeen fifty five that humans were able to
(06:02):
make cold on demand. And he was just like, well,
this seems kind of interesting, but I don't really know
what to do with it, so others should investigate. And
no one did anything for one hundred years because it
was like, what are we going to do with this?
It's a party trick.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
Yeah, that part is wild, right, It's like, here's this
giant breakthrough, We're ready, and then crickets.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
It's you know, there's I quote a line from Robert
Browning in the book, humanity's reach had exceeded its grasp.
We could we had figured out how to do something,
but we didn't know what to do with it. You know.
It just that, yes, the picture of what you could
do with cold wasn't there yet, right.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
And and you write about that, right. You point out
that in the eighteen hundreds, the first kind of industrialization
of cold that emerges is not from this new technology
but from a guy just selling ice, just like cutting
ice out of frozen lakes and putting it on ships
and sending that around the world and selling that. And
it's not until like one hundred years after that Scottish
(07:04):
doctor inventing refrigeration that this guy in Australia, James Harrison,
who you write about, He's like, oh, maybe refrigeration could
be you know, a business, So tell me about that
piece of it. Tell me about James Harrison.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
So, as with many things with technology, a few different
people are fiddling about with us at the same time
and making prototypes, and it's to do with who actually
gets it going. But James Harrison, son of a Scottish
salmon farmer, went to emigrated to Australia, as many British
people did at the time, worked as a printer. He
was actually a journalist, wrote and printed the local newspaper
(07:42):
near Brisbane, and he printing in Australia's summer heat. He
noticed that if he wiped ether over the type, then
the ink didn't smudge because of that cooling effect. Again,
it would evaporate off and at the time natural ice
was reaching Australia, but it was expensive, the amount that
(08:03):
had melted by the time it had got to Australia
in the distance, etc. It was expensive and it was rare.
It was like, I bet I could use this either
thing and build a refrigeration machine. I mean, he blew
himself up several times. There was many sets of eyebrows
were lost, but he ended up with a functioning machine.
And he was the first one to sell a refrigeration machine,
(08:26):
something that was capable at first, not of cooling things,
but of cooling water, of making ice. This is another
funny thing, like humans didn't think, oh, we could just
cool a room. They thought they were only used to
natural cold.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Ice is cold. If we want something to be cold,
let's freeze water and make it ice. Right, That's like
step one exactly. And who is his who is his market?
Who's he selling ice to brewers?
Speaker 2 (08:52):
One hundred percent brewers? You know some people credit beer
with being you know why humans got into agriculture and
domesticating grain and settling down forming civilization because we wanted
to drink.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
Yeah, you mentioned that in passing in the book. That's
like one sentence in the book. And I read it
and I thought, is it true? I mean, nobody knows
if it's true, but like, how plausible is that theory?
Speaker 3 (09:15):
It's a pretty plausible theory.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Like this is a theory that is subscribed to by
many archaeologists and reasonably backed up by residue in pots.
People were definitely making alcohol almost the first thing they
did with their grains.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
What is the Homer Simpson line? Beer the cause of
and solution to all of our problems? Pretty much but
perhaps historically true, right if you think of the rise
of agriculture, as you know, the creation of many many
problems and then the solution to many many problems exactly.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
And ditto refrigeration.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
So yeah, so why are brewers the first market for
artificial refrigeration?
Speaker 2 (09:59):
So you can make beer without refrigeration, it's just and
if you can drink it warm. I grew up in
England and people do still it's not my taste, but you.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Know, technology, one hundred years of technology notwithstanding.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Notwithstanding it, did you know why? It's actually a flavor thing.
Things taste more bitter when they're warmer, and if you
are looking for that taste in your beer, as British
people are, like oh, I'll have a pint of bitter.
They say, well, then warmer is better. But the point
is that lager was having a boom in popularity, in
(10:37):
particular because Germans were emigrating everywhere and bringing with them
their love for lagger and lagger yeast doesn't really function
particularly well above fifty degrees and so in the Laggering
caves in Saint Louis and Brooklyn it was getting too
hot in summer to make beer. And I mean summer
is when beer tastes best. So this was a crisis.
(11:02):
And the brewers were huge consumers of natural ice. But
then you know, there would be natural ice famines. If
there was a warm winter, there wouldn't be enough natural
ice to go around. The price would go up, and
also increasingly as cities got bigger, and in an era
before you know sanitation, the natural ice was getting polluted
(11:25):
and really dirty.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
So yes, it.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
Seeing of ice in a cave in a basement in
Brooklyn in eighteen seventy like that is nasty.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
There was a certain in the summer, certain funkiness, certain funkiness,
let's put it that way. So they were the early
adopters of this, this refrigeration technology. The first refrigerating machines
ever sold were both to breweries, one in London, one
in Australia, and they are the ones who also pioneered
(11:56):
the whole idea of like, wait, we don't have to
make ice, we could just cool the cellar. And that
was actually a brewer in Brooklyn figured that out.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Sort of cutting out the middleman. Right, there's this moment
which is kind of beautiful in a like history of
technology way, where they're like, we want the room to
be cool. We know ice is cold. We've got this machine,
and it just takes what years? How long does it
take before anybody figures out that you don't actually need
to melt water into ice put the ice in the room,
you can just cool the room.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
About five years?
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Wow? Yeah, like a generation. Yeah, the technology is right there.
It's just like an insight problem exactly.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
They did just I mean, if you're used to thinking
of cold as a property of ice, yea, then seeing
it as not is sort.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Of a leap. Yeah. No one in history has ever
used a machine to cool air exactly until somebody.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
Yeah, until until you know, this brewer in Brooklyn came
along and did that. And it was a huge improvement.
You can imagine like ice melts, it's funky, it's disgusting.
Now you have this clean, dry refrigeration machine just cooling
the room. The only problem was these were all prototypes.
(13:11):
They're massive, they use very explosive chemicals, and they're steam powered,
so they're constantly blowing up. They're unensurable, they're unreliable. Every
single one is unique because they're all prototypes. So it
just took Whenever I sort of look back at this history,
I have to remind myself it took a long time
because there was a lot to figure out. It was
(13:33):
a French monk who eventually figured, oh, if we put
the compressor, the thing that sort of compresses the refrigerant
so that it can evaporate again, if we put that
in an enclosed container, that's going to work much better
because then it won't you know, keep breaking down. And
he did that because he wanted, you know, to chill
the communion wine in the south of front, so you're adjacent.
(13:57):
It's all alcohol in the end.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
And by the way that you know, that insight that
the monk had of using a hermetically sealed compressor, like
that's basically the way referreerators work today, right, Like, that's
the basic idea.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
Still, everything about the early refrigerator is basically the same
as the refrigerator we use today, except we're using electricity
rather than steam, and the chemicals we use are you know,
we're not using ether anymore. We're using various things with
extremely long names, but otherwise the principle, the mechanics identical.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
So you're right about the way people take this technology
and extend it so that you can keep trucks cold
and you can keep ships cold. Right, and then we
get this world, this thing that becomes called the cold chain,
which is a world where we can keep food cold
from the moment you know, a vegetable is picked or
an animal is slaughtered, basically until the time I pull
(14:56):
it out of my fridge or my freezer to cook it.
And once we have this cold chain, people start to
kind of rethink food in a bigger way. And there's
a few pieces of that of that kind of rethinking
that I want to talk about from the book. So
tell me about this thing called the low temperature research station.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
No one had any clue what temperature things should be
at to last the longest, but not freeze and not
you know, or not turned brown or whatever. No one
had any clue like what should be stored with what
and for how long. All of that had to be
figured out, and so the Low Temperature Research Station was
(15:36):
really the first attempt to do that. It was set
up by the British government post World War One. Britain
is a very small little island filled with a lot
of people, and even back then it imported most of
its food and as German you boats were sinking ships
bringing food from the colonies. The British government were like, huh,
we should figure out how to keep a supply on hand,
(15:59):
sort of a reserve. This is a matter of national security.
We can't just do a just in time system, you know.
And so they set up this Low Temperature Research Station
where a bunch of scientists tackled everything. I mean, they
looked into meat. In the book, I spend most of
(16:19):
my time looking at how they studied apples. Apples were
a huge fruit at the time. This is before the
rise of the banana, so to speak, and the apple
was kind of it and apples would come from the
colonies and need to be stored, and there was you know,
a whole set of research going on into how do
(16:42):
you store apples, And it's not just a matter of temperature,
as it turns out, it's also a matter of what
the apple is breathing. And this was the thing I
didn't really realize until I wrote this book. But when
you harvest produce, it's still alive, it's still metabolizing, it's
still breathing, and like us, it has a certain number
(17:02):
of breaths left until it dies.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
When you say breathing, it's taking in what it's not
is it oxygen? It's so, it's not the usual.
Speaker 3 (17:13):
It's not it's not so distance No, huh.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
So what what is it taking in? And what is
it putting out?
Speaker 2 (17:20):
It's taking an oxygen and putting out carbon dioxide, just
like us.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
Just like us.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
Yeah, it's just they're just like us, and just like us,
they have a certain number of breaths before they die.
We know this about ourselves so that we don't tend
to think about.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
It very much a lot, to be honest. But whatever.
So what do they figure out about apples at the
at the Low Temperature Research Station.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
Well, they figure out that you can make an apple
breathe much more slowly if you reduce the oxygen levels.
And they figure this out by putting apples in a
in a vasoline lined coffin, they call it sitting them
in there. You suck out the oxygen, and there's this,
there's this sort of it's a finely tuned thing. You
(18:09):
can't remove all the oxygen because then the apples will
just ferment, and that is then it's all over your cider. Yeah,
so you need to get it low enough so that
they're still breathing, just breathing as slowly as possible. And
that actually varies by apple species. So you might be
able to take a Pink Lady down to you know,
(18:30):
zero point five percent oxygen, but a Red Delicious only
down to two percent. But the point is you're sort
of putting the apple into almost suspended animation. It's just
breathing as slowly as possible, and it's it's sort of
like if you play the podcast on like half speed,
it takes twice as long, while the apple that is
(18:53):
breathing at you know, half speed, lives twice as long.
And so they figured this out, put it into commercial practice,
and this is how apples are stored today. This is
why you can go to the store right now, which
is before the apple season starts, and by a Washington
State apple and it will be juicy and fresh and
also nearly a year old.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
And is temperature also a part of that formula to
sort of induce this hibernation.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
Oh yeah, you have to bring the temperature down. And
again that varies based on the species. But cold's main
method of preserving things is to slow things down. We
know this, like we are slower in the cold. Bacteria
and fungi are slower in the cold. Apples are slower
in the cold. You're just adding the atmospheric effect to
(19:41):
it as a sort of additive, so it slowed down
even more.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
Still to come on the show the technological marvel that
is a plastic bag full of lettuce. So apples are
a good one. I mean, there's a lot of specific
(20:07):
innovations for different foods. But another one I want to
talk about is lettuce. Tell me the lettuce story.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
For a long time, lettuce had to be grown near
where it was consumed. And then once ice you know,
ice making machines came along, well that's when California got
into the lettuce business and the Salinas Valley became the
largest ice producing uh you know area of the world,
(20:38):
second only to New York City, and the amount of
ice they made there because they were icing down all
the lettuce, and that meant the lettuce itself had to
change because you know, the soft Boston bib type they
don't do so well when they're ice. You need something sturdy,
like oh, an iceberg, which gets its name supposedly from
(21:02):
the fact that when these crisped lettuces were jammed into
railcars and topped with the load of ice and retopped,
you know, every couple hundred miles along the railway, it
would look like icebergs were coming, you know, like a
train car set of icebergs was coming towards you.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
Yeah, you wrote that. Before this time, the kind of
lettuce that we call iceberg was called Los Angeles right,
Los Angeles lettuce and like kind of I mean, I
guess people like it, but like not a real lettuce
lettuce right if you want your like green vegetables, icebery
lettuce is notably not that green. And I mean, as
(21:45):
I read the book, it just takes off as lettuce
because it's the lettuce that you could send across the country.
In a railcar full of ice one.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
And that happens again and again with the refrigeration. It
happens with apples too. The apples we have on our
grocery store shelves are the apples you can store in
controlled storage. Lots of very tasty heirloom varieties do not
do well in controlled storage. They can't be kept that long,
and so we don't see them on supermarket shelves. It's
just a it's sort of an ecological filter where things
(22:17):
that cannot be stored in this mass market industrial refrigerated
way no longer make it onto the grocery store shelves.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
But people are figuring out ways to store more things
in this mass market industrialized way, which is what happens
with lettuce right, which is why we can get so
much lettuce now. So like any in particular bagged lettuce,
to my surprise, turns out to be like a wild
technological breakthrough.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
I know, this is a thing where you just think, oh,
it's convenient, whatever, it's plastic bag, that's nice, maybe they
washed it, big whoop. And actually it turns out that
that bag that you just kind of crumple up and
throw away is this super high tech respiratory apparatus for
the lettuce leaves, and it all came about surprisingly recently,
(23:06):
and what it really is is that the bag is
essentially a miniature plastic version of a big controlled atmosphere
Apple warehouse. It's the same idea. The plastic is actually
not just plastic. It's several layers of what is called
differentially permeable membrane, which is basically just plastic with different
(23:30):
kinds of holes in it to let different gases through
at different rates that you have designed when you specified
the plastic and manufactured the plastic, and you glue all
that together minimum kind of seven layers, as many as
twelve to get exactly the atmospheric blend you want in
(23:51):
that bag of lettuce. So at first it was just
chopped lettuce, and it was the idea was just keeping
that in a controlled atmosphere. Then it was like, you know, what,
people want a salad, not just one kind of lettuce,
So we need to throw some arugula in there and
some baby spinach. And to do that you have to
calculate how fast each of those leaves are breathing, and
(24:12):
they breathe at a different rate, so baby spinach. Because
it's so young, it's breathing very very fast. En dive
is like kind of sturdier, more chill breathing more slowly.
You have to mix your leaves in the correct ratio
to get an even kind of breathing pattern. So the
spinach breathing super fast. You put enough and dive in
(24:35):
to kind of chill things down and take the overall
bags metabolism down. So it's this entirely. You think, oh,
they put in too much and dive. I don't like that. No,
it's all engineered to.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
And when they're like different. You know, you can buy
a bag of baby spinach. Is the plastic bag for
the baby spinach like different than the plastic bag for whatever,
the pre mixed Koleslaw or whatever.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
Yes, one hundred percent, because they're delivering a different atmospheric ratio.
I mean, this is the most high. It's using Cold
War era submarine technology, which is when people started spending
so long under the water that you know, people had
to figure out how to deliver controlled atmospheres.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
It's like a submarine. It's like a submarine for greens
basically exactly.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
Yeah, they and the guy who invented it who's still alive.
Speaker 3 (25:32):
Has anyone heard of this man?
Speaker 1 (25:34):
No, you know J's name, We haven't even said it.
Say the name.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
Jim Lug, James Lug. It's like this bold step forward
for salad that has been completely forgotten. And I'm guilty
of this as anyone else. Like you bring a bag
of salad home, if it doesn't fit in your crisper drawer,
you kind of open it to squish out some of
the air and put it in there. Now that I
know the effort that has gone into creating that little
(26:00):
atmospheric bubble, I'm like, I'm so sorry.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
Sorry, Jim. What about the so that the soft play
bag is what we're talking about, They also sell salid
now in the like hard plastic clamshell. Is that some
crazy technology that I don't even know about.
Speaker 3 (26:18):
No, that's been that's been.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
There's actually less effective, but it's been flushed with more
of an inert gas to the best of my knowledge.
But it's but actually not as high tech. The bags
are more high tech.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Huh. And do the bags work better? Do the bags
preserve the greens longer than the hard shell?
Speaker 3 (26:35):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (26:36):
Huh, not intuitive?
Speaker 3 (26:38):
I know now you know, so one of the things.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
That's interesting to me in the book is you seem
ambivalent about refrigeration. You spent ten years on the book,
and like, clearly you admire a lot of the people
who figured things out, but you seem, yeah, you seem
ambivalent about the effects of refrigeration on humanity in the world. Like,
(27:06):
how do you weigh how do you weigh the effects
of refuge?
Speaker 2 (27:10):
Well, yeah, so, first of all, I think the important
thing is to weigh it. And here's one thing I
came to realize as I worked on this book is
that refrigeration is just so taken for granted as a
central sort of you know.
Speaker 3 (27:24):
This is how we eat.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
It doesn't get evaluated for its costs or benefits. It
just is you know, it's one of those things like
air where it's like is air good or bad?
Speaker 3 (27:35):
You know, we need it.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
So I actually thought it was important to say, well,
you know what, it's a very recent technology, extremely recent.
Wasn't commercialized till you know, just over one hundred and
fifty years ago, wasn't commonplace till a century ago.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
If that, like, this is a very.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Recent transformation of our food system, why are we assuming
that it has to be that it is, you know, inevitable.
When you're starting to write a book, you go and
look at see has anyone else written about this? And
I went I went to the New York Public Library
and I looked at the most recent book on refrigeration,
and it was from the nineteen fifties, and it said, well, like,
(28:17):
refrigeration's great, and you know, human progress continues, and no
doubt the next food preservation thing will be along shortly.
No one at the time thought refrigeration.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
Was the end, uh huh, and yet it has sort
of become the end.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
It's interesting because I feel like mid century was that
with a number of things, right, like with air travel
comes to mind famously. Right if the fifty years from whatever,
nineteen hundred to nineteen fifty, nineteen ten to nineteen sixty
were like this incredible thing, and then we basically got
the same thing now that we had then.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
Yeah, a little better, but you know, like moderate iterations,
but the same thing. And the reason, h I think
it's important to look at. I mean, there are a
few different reasons. One is the super pressing one, which
is refrigeration actually turns out to have a huge climate
change impact. The refrigerants themselves are super greenhouse gases. A
(29:14):
lot of the time the power to make things cold,
you know, the energy required to make things cold is
a huge burden. And if the rest of the world
refrigerates like America does, which it doesn't right now. You know,
the US is sort of Europe as well, but unique
(29:35):
in having a cold chain of the scale we have.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
It's sort of a microcosm of the broader like, oh,
there is a developing world. Reasonably everybody wants to have
the same standard of living we do. But if that happens,
we're screwed in terms of climate change, among.
Speaker 3 (29:49):
Other things, completely screwed in.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
The absence of other innovations, at least exactly.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
And whereas people sort of seem to recognize that with like, oh, hey,
if everyone has a car in Africa, we're screwed, they
aren't talking about it when it comes to well, if
the entire food system is refrigerating.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
World, if the cold chain that we have in the
developed world becomes global.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
Yeah exactly.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
Okay, Well let's do this way. You wrote a book,
you spent ten years. What has happened has happened? On balance,
you think we're better off or worse off for refrigeration.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
I think better off as long as we figure out
what to do about the climate change aspect of it.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
So let's let's talk about what comes next. Yeah, what
people are trying to figure out. It is an excellent
point that seventy years ago, everybody's like, surely the next
cold making, surely the next refrigeration breakthrough is imminent, and
nothing right, So what are people working on? What is
(30:57):
the frontier of refrigeration.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
It's very underfunded. And that's also before you think about
you know, there's cooling things more sustainably, or there's preserving food. Differently,
when refrigeration was first, you know, introduced, people were thinking
that the big preservation breakthrough that people needed to feed
cities was not going to be cold cold was you know,
(31:24):
this fleeting natural ephemeral ice thing. There was no way
it would work at scale, so they were looking into
all sorts of you know, fumigation, coatings, shredding things and
drying them. You get the invention of the bullion cube
as a way to say, oh, how do we kind
of extract the nutritional value of meat and at least
(31:46):
preserve that. So it's at the time people were aware
that you know, preservation could take many forms, and I
think that's one of the things I look at in
the book is like, what if the future of you know,
some things have to be cold. Ice cream has to
be cold, beer has to be cold in my book,
(32:07):
but you know, an apple doesn't actually have to be cold,
it just has to be preserved.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
Most of refrigeration is not keeping things cold so that
we can eat them cold. It's so that they don't
spoil exactly.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
So if there are other ways for them not to spoil, well,
then you could have a vastly slimmed down cold chain.
Or listen, we've built our system in the US, it
is what it is. You could say, well, hey, in
countries that haven't built their cold chain yet, maybe they
could build this leaner, meaner model in the same way
(32:41):
that you know, they didn't get checkbooks, they went straight
to digital banking on their phones, and they didn't get landlines,
they went straight to cell phones, et cetera. So could
we find better preservation solutions if what we're trying to
do is keep food fresh that don't require cold chain
where possible.
Speaker 1 (32:59):
What are people working on in terms of preserving food
without cold so.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
Some people are working on high pressure process. So if
you can just apply enough pressure, you can sort of
squeeze out the bacteria and fungi. This works with meat
apparently quite well. It's expensive right now. It's very much
at the experimental stage. This is not something that is
done like commercially right now. Where is the one that
(33:29):
I went to see is done commercially right now, which
is a coating. And so it's funny, it's like what
goes around comes around. All of these you know, pressure, coating, fumigation, like,
all of these things were things that were thought of
in the seventeen fifties and now are being tried again,
and coatings is one of them.
Speaker 3 (33:50):
Really, the trick.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
With this one coating company appeal is they're taking the
same logic of the apple warehouse and the salad bag.
They're just putting it on to the produce item as
a nanoscale coating that is made out of food particles.
It is exactly the semi permeable membrane. But your salad
(34:14):
bag is it's just not plastic. It's just sprayed directly
onto your cucumber and it's controlling the cucumbers breathing that way.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
I mean it seems cool, but as you describe it,
it sounds like a thing one does not want to eat.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
That's where you're wrong. Licked, I licked the produce with
this on. I'm here to tell the tale.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
So, like, what is actually going on? What are they doing?
Speaker 2 (34:37):
It's a different formulation for each fruit and vegetable because
you're trying to create a different modified atmosphere.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
And you.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
Create this formulation, there's a lot of trial and era
you spray it on. It's nanoscale. Part of how it
works is people think of it as like wax or
something like it's a thick layer that's blocking things. No,
it came out of research into solar panels that was
all about how if they dry at different rates, they
like assemble slightly different at the nanoscale, have different You know,
(35:11):
a solar panel can be like twice as efficient if
you'll let it dry two times more slowly. So this
is a similar It's out of this same thin film
polymer physics, and you just have to spread it on
and dry it a certain way. It assembles with these properties.
It's nanoscale, so like undetectable made out of food waste
(35:32):
and what it's doing. Is this exact same thing that
the salad bag is doing, which is slowing down how
fast that piece of produce breaths so that it takes
its allotted number of breaths over a longer time. And
it's kind of astonishing. I like, I, you know, I
was went in as a skeptical journalist and then I
(35:54):
saw the bell peppers that had been sitting out for
eight weeks at room temperature, and I feel, we all
know that after eight weeks at room temperature, a bell
pepper is not in great shape. It's you know, it's
no longer something you want to eat. These bell peppers
with the you know, the nanoscale coating, they weren't crude
(36:17):
to tabared ready, but they were definitely stir fry, were
they They were. They were a little sad looking, but
they hadn't gone And eight weeks, yeah.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
Two months a long time for a bell pepper to
sit on the counter.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
No killing.
Speaker 1 (36:33):
So are they are they in out in the world now? Like,
are there fruits that you can buy that have this
coating on them?
Speaker 3 (36:41):
There are?
Speaker 2 (36:41):
In fact, Walmart just announced that it's ditching plastic on
its English cucumbers in favor of appeal.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
This coating Okay, yeah, the English cucumber they sell that,
that's the like the hothouse, the long the long one
and far more tasty cucumber that it is like shrink wrapped, right,
it has like, yeah, it's basically shrink wrapped when you
buy it. And so Walmart's going to start selling it
with this lipid coating instead of plastic exactly.
Speaker 3 (37:07):
And it works better. It like keeps the product fresher.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
And this is one of the fascinating things about it
because over time, refrigeration has totally changed our understanding of
what freshness means. It used to mean something that had
been harvested or slowtered really recently and really nearby. It
was something to do with time and distance. Then refrigeration
changed all of that because suddenly it could have been
slowtered six months ago and looked like it was slowdered yesterday.
(37:35):
So the definition of fresh changed, and what appeal does
is sort of say it could change again. It could
be fresh doesn't have to mean refrigerated. It could just
mean with more of the nutrients and the flavor that
it had when it was on the plant. It could
be a chemical definition, not a you know, not something
(37:56):
that we at the moment. The definition of fresh is
it needs to go in the fridge, right, I mean
that's or it comes from the fridge. That's how people
think of freshness. It could be. It could be to
do with the actual youth relative of the fruit and
vegetable itself, how few breaths it's taken.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
We'll be back in a minute with the lighting round.
Let's finish with the lightning round.
Speaker 3 (38:30):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
In the book, you cite a number of publications with
amazing names, including, but not limited to, Food Engineering Magazine,
Container Management Magazine, Palette Enterprise Magazine, and Food Technology Magazine.
(38:54):
If I am going to read one trade publication, any
trade publication, which one should it be?
Speaker 2 (39:01):
Does it have to be one that's still in print?
Because the old school ice in refrigeration, which was imprint
from like the eighteen eighties to the nineteen, I want
to say, twenties thirties, is I could spend all day
reading that. It's incredible.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
Tell me more, what with the John McPhee of ice
in refrigeration.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
None of the articles assigned, all of them are delightful.
They are entire articles about how cold affected Napoleon's Army,
for example. It's just a much more wide ranging look
at you know, cold is this sort of phenomenon.
Speaker 3 (39:36):
Yeah, I love.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
It's the magazine for people who are into cold exactly.
Speaker 3 (39:41):
So I'd say start there.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
What's your favorite thing that you can eat because of refrigeration?
Speaker 2 (39:47):
Oh well, I mean this is a hard call between.
I mean, if it's eat ice cream obviously, although you know,
if it's drink, then think of all the world of
cocktails that previously didn't have ice in them and are
(40:09):
now so so good.
Speaker 1 (40:11):
I mean, there's even things that like aren't cold, but
like mangoes. Like I live in New York and like,
theoretically in the world I could eat a mango without refrigeration.
But the idea that a mango could be like a
quasi stable fruit in my house is amazing and great.
I think, like, yes, I know they are costs, but
like I love mangoes.
Speaker 3 (40:32):
Yeah, I think.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
One of the sad things that's happened to me as
I've researched this book and made my podcast is I've
realized how much worse things taste when they are refrigerated.
Speaker 1 (40:43):
I mean, but it's not worse than no mango. I'm
sure the best mango in the world is amazing, but
I love the mangoes that I get.
Speaker 3 (40:51):
It depends if you've had the really good mangoes.
Speaker 1 (40:54):
Once you've got, then I'm glad that I haven't.
Speaker 3 (40:56):
Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
What's the most surprising detail you learned working on the book?
Speaker 3 (41:03):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (41:03):
Man, I mean, just because it's the most recent thing
we were talking. Came about ice cream. The non premium
brands are fifty percent air, and you can't truck them
across the country because they'll explode as you go over
the rockies. Really, yeah, so the companies have to come
up with different formulations for you know, the higher altitude
(41:26):
parts of the country, and you can't bring you know,
you can't truck your ice cream from your factory in
Georgia to sell and Denver is not going to work.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
So basically, the as you go up in altitude, the
atmospheric pressure declines and the air inside the container expands
and blows the lid off.
Speaker 3 (41:46):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
And so when you say non premium, it's like the
old school, like pre Hogendaws, pre Ben and Jerry's where
you get the big half gallon, not the little pint,
Yes exactly. So like hogandaws and Ben and Jerry's are
dense enough that you can take those over the rockies.
Speaker 2 (42:01):
Yeap, they are less air by you know, volume, and
thus you know, yes, they still expand a little, but
not enough to blow their lids off, so.
Speaker 1 (42:11):
They're not as much more expensive than the cheaper kind
once you account for the fact that the cheaper kind
has more air.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
Yeah, exactly, but some people like the air, you know,
it gives a different texture.
Speaker 3 (42:24):
Fair.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
What's one thing that people refrigerate that they should not
refrigerate so much?
Speaker 2 (42:30):
I mean, for example, never put stone fruit in your refrigerator.
It is the stone fruit killing zone. It literally disables
the genetic machinery that makes that the fruit uses to
make flavor.
Speaker 3 (42:44):
So just don't do it.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
Eat the peach or make the peach into a pie.
Do not put the peach in the fridge. There's a
ton onions and potatoes. Actually, I mean potatoes actually become
toxic in the fridge.
Speaker 3 (42:57):
Never do that. A lot of people have.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
This idea that the fridge is just this miraculous box
that keeps everything safe, and that is not the case.
It's not the ideal environment for a lot of things things.
Speaker 1 (43:10):
What's something that people don't refrigerate that they should h.
Speaker 3 (43:14):
Nuts? Us, Yeah, I see as news I can use
if you have.
Speaker 2 (43:21):
If you don't go through nuts that you're going to
go through on a relatively quick basis, Like if you
just grab a handful of almonds every day and you
go through the bag pretty quickly. Fine, doesn't need to
be in the fridge. But if you have, say some
pine nuts or some Macadamian nuts that you only use
in certain recipes, they will go rancid out of the
(43:42):
fridge and they will last longer. I actually keep my
Macadamius in the freezer.
Speaker 1 (43:50):
Nikki Twilly is the author of the book Frostbite and
the host of the podcast Gastropod. Thanks for listening to
the show. You can email us at problem at pushkin
dot fm. We're going to take a couple weeks off
for a summer break, but we'll be back soon. Today's
show was edited by Lydia Jane Kott. It was produced
by Gabriel Hunter Chang and engineered by Sarah Bruguer. I'm
(44:11):
Jacob Goldstein.
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