February 3, 2026 • 60 mins
For much of the world, refrigeration is such a commonplace technology that we rarely stop to wonder at the many ways it has transformed our lives. From the foods we grow to where we grow them, from how they taste to what we eat, refrigeration has dramatically - and quite recently - changed our relationship to food, our health, and the environment. As Nicola Twilley describes in Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves, progress, as it so often does, comes at a cost. Twilley, who also cohosts the award-winning food podcast Gastropod, joins us in this week’s TPWKY book club episode to discuss the surprising history and tenuous future of refrigeration. You’ll never look at your fridge the same way again.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:42):
Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh and this is this Podcast Will
Kill You. Welcome to another episode in the tp w
k Y book Club series. If you haven't tuned into
one of these episodes before, you are in for a treat,
because this series is where I get to chat with
authors of popular science and medicine books about their latest work,
(01:03):
where they get their inspiration, the strangest thing they learned,
and how their book helps us to better understand ourselves
and the world around us. We have featured some just
fantastic books so far this season, so if you'd like
to take a look at the full list of book
Club books for this season, past seasons, and any future
ones on our list, head to our website This Podcast
(01:26):
will Kill You dot com. Under the extras tab, you'll
find a link to our bookshop dot org affiliate page,
which includes a bunch of podcast related lists, including one
for this book club series. I am always updating this
list to include the topics of future book Club episodes,
so check back in regularly if you're the type who
likes to read ahead. As always, we love hearing from
(01:48):
you all, so if you have anything you'd like to
share about these episodes, our regular episodes, your first hand account,
or just whatever else is on your mind. Reach out
through the contact us form on our website. Two final
things before moving on to this week's book. First, please rate, review,
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now find full video versions of most of our newest
(02:11):
episodes on YouTube. Make sure you're subscribed to the exactly
Right Media YouTube channel so you never miss a new
episode drop. Okay, now on to our thrilling and chilling
book of the week. How many times a day do
you open your fridge to peer inside. Maybe you're taking
a quick inventory to see what you need to pick
(02:32):
up for tonight's dinner, or maybe you're pulling out the
ingredients to make a sandwich, or maybe you're checking if
a tasty snack has somehow materialized since you last looked
as someone who works from home. I'm doing that last
one constantly. When we swing open that fridge door, our
thoughts are mostly on what's held inside, what's there, what's
(02:54):
not there. Rarely do we stop to think about the
extensive journey that food has taken to in our fridge.
And I don't mean costco car home, I mean the
whole journey from where it was grown or where the
ingredients were grown, to its processing, to its transport, to
its storage, to its transport again to the grocery store
(03:15):
where you picked it up, and a whole lot of
steps in between that I probably missed. Our cold chain
is a logistical and technological modern day marvel, and yet
we rarely give it a second thought unless something goes
awry and our supply chain is disrupted, or the power
goes out at home and all of our frozen burritos
turned into a mushy mess. But this week's book, Frostbite,
(03:39):
How Refrigeration Changed our food, our planet, and ourselves, by
Nikola Twilly, will have you pausing before you reach for
that bag of apples or loading steaks into your cart
at the store. Three quarters of the food that Americans
eat is refrigerated at some point along the processing, shipping, storage,
and selling pipeline. A relatively recent development in our species history. Twilly,
(04:04):
co host of popular podcast Gastropod and frequent contributor to
The New Yorker, introduces readers to the major players in
the invention of mechanical refrigeration, explores the preservation strategies people
used before it was available, and reveals the tremendous impact
refrigeration has had on our planet and health, from ice
(04:26):
harvesting to banana ripening, from the unfathomably huge refrigerated warehouses
to subterranean cheese caves. Frostbite is a fascinating and sobering
examination of a technology that has revolutionized our lives. I
am so excited to share this interview with you all,
so let's take a quick break and get started. Nikki,
(05:12):
thank you so much for joining me today.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Oh it's a thrill. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
I am so excited to chat with you about your book, Frostbite,
which takes readers through the truly fascinating story of refrigeration,
from its long history of development to the tremendous impact
of this technology has had and continues to have on
our lives, and one that we don't often think that
much about. Did your feelings about refrigeration change as you
(05:40):
worked on this book.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Oh, one hundred percent. And I think that's part of
why it took me so long to write the book.
I honestly started working on this in a way nearly
fifteen years ago, but I just kept falling deeper down
the rabbit hole because there was more and more. At first,
I just thought, oh, this is going to be an
(06:02):
interesting little look at a sort of peak behind the
scenes at refrigerated warehouses. And then I realized, oh, no,
this has changed what we eat, where it's grown, how
good it is for us, what it tastes like, what
it does to the planet, like everything. So it just
sort of kept expanding and spiraling, and I kept going
(06:22):
deeper and deeper, and so yes, my feelings. You know,
it's a cliche to be like this thing changed the world,
but I started out sort of like, oh, this is
an interesting thing and ended up fully owned team refrigeration
changed the world.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Oh, I mean I'm there as well, like count me in.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
I'm on the side. One of the.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Things just initially that absolutely blew my mind was the
cold chain itself. How massive it is. You know, when
we go to the grocery store to buy a pack
of yogurt or a bag of frozen fruit. You know,
I don't think that I have never thought about the
entire chain, the process from somebody picking that fruit off
the tree to you know, when it gets to in
(07:06):
between and stored all the way to the shelf of
my closest safeway. Can you take me through some of
the components that make up the cold chain.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
Yeah. And I think this is so interesting because it
is called a cold chain because the idea is that
once you know your your I don't know your apple
has been harvested, or your you know, pig has been slaughtered,
it is chilled and it never rises above that temperature
until it gets all the way to you. And so
(07:36):
for people in the industry, they see it as a
seamless chain, but I think for us as consumers, we
never see that because it is all in sort of
separate places. So you have, you know, the cooling that
takes place in the slaughterhouse or on the farm. You
then have trucks or trains or in some cases for
(07:57):
high value things wag you beef, you know, out of
seasoned fruits. You're talking about air transit that's all cooled.
Then it's going to refrigerated warehouses, often more than one.
So it'll go to a warehouse to be stored, it'll
go to a supermarket distribution center, then to go out
to whichever of the various supermarkets it's going to. It'll
(08:20):
sit in the cold room at the supermarket, and then
it'll go out onto the chilled shelves, and then you'll
take it home. This is a mini break in the
cold chain right there, and put it in your fridge.
So really you start to see the fridge as literally
the tip of an iceberg. And then once you realize
(08:41):
add it all together and it's all mostly invisible to us.
This is five point five billion cubic feet of cold space.
I started to realize, Oh, it's like a third Arctic.
I mean, you see the polar regions, they're all this
natural cold in one place, but we've built all this
(09:01):
artificial cold in multiple places. And once you start to
see it as a whole, that's when it started to
blow my mind. Oh absolutely.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
I mean I've been driving around thinking like, where are
the cold refrigerated warehouses in this city? You know what
am I not seeing? It's all You're right, it's all
just like invisible to us. Or maybe it's more that
we just don't ever think of it, and so we
keep it invisible to us. And thinking about this technology
(09:30):
as really so so recent in human history, and how
for centuries natural scientists and philosophers struggled to conceptualize what
cold was, and part of that challenge was the fact
that it's the absence of a thing heat rather than
a thing in it itself, which was so cool. But
(09:51):
during that time, before we were able to truly harness
the power of cold, humans came up with some very
inventive ways to preserve food without at spoiling. I would
love for you to share some examples of this.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
Yeah, I mean, this is been like the hotspot for
human creativity since before we were modern humans. Because obviously,
the minute you have a wooly mammoth that is too
big to eat in one go, what are you gonna do?
And so you can do what anthropologists calls social storage,
which is where you share that wooly mammoth with your
(10:25):
community and then hope that they share back with you.
So it's a food preservation sort of system. Storage. Yeah,
it's a neat name for it, right, yeah. Yeah. But
also you really want to be able to save food
for a rainy day, and so going back in as
far as in human history as possible, people have been
(10:46):
drying food, smoking food, using honey or later sugar to
preserve food. It all works by depriving the microbes that
want to eat this food too from eating it before
we can. So if you remove the water from meat
(11:07):
and turn it into jerky, all you're doing is it
making it hard for microbes to live there so that
it can last long enough for you to then eat it.
And so smoking does that too, with the addition of
some like microbone friendly chemicals that it deposits there. Making
jam does that too. Reduces water activity. Oftentimes these are
changing the pH two, which which helps preserve cheese, which
(11:31):
I love, is being called milk's bid for immortality, which
I love. That you're also you're reducing the water content,
but you're also recruiting friendly microbes to keep out bad
microbes that want to eat it. So that's another way
where you can sort of recruit microbial allies in your
war against rot. So yeah, And the other thing that's
(11:55):
kind of funny is it's not like humans didn't realize
that cold would preserve food. It's I mean that they
noticed that right away, and you get these examples of
storing bones in caves and building kind of ice chests
in the ground where ice was available. It's just that
we didn't understand how to make cold. And as you say,
(12:15):
it's astonishing to me that we've been able to add
heat to food since before we were modern humans. That
goes way back. Some people say that's why we became
modern humans, why we have our big brains, is because
we figured out cooking. We couldn't figure out how to
get heat out of food until I mean basically about
one hundred and fifty years ago. So it's just it's
(12:37):
just a really recent innovation for us.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Talking about all these different ways of preserving food. You
touched earlier on how much refrigeration has changed the foods
that we eat and the way that they taste. Were
there any foods that were kind of resistant to methods
of preservation historically that then maybe would have kind of
shaped the diets in some ways during times of scarcity.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
Absolutely, in terms of produce especially, that's something where so
with meat and with fish and with dairy, what you're
trying to do is stop microbes from rotting the food
they want to eat it before we can. With produce,
what's happening is actually when you harvest an apple or
(13:25):
a lettuce or anything, it's still breathing. And what is
happening is, like humans, it has a certain number of
breaths that can take before it dies, and so what
you need to do is slow that down, and that's
what refrigeration does. So before we had a way to
slow down how fast fruit and vegetables breathed, we literally
(13:49):
couldn't preserve fresh fruit or vegetables. You had to have
them in some alternate forms. So you had to turn
your strawberries into jam. You had to turn your apples
into cider where the alcohol also helps protect Those are
the only ways. You boiled down your tomatoes into a
you know, thick, dark conserv aegar that was so conserve
(14:13):
andera I should say, that was so thick and dark
that you sliced it with a knife. I mean, that
was what tomato paste was like before you know, we
get modern canning. So there was no way to eat
fresh produce out of season historically because the only way
to preserve produce was to utterly transform it.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
I think especially we think about oh, people on farms
and just had fresh produce all the time, and that's
like not the reality in any situation, and especially wasn't
the reality in like the transition period when industrialization was happening,
but refrigeration had not yet been widespread.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Oh totally, but even medieval folks where you're like, oh,
they would have just gathered to from the fields. No,
historians say that for farmers at least hunter gatherers had
often more luck boosting their nutrient content in the winter.
But pretty much the thinking is that everyone in pre
refrigeration Europe was basically what they call pre score buttic,
(15:13):
which is like being pre diabetic, but for scurvy they
were on. They were tending towards scurvy by February March,
at which point the storable produces run out. You can
store apples in a cellar, you can store turnips, potatoes,
but you're really starting to run out of produce. And
(15:34):
that hungry season before you start to get fresh spring
produce again, was a really tough time before refrigeration.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Let's take a quick break, and when we get back,
there's still so much to discuss. Welcome back everyone. I've
(16:06):
been chatting with Nikolatolly about her book Frostbite, How refrigeration
changed our food, our planet, and ourselves. Let's get back
into things. As you mentioned, people knew that cold would
preserve food to some degree, but it was just sort
of an availability question of that, and when you were
working on this book. One of the things that you
(16:26):
did is you went to Maine to participate in harvesting ice.
I loved that chapter. Tell me all about that experience
was super fun.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
And if you can do this near you, there's some
there's like I think a couple lakes in Wisconsin where
you can still do this. There's the one I went
to in Maine. If you do get a chance to
do this, I highly recommend it. Apparently there's a big
boom in popularity after Frozen came out because there's ice
harvesting scene there. Anyway, one hundred percent recommend ice harvesting.
(16:57):
But there was a time where every lake in the
northern United States would have been harvested multiple times per winter.
And the United States was basically like the Saudi Arabia
of ice because we had so much freshwater and so
much natural cold. So it was like this was our
(17:19):
huge natural resource. Actually, so as you said, we knew
that cold preserved food, we just didn't have a way
of kind of making that happen on demand or happen
at scale. And so for most of human history, cold
was something that was especially if you didn't live like
on a glacier, cold was something that was very much
(17:40):
a luxury, and so you used it for luxurious things.
Status symbols, like the Medici had ice caves and they
would bring down ice from the mountains and have ice
cream parties and that was a huge you know, and
then there were ice heists you find in the Medici archives.
You know, the ice has been stolen because it's a
luxury product. People are using it for wine slushies, they're
(18:03):
using it for ice cream, they're using it for the
most exquisite oysters. You know, in summertime. It's just a
it's a it's a flex and it's just not available
for your daily food. That all changes in the eighteen
hundreds when this absolutely adorable high school dropout called Frederick
(18:24):
Tudor from Boston is like, you know what I'm gonna do.
I'm going to turn this ice business. Like most New
England families, or at least wealthy New England families, he
had an ice house on his estate and they used
it for ice cream and wine slushies, and it was
an elite thing. And he was like, wouldn't it be
great if this was an industry and people who didn't
have ice locally could have access to this ice. Actually,
(18:48):
what happened is he went on holiday to Cuba with
his brother and he was too hot. It's like at
this new Englander who can't handle the heat. And he
was like, oh, what I wouldn't give for an ice
drink right now? And then he was like, hey, what
they wouldn't give for an ice drink right now? This
is a business. And so he goes home and he
writes letters to everyone being like, I'm about to make
(19:11):
so much money, I won't even know what to do
with it. Come in with me on this scheme. We're
gonna ship ice around the world. And of course everyone
is like, you are completely crackers, my friend, that is
not happening, and he doesn't care. He goes ahead with it,
and of course hasn't thought a single thing through. And
this is why I love him, because it's so exactly
how I operate. But he harvests the ice and then
(19:33):
he's like, oh, but the harbor's frozen. If it's cold
enough to freeze the lakes, the harbor's frozen, so no
ships are leaving. So now I need to build an
ice house, like a place to store the ice crap?
Does that? Then when the harbor finally opens up. The
ship captains are all like, I'm sorry, I'm not taking
as my cargo this frozen water that's gonna melt and
(19:57):
like make my boat unsteady? You know, are you lately mad?
He gets it to Cuba. I mean, first of all,
the Cubans can't figure out how to tax it. They're like,
is it a mind substance like a metal like you?
Or is it a harvested so like an agricultural product,
like what is this that's And then the Cubans themselves
(20:19):
are like, yeah, what am I going to do with
this again? Sorry? They don't have fridges. They've like he's
selling them something that's literally melting on the way home
and that they've never used before. So every single thing
goes wrong that could possibly go wrong. In his diaries,
which are at Yale still, he just has like the
word failure written in block caps multiple times. He has
(20:43):
little Pep talks to himself about how he's still young
and he can still do something else with his life.
He goes bankrupt three times, he goes to prison twice,
and somehow he actually succeeds. And what is bananas about
this whole story is not that like he builds this
global empire and he's shipping ice to Mumbai and Sydney,
although that has bananas. But what's even more important to
(21:06):
understand is that before he did that, ice was a frivolous, decadent,
luxury product. After he did this, after he showed you
can harvest cold at scale and get it all around
the world, that's when people realized, oh, cold is really useful,
like cold can transform our food system. And so engineers
(21:29):
who actually had already figured out how to make cold
just saw it as a party trick because there wasn't
much use for it. They were like, oh, we could
build a machine to do this and you know, make
ice on demand. And so it was him making this
happen at scale that basically led to the invention of
the refrigeration machine. But I realized I was supposed to
(21:50):
be telling you about harvesting ice, which is super fun.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
You. I love the story of Frederick Tudor because one
of the jokes, I feel like the running jokes throughout
this season of the show has been that everything is tuberculosis.
Because John Green's new book and I read how Tudor
went to Havanah in the first place with his brother
because his brother was looking for cleaner, warmer air for
(22:15):
his tuberculosis, and so refrigeration is tuberculosis unbelievable. But yeah,
tell me about tell me about what is it like?
What is the process of harvesting ice? How long does
the ice last? Is it basically like frozen?
Speaker 2 (22:32):
It is basically like frozen, And it's kind of incredible.
So Frederick Tudor and his team, over the course of
the decades they've been figuring this out, developed all the
tools that are still used today. What you do is
you sort of carve a grid onto the top of
the frozen lake, and then you usually using horses, kind
(22:53):
of drawing the lines on with a particular tool. Then
you have a really big saw and you saw down
and sort of carve off long columns of gigantic ice cubes.
What are gigantic ice cubes? They are about like two
foot by one foot, so really big ice cubes. And
(23:14):
then you split that long column of ice cubes apart
using something called a breaker bar. That is really fun,
and so now they're individual ice cubes, these oversized ones,
and you sort of you have a metal pole that
kind of helps you guide them along the open channel
and you get it to again a horse drawne sort
of sled that takes it up a hill and from
(23:37):
there it kind of falls down into an ice house
and a team in the ice house have to guide
it into position, and this is where a lot of
people end up breaking their ankles. They don't let the
they don't let the amateurs in there. But when you
go to an ice harvest, you can usually you can
take your turn it sawing, You can take your turn
at using the breaker bar. Super fun, definitely my favorite
(24:01):
lot of rage. You can get out that way and
then take your turn of guiding it around, which is
a core workout. But the stuff that happens inside the icehouse,
it's like Tetris, but happening with this giant sliding ice
block that can break your ankle, that's moving incredibly fast,
so it's intense. And then once it's packed in, once
all these giant ice cubes are packed in there and
(24:23):
any broken bits kind of fill in the gaps, it
stays there for months, months and months and months. So
I harvested ice in Maine in January and I went
back in July and they were using the ice that
we had harvested to make ice cream for an ice
cream social, so and there was still leftover and they
sell it to fishermen to take it out because it
(24:46):
actually lasts longer than machine made ice because it has
fewer bubbles in it, so it's really good quality ice.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
There could be such variation in ice.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
I love that. I would love.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
That's going to be a bucket list thing for me
for sure, to see that, to participate in that.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
It's super fun. And I mean going back for the
social in the summer is even more fun because you
can't You're like, what is this Like it's it's completely different,
and the same ice is still there unmelted in the
in the like July heat. You knows.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
That was so cool to see have like a glimpse
back into this is what people used to do. This
is how people used to keep things cold. And you
talked about how Tudor kind of came up with this
idea of harvesting ice. There were people who already knew
how to create cold or remove heat to you know,
(25:41):
create an atmosphere of cold, and yet it really wasn't
until these two things happened that an industry arose. Who
were the ones leading the charge, Like who were the
people interested in being? Like, oh, I see a potential
for this, not beyond just like the transport of ice,
but like this could change everything.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
What I love about this story is that you would
think it would be you know, something nutritious, like milk
or meat or something. No, it's beer. It's the brewers
who led the charge. We did this for booze. And
it's just such a beautiful story because there's you know,
a lot of archaeologists and anthropologists believe that one of
(26:23):
the reasons we adopted farming of grains especially is because
we wanted to make beer. Well, it turns out refrigeration.
I mean, I like that you were joking everything is tuberculosis,
but really everything is beer. Refrigeration gets started because brewers
want to keep their lagger beer caves cold. And so
what happens is in the eighteen hundreds, lagger beer gets going,
(26:50):
and it's a slightly different form of yeast than had
been used previously in European history, and it's a slightly
different brewing process that requires colder temperatures and can't happen
at warmer temperatures, and beer historians will be able to
give you much more technical detail than that, but the
longest short of it for our purposes is you can't
(27:11):
make lagger beer in the warmth, like above fifty degrees,
it's over. So they became huge consumers of ice, and
particularly because in the eighteen hundred so many Germans emigrated
to North America. They're living in places like Saint Louis
where it gets really hot in the summer. They want
(27:32):
lagger beer. I mean, the reason you have such a
thing as beer gardens is because those were planted above
the laggering cellars to try and keep the laggering cellars cold.
That's how they were. They really needed to be cold.
And so brewers become the largest consumers of ice, competing
with everybody else. I mean, anyone who like New York
(27:53):
City is you know, one of the largest consumers of ice.
Everyone wants ice. And so they were the ones who
actually put the money up for these first commercial refrigeration machines.
What happened was a Scottish doctor had figured out how
to actually create cold on demand, remove heat essentially, and
(28:16):
he had done that in the seventeen fifties and he
had just he wrote a little pamphlet at the end
of a much larger book describing his process and saying,
this seems interesting. Someone should look into this. It was
like ad little party trick. Almost no one looked into it.
It relied on noticing that as liquids evaporate into a gas,
(28:36):
they can pull heat energy away with them and then
the water that's right there will freeze. Great, so we
sort of knew how to do it, I mean, in
a flask. He did this. And so what happens after
Frederick Trudor shows the value of ice at scale is
that engineers start to get interested. And it's like many
(28:56):
things in technology, there's a bunch of people working on
it simultaneously. There's a doctor in Florida who actually wants
the ice for his patients to keep them cool. There
is an engineer in London who was working with the
railway companies and thought this would be a useful ad
for them. But the person to get there first was
(29:18):
an Australian printer who Australia is one of the continents
that really doesn't have natural ice, so they were dependent
on ice from being shipped from North America. And however
well you pack it, there is melt getting that far
and so it was very expensive by the time he
got there, so there was a lot of demand and
(29:39):
so he I mean, he blew himself up twice trying
to build this machine. I mean, the types of liquids
that evaporate that quickly to gas are very volatile, very flammable,
and you're operating with steam powered machinery. So the whole
thing is just a giant health hazard and the size
of the house. But he built the first two working
(30:02):
refrigeration machines, and it was brewers, one in Australia and
one in London who were the first ones to buy them.
So thank you beer, Thank you beer.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
That's so funny because I had written down when I
was when I was reading your book, like, oh, necessity
is the mother of invention. But no, it's beer is
the mother of invention.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
I mean, some could argue that a cold beer in
summertime is a necessity.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
Yeah, So from from beer, then that kind of turns
into food. This is when we set start to see
particularly meat. We have a whole lot of meat here,
a whole lot of cattle here, but we don't have
very much here. And so how did the kind of
the dead meat trade? I think is what you call it,
emerge out of this or from this. Refrigeration for beer,
(30:49):
refrigeration for dead meat.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
Yeah, and dead meat is what they called it to
differentiate because at the time meat was slaughtered before you
ate it, it was live meat. Now it was there
was this gap in between when it was loaded and
when you eateed, and so you were buying dead meat.
It's really it gives you a sense of how weird
that change was for people that they deliberately had to
(31:14):
differentiate it. Nowadays, all we eat is dead meat obviously
pretty much unless you're a hunter and you know, you
go out and we're all eating dead meat. But for them,
they were used to live meat, and so yes, it's
really really interesting. I had no idea about this until
I went down this rabbit hole. But in the seventeen
hundreds especially, people start moving to cities. By the early
(31:36):
eighteen hundreds, London is bigger than any city in the
world has ever been. It's up to it gets past
one million, up to two million, up to three million.
And the thing about that is now people aren't living
close to their food source now. At the time, the
only food source that was seen as important was well
(31:57):
grains obviously, but you can transport them. But meat protein
people thought that was the essential nutrient, and yet you
have all of these workers living in cities who can't
get enough protein, and it was it's wild. There were
cattle being stored in basements, living in basements underneath the Strand,
(32:18):
which is like the theater district in London now, and
they would get a two week holiday above ground each
year be sent out of the city. I mean, it's terrified.
There were more pigs living in Kensington, which is one
of the poshest parts of London today, than there were people.
Because it was like you couldn't transport meat. People would
(32:39):
try and herd turkeys in from the countryside and I mean,
hurting a turkey sounds like a joke, but it wasn't
a joke. They had like how are you bringing So
it was a you know, today we have like protein
maxing and things. In the eighteen hundreds they were in
a full on protein panic because there was just this
sense that people in cities, we're not getting enough of
(33:02):
this one essential nutrient, and so people tried came up
with all kinds of things. This is where you get
the ancestor of the bullion cube. Because people were trying
to compress meat and get all its nutrients in a
shelf stable form. There were jerky banquets in London in
the eighteen hundreds to try and say this is how
we're going to preserve meat and get it to people.
(33:23):
British people did not like jerky. It did not go
down well. People tried shredding meat and coating meat and
fumigating meat and like all kinds of processes to try
to get meat to people in cities. And so once
ice started being available at scale and affordable, at least
(33:44):
reasonably affordable, that is when you know, the meat industry
was like, gosh, we can get meat to people in
cities where there's this huge market and we can make
so much money doing it. And it's another New Englander,
not you you know, but the stereotype of thrift does
(34:05):
come into play here because a New England butcher called
Gustavus Swift, he moved to Chicago and they were shipping
live cattle to New York to be slaughtered because that's
how you have to do it, and it drove him
nuts because what you're doing when you ship a live
cow is you were shipping fifty percent of that that
(34:25):
can't be eaten, and so you're paying to ship it,
but you're not making any money off it. And what's more,
you're not making any money on the buy products. Because
if you slaughter all your cattle in one place yourself,
oh well now you have enough blood and guts and
fat and so you can make margarine and sausages and
(34:46):
all kinds of things. But if you're shipping these live,
you're paying the train company to transport something that can't
be sold, and you were losing money on the Bible.
It's it just drove him bananas. And so he's the
one who really figured out how to make the dead
meat trade work. And it was it sounds so simple.
(35:07):
It's like, right, oh, just put put the meat and
some ice together and it'll be great. No, there was.
I mean his son wrote a biography that it's actually
like genuinely amusing, full of very passive aggressive comments. Clearly
he was a difficult man. Anyway. I got to read that,
but it's like available for free online because it's old,
(35:29):
and it did it made me. I had some feelings anyway,
But he would he shipped load after load of meat
that would arrive rotten and moldy. They would just dump
it in the river because there was no EPA then.
But also like figuring out the air circulation in the
in the train car, figuring out how often you had
(35:51):
to add fresh ice, and then if you have to
fill up a whole train car full of meat, then
that means you have to slaughter a lot of meat.
And each time you bring a fresh warm carpecus in,
it's warming everything else up. And so all of these
problems you don't think about because there's solved problems nowadays.
He had to solve them. It took decades, he lost
(36:13):
a lot of money, but he finally figured it out
in the eighteen seventies, and you can see meat consumption
just skyrockets. It's incredible. It goes from being like here
on a grafted like four times that on a graph
in ten years, just because suddenly it's so much cheaper
if you can only ship the meat, not the whole cow,
(36:35):
and you can monetize the byproducts too. People, you're selling
a steak for a lot less all of a sudden.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
So yeah, let's take a quick break here. We'll be
back before you know it. Welcome back, everyone. I'm here
(37:03):
chatting with Nikola Twilly about her book Frostbite. Let's get
into some more questions. And then this also happened. This
dietary change also happened when fruits and veggies started to
be refrigerated. Because when we talk about scarcity, and you know,
the trouble of getting meat in from the rural areas
where it's plentiful to the cities where it's not. You know,
(37:25):
that's one issue of scarcity. But then when you talk
about seasonality and growing seasons, that's another kind of dimension
of scarcity. So how did the focus of refrigeration broadened
to encompass fruits and veggies more than just meat? But like,
what else can we do with refrigeration?
Speaker 2 (37:45):
So really, fruits and vegetables were seen as optional extras
throughout most of the eighteen hundreds, like they were like
a nice to have, not a necessary to have. And
it was some mistaken you know, these were the early
days of nutrition science. People didn't know, for example, that
you could get your proteins from beans, not just meat,
so you know, they were obsessed with meat, but they
(38:07):
really didn't they didn't know what vitamins were. They had
sort of discovered and apologies, I say vitamins and British
originally it's I'll also say tomato, it's allow it. I'll
allow it. But until the nineteen teens, when vitamins are
really sort of hammered out and people start to realize, like, oh,
(38:28):
fruit and vegetables have they're not just sort of these
nice seasonal extra they are essential part of our diet
and we need to eat leafy greens and citrus. And
you know, suddenly, when that happened, then it was worth
shipping fruits and vegetables using refrigeration. So it's really it's
(38:50):
like what's worth doing. There was you know, beer is
a high value, desirable product, so it was beer meat
high value. People thought it was the only essential nutrient,
so that was worth doing. So it's not until when
fruits and vegetables become worth it because science tells us
we need to eat them. And really, the early nineteen
teens are like a huge vitamania kind of era. I
(39:14):
mean there were New York Times cover stories about, you know,
we need more fruits and vegetables, and they had been
ignored before that. So that's when you start to see
California citrus being transported in those same dead meat rail
cars using the ice and iceberg lettuce catches on because
(39:34):
that is sturdy enough to survive a multi day, multi
week sometimes journey across the country in those railcars full
of ice. That's how it supposedly got its name. It
was a very sturdy varietal that, depending on who you
talk to, is either called the Los Angeles lettuce or
(39:55):
the New York lettuce because it was for the New
York market, but it was grown in California, and you know,
it is the lettuce we know today, very sturdy, like
very closed head, not light and fluffy like in a
arugula or something, you know, crispy, And so people would
(40:15):
stick them in the rail cars, load them up with
ice on top, and the kids seeing these train cars
coming would say, the icebergs are coming because there was
ice visible from the top of the railcars. So that's
supposedly how it got its name. But yeah, once you start,
you know, once you start getting this pressure from consumers
(40:36):
who want to eat more vegetables, then you start this
system and as you say, it's a different kind of scarcity.
You know, Californians could have eaten citrus and lettuce in winter.
But at the time there were very few people living
in California, and the people in New York suddenly realized
they needed this, and so a refrigerated railcar was was
(40:58):
the trick to make sure that you could eat fresh
fruits and vegetables all year round in something that a
fellow food writer and mind Johanna Blitheman, is called permanent
global summertime, which I love as a It's like, no
longer do we have seasons. We just have permanent global summertime,
and you can have a strawberry in December if you
(41:20):
so wish.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
I mean, there are so many points about the fruits
and veggies that you touch on in your book. You know,
I have a bag of cosmic crisp or whatever those
apples are, and then to think about how long those
apples possibly have been removed from the tree is just
blew my mind.
Speaker 2 (41:38):
I mean, if you have your cosmic crisp apples right
now and they're harvested in Washington State, those are eleven
months old and coming up to their first birthday. Because
think about when the apple harvest is. It's just getting
started right now in August in Washington State. So that
your apples are not the first ones off the tree
(41:59):
from this year, they're starting the tree. Yeah. And the
other thing is like, what's possible. For example, before the banana,
perfectly delicious tropical fruit, no Americans had ever tried one.
When a banana palm was exhibited at the eighteen seventy
somethingter Philadelphia, you know, Centennial Exposition, it was so valuable
(42:25):
and rare and desirable that it had an armed guard
this tree so that people didn't steal the bananas. And now,
if you think about it, there's no gas station even
that doesn't have a banana. I mean every seven eleven.
It's just they're the most available fruit. And that is
thanks to refrigeration, which is funny because you don't store
(42:46):
bananas in a refrigerator at home, but actually to get
them from the tropics to all the way to North America,
you have to harvest them when they're green and unripe
and then refrigerate them so they don't ripe till they
get to the destination. So the banana, which is the
world's most popular fruit, would never have been would have
(43:06):
just carried on being a tropical fruit that was liked
by people who lived in the tropics without refrigeration, so
it really transformed the fruit scape.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
The fruit scape.
Speaker 2 (43:18):
I love that.
Speaker 1 (43:20):
And so yeah, now we are, many of us are
the final step in the cold chain or the tip
of the iceberg of the cold chain. But this happened
later than industrial refrigeration happened. When did the refrigerator, the
home domestic refrigerator become a thing.
Speaker 2 (43:41):
Yeah, So those first machines, like I say, they would
blow up all the time. And this is how James
Harrison the Australia who made the sold the first machines
sort of lost eyebrows. You know. It was a dangerous business.
And when you are using steam power for your refrigeration machinery,
these things the size of a house, so that's you're
(44:03):
not going to have that in your house. And people
did try to have one central steam powered refrigeration machine
at a warehouse or something and then pipe cold to
houses nearby. So under the streets in downtown Boston these
pipes are still there, going from what used to be
a refrigerated warehouse out to homes and businesses in the neighborhood,
(44:26):
and you would have got your cold kind of the
way we get our electricity or our gas like through
a pipe, which is a whole different imagine anyway. Yeah,
so you just have a pipe, go into a cupboard
and that would be your cold box.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
One of your utilities. Yeah, exactly how much cold did
I buy this month?
Speaker 2 (44:43):
Yeah, totally totally different way of thinking about it. But
what happened actually was electrification. And so once people had
electricity at home and you were able to shrink the
various component parts the refrigerator to make them work, you know,
the motor, the compressor, things like that, to make them
(45:05):
work using electricity. That's when refrigerators, the domestic fridge becomes domestic.
Even still, the very first ones they would put the
machinery in the basement and the fridge up in the
kitchen because it was big, and it was ugly and
it was loud, honestly. But you know, gradually, by the twenties,
(45:27):
by the thirties, you get a home a reasonable home
refrigerator that you can plug into the wall. And actually
General Electric promoted it very hard because this is their
idea of a gold mine. You have to plug it
in twenty four to seven and run it. It's a
power hungry machine that you can never unplug. If you're
an electricity company, that is the dream. So they loved it.
Speaker 1 (45:50):
It's the ultimate subscription service. I can never unplug. Yeah,
and you know, refrigeration has made you know, we are
now dependent on refrigeration in many different ways. Maybe it's
for food, maybe industry, science and medicine is hugely dependent
on refrigeration. And yet refrigeration has solved so many problems
(46:12):
at the same time that it has created so many problems.
What are some of the unintended negative consequences of refrigeration.
Speaker 2 (46:20):
And then this is really why I think this book
matters now. I got into it just because I was fascinated,
but as I started researching it, I was like, oh,
this is actually an urgent problem as well, Like this
matters right now. And actually, during the process of writing
the book, spoke at the first un meeting of the
Sustainable Cooling Team, because the world has started to wake
(46:43):
up to this too. And here's the problem. When you
cool things, it takes a lot of energy. It takes
a lot of energy to remove that heat to move
it around. And so you might say, Okay, while we
could power all our refrigeration machine and re using renewables,
there's no way, we can't even keep up with our
(47:04):
existing demand, let alone the fact that cooling is growing
so rapidly. It's incredible. The US has you know, it's
the most refrigerated country on Earth. We have the most
amount of cold space, and still we are building new
refrigerated warehouses. The US cold chain market is a huge
(47:26):
investment opportunity right now because we're building so much. The
rest of the world, like China has been building a
cold chain for the past decade and a half, is
still like a sixth of the amount per person that
we have. Most of Sub Saharan Africa, which is where
also two billion people are projected to join the world's
(47:47):
population during the next you know, twenty years, doesn't even
have a cold chain yet, but they're building one. So
if every person alive just today, not taking those future
two billion into account, was to have the same amount
of cold space as it takes to feed an American,
the current demand for refrigeration would multiply by five five
(48:09):
times over and so that the emissions then from refrigeration,
which are already more than the emissions from global aviation.
And we hear and I'm just talking about refrigerating food.
I'm not talking about cooling our houses or all the
stuff we use for medicine or data centers or everything else.
Just talking about cooling our food already more than global aviation.
(48:31):
And all the time we hear about we shouldn't fly,
no one is like, what are we doing about refrigerating
our food? That's just not a conversation because it seems essential.
But imagine that then multiplying by five, then it's going
to be the same size as all of us emissions,
which is just unimaginably huge. That isn't even taking into
(48:52):
account the fact that for every degree warmer the planet gets,
refrigeration is less efficient, has to work harder. We're actually
making the job harder, using more power to do even
just the cooling that we have, let alone, they expanded
future culchain. So it's a real critical problem. And you
(49:12):
can't just say to you know, countries in Sub Saharan Africa, sorry,
you can't have refrigerators, right right, that's not an option.
So it's it's a gigantic problem. You know a lot
of un sustainable development goals are sort of dependent on
having refrigeration. That's how countries are planning to grow their
(49:34):
farming sector and waste less food and build export markets.
Country like Kenya their majority of their overseas income comes
from exporting fruits and vegetables now, but that's because they
built a cold chain. And it's like this, if this
happens all over, it's anyway. So it's a real it's
(49:55):
actually a really huge crisis. And less than one percent
global R and D goes into refrigeration technology, let alone
other ways of preserving food. So it's really like we've
sort of taken our eyes off the ball and just
being like, wow, we have this great system. It works great.
Hasn't really changed since that, you know, for a hundred years.
(50:16):
We're using the same technology, but you know, little refinements
to make it more efficient here and there, but not
it works the exact same way. An engineer from you know,
the nineteen tens would know their way exactly around your fridge.
Speaker 1 (50:31):
So yeah, yeah, time travelers stroll on in, Oh your
fridge is broken, I.
Speaker 2 (50:36):
Got you, no problem pretty much.
Speaker 1 (50:38):
So you mentioned that there is at least a teeny
tiny portion of R and D and innovators going into
this problem and trying to think, how can we come
up with creative solutions to the growing planet of cooling
ironically even though it is warming. What are some of
those ways that people are rethinking the fewuture of refrigeration.
Speaker 2 (51:02):
Yeah, this is I mean, I hate to use the pun,
but this kind of the coolest stuff because it's.
Speaker 1 (51:08):
Love that you use the pun. It was necessary. It
had to happen at some point, come.
Speaker 2 (51:12):
On, seriously. But yeah, so there's a lot of really
interesting work. So one on the one hand, for example,
you can change how you refrigerate. It turns out there
are certain types of materials where if you kind of
mess them up, get them disordered, put throw them into chaos,
they absorb heat energy to get themselves reordered again because
(51:36):
they need they need energy from that. They absorb energy
from their surroundings in the form of heat to kind
of get themselves back in their nice little grid again.
And so you can do that disordering with a magnet.
You can do do it with heat, you can do
it with all kinds of things. This forever has been
how we get down to absolute zero for physics experiments
(51:58):
using a magnetic cooling. It's just that there has been
no way to make that work at this at you know,
a normal refrigerator economic scale, because the materials very expensive,
specialize whatever. But there is a group at the University
of Cambridge in the UK who have found a very
cheap and common form of plastic actually that if you
(52:21):
squeeze it and release it so you mess the you
mess the atoms up, and then you release it so
they bounce back, but they suck in energy to get
themselves all sorted out again. It works, and it gives
you the same amount of cooling as a regular fridge
for less than half the emissions because you're just squeezing
(52:41):
and releasing some plastic using the same Yeah. So that's
really interesting and they have, you know, working prototypes. The
problem is the people who will save money on that
are the end users, and the people who make refrigerators
are not the people who will save money. They will
they just make the equipment. So there's a business model
(53:02):
issue there. We'll see how that goes. People are investing
in it. It's exciting. The other thing I find really
fascinating is that we don't have to use refrigeration to
preserve food. And I'm not suggesting we all go back
to like canning our own tomatoes either. I mean, for
most of human history, this is where we started. We
have thrown enormous amounts of human ingenuity at the problem
(53:25):
of how do you preserve food? And then it's like
we invented the refrigerator and we were like, hey, we're done, good,
I finished. But it's like, no, actually, we can keep going.
And so there are people working on all kinds of
cool things. There's a potato farmer from India who was
fed up with his potato harvest rotting before he could
(53:46):
get it to market and has come up with a
system that keeps potatoes formerly frozen French fries that you
would buy frozen deep frozen. He can keep them at
room temperature good for six months plus. He uses something
called supercritical carbon dioxide, which is carbon dioxide, just the
regular stuff in the air, but that is in the
(54:09):
form of both a liquid and a gas. That's what
super critical meal means. So you pump it around these
slice of potatoes like that and it preserves them, I mean,
and you're not doing anything to the potatoes themselves. There's
no health implications. In fact, because it's sort of slightly
like a cooking process, they end up a little crispier.
(54:31):
It's like triple cooked French fries. So that's something where
they're building their first commercial production line right now, which
will be really exciting. And again it's just like I'm
not saying that's going to replace everything that. This process
(54:52):
also works on meat, it works on all sorts of things.
Australian meat producers are actually really interested in it because
it would enable them to ship ute unquote fresh meat
rather than frozen meat. But it's not like this is
going to take over. We're always going to have a
place for refrigeration. What I think is so exciting about
these additional methods that are being invented is that some
(55:15):
of them have benefits too, not just sustainability ones, but
ones for flavor. There's a coating for produce, for example,
edible fat based coating basically, but it's nanoscale, so it's
not like you're actually eating like a tablespoon fat with
your food or anything. It's just but what it does
is it it does exactly what refrigeration does in that
(55:37):
it slows down how fast the fruit or vegetable is breathing.
But it means that for example, fruits and vegetables that
don't refrigerate well, like all the tropical ones like tiramoil,
finger limes, delicious things that we never see in grocery stores.
They can be given this coating instead. And now, oh
(55:58):
we could have them because they can't be refrigerated, or
for example, you could use it to take things out
of the refrigerator. I mean when I visited them, they
had put the spray on bell peppers and sat side
by side with some bell peppers that hadn't been coated,
stored at room temperature for eight weeks. Eight weeks. I mean,
(56:19):
if you left a bell pepper on your counter for
eight weeks, it would have slid off the surface's slime
at that point, I mean, it would be gone. And
the ones that weren't coated were like that. The ones
that were coated, yeah, they weren't fresh enough for your
cruditae platter anymore, but they were perfectly fine for sturffry.
(56:39):
So I just you know, And of course, here in
America were used to buying our fruits and vegetables refrigerated.
It's gonna be really hard to change that. But there
are a lot of places in the world where people
don't buy their fruits and vegetables refrigerated, and they don't
want their fruits and vegetables refrigerated because they think it
means it's not fresh. Well, the spray could help prevent
(57:00):
food waste and things going bad while not refrigerating the food.
So the other thing is people think, oh, refrigerator food
is fresh. It's not getting any fresher in your refrigerator.
If you put your bag of spinach in there a
week later, you can eat it. It still tastes fine,
but it has lost up to half its nutrients, so
(57:23):
it's not like it's getting any fresher. And so something
that can help us preserve food differently better. I think
it's really exciting.
Speaker 1 (57:32):
I love these innovative solutions. I have loved exploring so
many rabbit holes of refrigeration. There are so many more
in your book that everyone who's listening should go out
and read right now because it's fascinating. You'll be telling
everyone fun facts and Nikki, I just want to thank
you so much for taking the time to chat with
me today.
Speaker 2 (57:52):
Oh thank you. As you can tell, I could basically
talk about this for the rest of my life. So
it's really fun to have the oppera or tunity.
Speaker 1 (58:00):
Thank you so much, A big thank you again. To
(58:23):
Nicola Twilly for taking the time to chat with me.
I certainly haven't looked at my fridge the same way
since reading this book. If you enjoyed today's episode and
would like to learn more, check out our website this
podcast will kill You dot com. We're I'll post a
link to where you can find Frostbite How refrigeration changed
our food, our planet, and ourselves, as well as a
(58:43):
link to Nicki's website where you can find her other work.
And don't forget you can check out our website for
all sorts of other cool things, including but not limited to, transcripts,
Quarantini and place Barrita, recipes, show notes and references for
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(59:04):
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for listening. I hope you liked this episode and our
loving being part of the TPWKY book Club. A special
(59:25):
thank you, as always to our fantastic patrons, We appreciate
your support so very much. Well, until next time, keep
washing those hands.
Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh and this is this Podcast Will
Kill You. Welcome to another episode in the tp w
k Y book Club series. If you haven't tuned into
one of these episodes before, you are in for a treat,
because this series is where I get to chat with
authors of popular science and medicine books about their latest work,
(01:03):
where they get their inspiration, the strangest thing they learned,
and how their book helps us to better understand ourselves
and the world around us. We have featured some just
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to take a look at the full list of book
Club books for this season, past seasons, and any future
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(01:26):
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(01:48):
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(02:11):
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Right Media YouTube channel so you never miss a new
episode drop. Okay, now on to our thrilling and chilling
book of the week. How many times a day do
you open your fridge to peer inside. Maybe you're taking
a quick inventory to see what you need to pick
(02:32):
up for tonight's dinner, or maybe you're pulling out the
ingredients to make a sandwich, or maybe you're checking if
a tasty snack has somehow materialized since you last looked
as someone who works from home. I'm doing that last
one constantly. When we swing open that fridge door, our
thoughts are mostly on what's held inside, what's there, what's
(02:54):
not there. Rarely do we stop to think about the
extensive journey that food has taken to in our fridge.
And I don't mean costco car home, I mean the
whole journey from where it was grown or where the
ingredients were grown, to its processing, to its transport, to
its storage, to its transport again to the grocery store
(03:15):
where you picked it up, and a whole lot of
steps in between that I probably missed. Our cold chain
is a logistical and technological modern day marvel, and yet
we rarely give it a second thought unless something goes
awry and our supply chain is disrupted, or the power
goes out at home and all of our frozen burritos
turned into a mushy mess. But this week's book, Frostbite,
(03:39):
How Refrigeration Changed our food, our planet, and ourselves, by
Nikola Twilly, will have you pausing before you reach for
that bag of apples or loading steaks into your cart
at the store. Three quarters of the food that Americans
eat is refrigerated at some point along the processing, shipping, storage,
and selling pipeline. A relatively recent development in our species history. Twilly,
(04:04):
co host of popular podcast Gastropod and frequent contributor to
The New Yorker, introduces readers to the major players in
the invention of mechanical refrigeration, explores the preservation strategies people
used before it was available, and reveals the tremendous impact
refrigeration has had on our planet and health, from ice
(04:26):
harvesting to banana ripening, from the unfathomably huge refrigerated warehouses
to subterranean cheese caves. Frostbite is a fascinating and sobering
examination of a technology that has revolutionized our lives. I
am so excited to share this interview with you all,
so let's take a quick break and get started. Nikki,
(05:12):
thank you so much for joining me today.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Oh it's a thrill. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
I am so excited to chat with you about your book, Frostbite,
which takes readers through the truly fascinating story of refrigeration,
from its long history of development to the tremendous impact
of this technology has had and continues to have on
our lives, and one that we don't often think that
much about. Did your feelings about refrigeration change as you
(05:40):
worked on this book.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Oh, one hundred percent. And I think that's part of
why it took me so long to write the book.
I honestly started working on this in a way nearly
fifteen years ago, but I just kept falling deeper down
the rabbit hole because there was more and more. At first,
I just thought, oh, this is going to be an
(06:02):
interesting little look at a sort of peak behind the
scenes at refrigerated warehouses. And then I realized, oh, no,
this has changed what we eat, where it's grown, how
good it is for us, what it tastes like, what
it does to the planet, like everything. So it just
sort of kept expanding and spiraling, and I kept going
(06:22):
deeper and deeper, and so yes, my feelings. You know,
it's a cliche to be like this thing changed the world,
but I started out sort of like, oh, this is
an interesting thing and ended up fully owned team refrigeration
changed the world.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Oh, I mean I'm there as well, like count me in.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
I'm on the side. One of the.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Things just initially that absolutely blew my mind was the
cold chain itself. How massive it is. You know, when
we go to the grocery store to buy a pack
of yogurt or a bag of frozen fruit. You know,
I don't think that I have never thought about the
entire chain, the process from somebody picking that fruit off
the tree to you know, when it gets to in
(07:06):
between and stored all the way to the shelf of
my closest safeway. Can you take me through some of
the components that make up the cold chain.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
Yeah. And I think this is so interesting because it
is called a cold chain because the idea is that
once you know your your I don't know your apple
has been harvested, or your you know, pig has been slaughtered,
it is chilled and it never rises above that temperature
until it gets all the way to you. And so
(07:36):
for people in the industry, they see it as a
seamless chain, but I think for us as consumers, we
never see that because it is all in sort of
separate places. So you have, you know, the cooling that
takes place in the slaughterhouse or on the farm. You
then have trucks or trains or in some cases for
(07:57):
high value things wag you beef, you know, out of
seasoned fruits. You're talking about air transit that's all cooled.
Then it's going to refrigerated warehouses, often more than one.
So it'll go to a warehouse to be stored, it'll
go to a supermarket distribution center, then to go out
to whichever of the various supermarkets it's going to. It'll
(08:20):
sit in the cold room at the supermarket, and then
it'll go out onto the chilled shelves, and then you'll
take it home. This is a mini break in the
cold chain right there, and put it in your fridge.
So really you start to see the fridge as literally
the tip of an iceberg. And then once you realize
(08:41):
add it all together and it's all mostly invisible to us.
This is five point five billion cubic feet of cold space.
I started to realize, Oh, it's like a third Arctic.
I mean, you see the polar regions, they're all this
natural cold in one place, but we've built all this
(09:01):
artificial cold in multiple places. And once you start to
see it as a whole, that's when it started to
blow my mind. Oh absolutely.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
I mean I've been driving around thinking like, where are
the cold refrigerated warehouses in this city? You know what
am I not seeing? It's all You're right, it's all
just like invisible to us. Or maybe it's more that
we just don't ever think of it, and so we
keep it invisible to us. And thinking about this technology
(09:30):
as really so so recent in human history, and how
for centuries natural scientists and philosophers struggled to conceptualize what
cold was, and part of that challenge was the fact
that it's the absence of a thing heat rather than
a thing in it itself, which was so cool. But
(09:51):
during that time, before we were able to truly harness
the power of cold, humans came up with some very
inventive ways to preserve food without at spoiling. I would
love for you to share some examples of this.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
Yeah, I mean, this is been like the hotspot for
human creativity since before we were modern humans. Because obviously,
the minute you have a wooly mammoth that is too
big to eat in one go, what are you gonna do?
And so you can do what anthropologists calls social storage,
which is where you share that wooly mammoth with your
(10:25):
community and then hope that they share back with you.
So it's a food preservation sort of system. Storage. Yeah,
it's a neat name for it, right, yeah. Yeah. But
also you really want to be able to save food
for a rainy day, and so going back in as
far as in human history as possible, people have been
(10:46):
drying food, smoking food, using honey or later sugar to
preserve food. It all works by depriving the microbes that
want to eat this food too from eating it before
we can. So if you remove the water from meat
(11:07):
and turn it into jerky, all you're doing is it
making it hard for microbes to live there so that
it can last long enough for you to then eat it.
And so smoking does that too, with the addition of
some like microbone friendly chemicals that it deposits there. Making
jam does that too. Reduces water activity. Oftentimes these are
changing the pH two, which which helps preserve cheese, which
(11:31):
I love, is being called milk's bid for immortality, which
I love. That you're also you're reducing the water content,
but you're also recruiting friendly microbes to keep out bad
microbes that want to eat it. So that's another way
where you can sort of recruit microbial allies in your
war against rot. So yeah, And the other thing that's
(11:55):
kind of funny is it's not like humans didn't realize
that cold would preserve food. It's I mean that they
noticed that right away, and you get these examples of
storing bones in caves and building kind of ice chests
in the ground where ice was available. It's just that
we didn't understand how to make cold. And as you say,
(12:15):
it's astonishing to me that we've been able to add
heat to food since before we were modern humans. That
goes way back. Some people say that's why we became
modern humans, why we have our big brains, is because
we figured out cooking. We couldn't figure out how to
get heat out of food until I mean basically about
one hundred and fifty years ago. So it's just it's
(12:37):
just a really recent innovation for us.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Talking about all these different ways of preserving food. You
touched earlier on how much refrigeration has changed the foods
that we eat and the way that they taste. Were
there any foods that were kind of resistant to methods
of preservation historically that then maybe would have kind of
shaped the diets in some ways during times of scarcity.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
Absolutely, in terms of produce especially, that's something where so
with meat and with fish and with dairy, what you're
trying to do is stop microbes from rotting the food
they want to eat it before we can. With produce,
what's happening is actually when you harvest an apple or
(13:25):
a lettuce or anything, it's still breathing. And what is
happening is, like humans, it has a certain number of
breaths that can take before it dies, and so what
you need to do is slow that down, and that's
what refrigeration does. So before we had a way to
slow down how fast fruit and vegetables breathed, we literally
(13:49):
couldn't preserve fresh fruit or vegetables. You had to have
them in some alternate forms. So you had to turn
your strawberries into jam. You had to turn your apples
into cider where the alcohol also helps protect Those are
the only ways. You boiled down your tomatoes into a
you know, thick, dark conserv aegar that was so conserve
(14:13):
andera I should say, that was so thick and dark
that you sliced it with a knife. I mean, that
was what tomato paste was like before you know, we
get modern canning. So there was no way to eat
fresh produce out of season historically because the only way
to preserve produce was to utterly transform it.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
I think especially we think about oh, people on farms
and just had fresh produce all the time, and that's
like not the reality in any situation, and especially wasn't
the reality in like the transition period when industrialization was happening,
but refrigeration had not yet been widespread.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Oh totally, but even medieval folks where you're like, oh,
they would have just gathered to from the fields. No,
historians say that for farmers at least hunter gatherers had
often more luck boosting their nutrient content in the winter.
But pretty much the thinking is that everyone in pre
refrigeration Europe was basically what they call pre score buttic,
(15:13):
which is like being pre diabetic, but for scurvy they
were on. They were tending towards scurvy by February March,
at which point the storable produces run out. You can
store apples in a cellar, you can store turnips, potatoes,
but you're really starting to run out of produce. And
(15:34):
that hungry season before you start to get fresh spring
produce again, was a really tough time before refrigeration.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Let's take a quick break, and when we get back,
there's still so much to discuss. Welcome back everyone. I've
(16:06):
been chatting with Nikolatolly about her book Frostbite, How refrigeration
changed our food, our planet, and ourselves. Let's get back
into things. As you mentioned, people knew that cold would
preserve food to some degree, but it was just sort
of an availability question of that, and when you were
working on this book. One of the things that you
(16:26):
did is you went to Maine to participate in harvesting ice.
I loved that chapter. Tell me all about that experience
was super fun.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
And if you can do this near you, there's some
there's like I think a couple lakes in Wisconsin where
you can still do this. There's the one I went
to in Maine. If you do get a chance to
do this, I highly recommend it. Apparently there's a big
boom in popularity after Frozen came out because there's ice
harvesting scene there. Anyway, one hundred percent recommend ice harvesting.
(16:57):
But there was a time where every lake in the
northern United States would have been harvested multiple times per winter.
And the United States was basically like the Saudi Arabia
of ice because we had so much freshwater and so
much natural cold. So it was like this was our
(17:19):
huge natural resource. Actually, so as you said, we knew
that cold preserved food, we just didn't have a way
of kind of making that happen on demand or happen
at scale. And so for most of human history, cold
was something that was especially if you didn't live like
on a glacier, cold was something that was very much
(17:40):
a luxury, and so you used it for luxurious things.
Status symbols, like the Medici had ice caves and they
would bring down ice from the mountains and have ice
cream parties and that was a huge you know, and
then there were ice heists you find in the Medici archives.
You know, the ice has been stolen because it's a
luxury product. People are using it for wine slushies, they're
(18:03):
using it for ice cream, they're using it for the
most exquisite oysters. You know, in summertime. It's just a
it's a it's a flex and it's just not available
for your daily food. That all changes in the eighteen
hundreds when this absolutely adorable high school dropout called Frederick
(18:24):
Tudor from Boston is like, you know what I'm gonna do.
I'm going to turn this ice business. Like most New
England families, or at least wealthy New England families, he
had an ice house on his estate and they used
it for ice cream and wine slushies, and it was
an elite thing. And he was like, wouldn't it be
great if this was an industry and people who didn't
have ice locally could have access to this ice. Actually,
(18:48):
what happened is he went on holiday to Cuba with
his brother and he was too hot. It's like at
this new Englander who can't handle the heat. And he
was like, oh, what I wouldn't give for an ice
drink right now? And then he was like, hey, what
they wouldn't give for an ice drink right now? This
is a business. And so he goes home and he
writes letters to everyone being like, I'm about to make
(19:11):
so much money, I won't even know what to do
with it. Come in with me on this scheme. We're
gonna ship ice around the world. And of course everyone
is like, you are completely crackers, my friend, that is
not happening, and he doesn't care. He goes ahead with it,
and of course hasn't thought a single thing through. And
this is why I love him, because it's so exactly
how I operate. But he harvests the ice and then
(19:33):
he's like, oh, but the harbor's frozen. If it's cold
enough to freeze the lakes, the harbor's frozen, so no
ships are leaving. So now I need to build an
ice house, like a place to store the ice crap?
Does that? Then when the harbor finally opens up. The
ship captains are all like, I'm sorry, I'm not taking
as my cargo this frozen water that's gonna melt and
(19:57):
like make my boat unsteady? You know, are you lately mad?
He gets it to Cuba. I mean, first of all,
the Cubans can't figure out how to tax it. They're like,
is it a mind substance like a metal like you?
Or is it a harvested so like an agricultural product,
like what is this that's And then the Cubans themselves
(20:19):
are like, yeah, what am I going to do with
this again? Sorry? They don't have fridges. They've like he's
selling them something that's literally melting on the way home
and that they've never used before. So every single thing
goes wrong that could possibly go wrong. In his diaries,
which are at Yale still, he just has like the
word failure written in block caps multiple times. He has
(20:43):
little Pep talks to himself about how he's still young
and he can still do something else with his life.
He goes bankrupt three times, he goes to prison twice,
and somehow he actually succeeds. And what is bananas about
this whole story is not that like he builds this
global empire and he's shipping ice to Mumbai and Sydney,
although that has bananas. But what's even more important to
(21:06):
understand is that before he did that, ice was a frivolous, decadent,
luxury product. After he did this, after he showed you
can harvest cold at scale and get it all around
the world, that's when people realized, oh, cold is really useful,
like cold can transform our food system. And so engineers
(21:29):
who actually had already figured out how to make cold
just saw it as a party trick because there wasn't
much use for it. They were like, oh, we could
build a machine to do this and you know, make
ice on demand. And so it was him making this
happen at scale that basically led to the invention of
the refrigeration machine. But I realized I was supposed to
(21:50):
be telling you about harvesting ice, which is super fun.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
You. I love the story of Frederick Tudor because one
of the jokes, I feel like the running jokes throughout
this season of the show has been that everything is tuberculosis.
Because John Green's new book and I read how Tudor
went to Havanah in the first place with his brother
because his brother was looking for cleaner, warmer air for
(22:15):
his tuberculosis, and so refrigeration is tuberculosis unbelievable. But yeah,
tell me about tell me about what is it like?
What is the process of harvesting ice? How long does
the ice last? Is it basically like frozen?
Speaker 2 (22:32):
It is basically like frozen, And it's kind of incredible.
So Frederick Tudor and his team, over the course of
the decades they've been figuring this out, developed all the
tools that are still used today. What you do is
you sort of carve a grid onto the top of
the frozen lake, and then you usually using horses, kind
(22:53):
of drawing the lines on with a particular tool. Then
you have a really big saw and you saw down
and sort of carve off long columns of gigantic ice cubes.
What are gigantic ice cubes? They are about like two
foot by one foot, so really big ice cubes. And
(23:14):
then you split that long column of ice cubes apart
using something called a breaker bar. That is really fun,
and so now they're individual ice cubes, these oversized ones,
and you sort of you have a metal pole that
kind of helps you guide them along the open channel
and you get it to again a horse drawne sort
of sled that takes it up a hill and from
(23:37):
there it kind of falls down into an ice house
and a team in the ice house have to guide
it into position, and this is where a lot of
people end up breaking their ankles. They don't let the
they don't let the amateurs in there. But when you
go to an ice harvest, you can usually you can
take your turn it sawing, You can take your turn
at using the breaker bar. Super fun, definitely my favorite
(24:01):
lot of rage. You can get out that way and
then take your turn of guiding it around, which is
a core workout. But the stuff that happens inside the icehouse,
it's like Tetris, but happening with this giant sliding ice
block that can break your ankle, that's moving incredibly fast,
so it's intense. And then once it's packed in, once
all these giant ice cubes are packed in there and
(24:23):
any broken bits kind of fill in the gaps, it
stays there for months, months and months and months. So
I harvested ice in Maine in January and I went
back in July and they were using the ice that
we had harvested to make ice cream for an ice
cream social, so and there was still leftover and they
sell it to fishermen to take it out because it
(24:46):
actually lasts longer than machine made ice because it has
fewer bubbles in it, so it's really good quality ice.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
There could be such variation in ice.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
I love that. I would love.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
That's going to be a bucket list thing for me
for sure, to see that, to participate in that.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
It's super fun. And I mean going back for the
social in the summer is even more fun because you
can't You're like, what is this Like it's it's completely different,
and the same ice is still there unmelted in the
in the like July heat. You knows.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
That was so cool to see have like a glimpse
back into this is what people used to do. This
is how people used to keep things cold. And you
talked about how Tudor kind of came up with this
idea of harvesting ice. There were people who already knew
how to create cold or remove heat to you know,
(25:41):
create an atmosphere of cold, and yet it really wasn't
until these two things happened that an industry arose. Who
were the ones leading the charge, Like who were the
people interested in being? Like, oh, I see a potential
for this, not beyond just like the transport of ice,
but like this could change everything.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
What I love about this story is that you would
think it would be you know, something nutritious, like milk
or meat or something. No, it's beer. It's the brewers
who led the charge. We did this for booze. And
it's just such a beautiful story because there's you know,
a lot of archaeologists and anthropologists believe that one of
(26:23):
the reasons we adopted farming of grains especially is because
we wanted to make beer. Well, it turns out refrigeration.
I mean, I like that you were joking everything is tuberculosis,
but really everything is beer. Refrigeration gets started because brewers
want to keep their lagger beer caves cold. And so
what happens is in the eighteen hundreds, lagger beer gets going,
(26:50):
and it's a slightly different form of yeast than had
been used previously in European history, and it's a slightly
different brewing process that requires colder temperatures and can't happen
at warmer temperatures, and beer historians will be able to
give you much more technical detail than that, but the
longest short of it for our purposes is you can't
(27:11):
make lagger beer in the warmth, like above fifty degrees,
it's over. So they became huge consumers of ice, and
particularly because in the eighteen hundred so many Germans emigrated
to North America. They're living in places like Saint Louis
where it gets really hot in the summer. They want
(27:32):
lagger beer. I mean, the reason you have such a
thing as beer gardens is because those were planted above
the laggering cellars to try and keep the laggering cellars cold.
That's how they were. They really needed to be cold.
And so brewers become the largest consumers of ice, competing
with everybody else. I mean, anyone who like New York
(27:53):
City is you know, one of the largest consumers of ice.
Everyone wants ice. And so they were the ones who
actually put the money up for these first commercial refrigeration machines.
What happened was a Scottish doctor had figured out how
to actually create cold on demand, remove heat essentially, and
(28:16):
he had done that in the seventeen fifties and he
had just he wrote a little pamphlet at the end
of a much larger book describing his process and saying,
this seems interesting. Someone should look into this. It was
like ad little party trick. Almost no one looked into it.
It relied on noticing that as liquids evaporate into a gas,
(28:36):
they can pull heat energy away with them and then
the water that's right there will freeze. Great, so we
sort of knew how to do it, I mean, in
a flask. He did this. And so what happens after
Frederick Trudor shows the value of ice at scale is
that engineers start to get interested. And it's like many
(28:56):
things in technology, there's a bunch of people working on
it simultaneously. There's a doctor in Florida who actually wants
the ice for his patients to keep them cool. There
is an engineer in London who was working with the
railway companies and thought this would be a useful ad
for them. But the person to get there first was
(29:18):
an Australian printer who Australia is one of the continents
that really doesn't have natural ice, so they were dependent
on ice from being shipped from North America. And however
well you pack it, there is melt getting that far
and so it was very expensive by the time he
got there, so there was a lot of demand and
(29:39):
so he I mean, he blew himself up twice trying
to build this machine. I mean, the types of liquids
that evaporate that quickly to gas are very volatile, very flammable,
and you're operating with steam powered machinery. So the whole
thing is just a giant health hazard and the size
of the house. But he built the first two working
(30:02):
refrigeration machines, and it was brewers, one in Australia and
one in London who were the first ones to buy them.
So thank you beer, Thank you beer.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
That's so funny because I had written down when I
was when I was reading your book, like, oh, necessity
is the mother of invention. But no, it's beer is
the mother of invention.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
I mean, some could argue that a cold beer in
summertime is a necessity.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
Yeah, So from from beer, then that kind of turns
into food. This is when we set start to see
particularly meat. We have a whole lot of meat here,
a whole lot of cattle here, but we don't have
very much here. And so how did the kind of
the dead meat trade? I think is what you call it,
emerge out of this or from this. Refrigeration for beer,
(30:49):
refrigeration for dead meat.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
Yeah, and dead meat is what they called it to
differentiate because at the time meat was slaughtered before you
ate it, it was live meat. Now it was there
was this gap in between when it was loaded and
when you eateed, and so you were buying dead meat.
It's really it gives you a sense of how weird
that change was for people that they deliberately had to
(31:14):
differentiate it. Nowadays, all we eat is dead meat obviously
pretty much unless you're a hunter and you know, you
go out and we're all eating dead meat. But for them,
they were used to live meat, and so yes, it's
really really interesting. I had no idea about this until
I went down this rabbit hole. But in the seventeen
hundreds especially, people start moving to cities. By the early
(31:36):
eighteen hundreds, London is bigger than any city in the
world has ever been. It's up to it gets past
one million, up to two million, up to three million.
And the thing about that is now people aren't living
close to their food source now. At the time, the
only food source that was seen as important was well
(31:57):
grains obviously, but you can transport them. But meat protein
people thought that was the essential nutrient, and yet you
have all of these workers living in cities who can't
get enough protein, and it was it's wild. There were
cattle being stored in basements, living in basements underneath the Strand,
(32:18):
which is like the theater district in London now, and
they would get a two week holiday above ground each
year be sent out of the city. I mean, it's terrified.
There were more pigs living in Kensington, which is one
of the poshest parts of London today, than there were people.
Because it was like you couldn't transport meat. People would
(32:39):
try and herd turkeys in from the countryside and I mean,
hurting a turkey sounds like a joke, but it wasn't
a joke. They had like how are you bringing So
it was a you know, today we have like protein
maxing and things. In the eighteen hundreds they were in
a full on protein panic because there was just this
sense that people in cities, we're not getting enough of
(33:02):
this one essential nutrient, and so people tried came up
with all kinds of things. This is where you get
the ancestor of the bullion cube. Because people were trying
to compress meat and get all its nutrients in a
shelf stable form. There were jerky banquets in London in
the eighteen hundreds to try and say this is how
we're going to preserve meat and get it to people.
(33:23):
British people did not like jerky. It did not go
down well. People tried shredding meat and coating meat and
fumigating meat and like all kinds of processes to try
to get meat to people in cities. And so once
ice started being available at scale and affordable, at least
(33:44):
reasonably affordable, that is when you know, the meat industry
was like, gosh, we can get meat to people in
cities where there's this huge market and we can make
so much money doing it. And it's another New Englander,
not you you know, but the stereotype of thrift does
(34:05):
come into play here because a New England butcher called
Gustavus Swift, he moved to Chicago and they were shipping
live cattle to New York to be slaughtered because that's
how you have to do it, and it drove him
nuts because what you're doing when you ship a live
cow is you were shipping fifty percent of that that
(34:25):
can't be eaten, and so you're paying to ship it,
but you're not making any money off it. And what's more,
you're not making any money on the buy products. Because
if you slaughter all your cattle in one place yourself,
oh well now you have enough blood and guts and
fat and so you can make margarine and sausages and
(34:46):
all kinds of things. But if you're shipping these live,
you're paying the train company to transport something that can't
be sold, and you were losing money on the Bible.
It's it just drove him bananas. And so he's the
one who really figured out how to make the dead
meat trade work. And it was it sounds so simple.
(35:07):
It's like, right, oh, just put put the meat and
some ice together and it'll be great. No, there was.
I mean his son wrote a biography that it's actually
like genuinely amusing, full of very passive aggressive comments. Clearly
he was a difficult man. Anyway. I got to read that,
but it's like available for free online because it's old,
(35:29):
and it did it made me. I had some feelings anyway,
But he would he shipped load after load of meat
that would arrive rotten and moldy. They would just dump
it in the river because there was no EPA then.
But also like figuring out the air circulation in the
in the train car, figuring out how often you had
(35:51):
to add fresh ice, and then if you have to
fill up a whole train car full of meat, then
that means you have to slaughter a lot of meat.
And each time you bring a fresh warm carpecus in,
it's warming everything else up. And so all of these
problems you don't think about because there's solved problems nowadays.
He had to solve them. It took decades, he lost
(36:13):
a lot of money, but he finally figured it out
in the eighteen seventies, and you can see meat consumption
just skyrockets. It's incredible. It goes from being like here
on a grafted like four times that on a graph
in ten years, just because suddenly it's so much cheaper
if you can only ship the meat, not the whole cow,
(36:35):
and you can monetize the byproducts too. People, you're selling
a steak for a lot less all of a sudden.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
So yeah, let's take a quick break here. We'll be
back before you know it. Welcome back, everyone. I'm here
(37:03):
chatting with Nikola Twilly about her book Frostbite. Let's get
into some more questions. And then this also happened. This
dietary change also happened when fruits and veggies started to
be refrigerated. Because when we talk about scarcity, and you know,
the trouble of getting meat in from the rural areas
where it's plentiful to the cities where it's not. You know,
(37:25):
that's one issue of scarcity. But then when you talk
about seasonality and growing seasons, that's another kind of dimension
of scarcity. So how did the focus of refrigeration broadened
to encompass fruits and veggies more than just meat? But like,
what else can we do with refrigeration?
Speaker 2 (37:45):
So really, fruits and vegetables were seen as optional extras
throughout most of the eighteen hundreds, like they were like
a nice to have, not a necessary to have. And
it was some mistaken you know, these were the early
days of nutrition science. People didn't know, for example, that
you could get your proteins from beans, not just meat,
so you know, they were obsessed with meat, but they
(38:07):
really didn't they didn't know what vitamins were. They had
sort of discovered and apologies, I say vitamins and British
originally it's I'll also say tomato, it's allow it. I'll
allow it. But until the nineteen teens, when vitamins are
really sort of hammered out and people start to realize, like, oh,
(38:28):
fruit and vegetables have they're not just sort of these
nice seasonal extra they are essential part of our diet
and we need to eat leafy greens and citrus. And
you know, suddenly, when that happened, then it was worth
shipping fruits and vegetables using refrigeration. So it's really it's
(38:50):
like what's worth doing. There was you know, beer is
a high value, desirable product, so it was beer meat
high value. People thought it was the only essential nutrient,
so that was worth doing. So it's not until when
fruits and vegetables become worth it because science tells us
we need to eat them. And really, the early nineteen
teens are like a huge vitamania kind of era. I
(39:14):
mean there were New York Times cover stories about, you know,
we need more fruits and vegetables, and they had been
ignored before that. So that's when you start to see
California citrus being transported in those same dead meat rail
cars using the ice and iceberg lettuce catches on because
(39:34):
that is sturdy enough to survive a multi day, multi
week sometimes journey across the country in those railcars full
of ice. That's how it supposedly got its name. It
was a very sturdy varietal that, depending on who you
talk to, is either called the Los Angeles lettuce or
(39:55):
the New York lettuce because it was for the New
York market, but it was grown in California, and you know,
it is the lettuce we know today, very sturdy, like
very closed head, not light and fluffy like in a
arugula or something, you know, crispy, And so people would
(40:15):
stick them in the rail cars, load them up with
ice on top, and the kids seeing these train cars
coming would say, the icebergs are coming because there was
ice visible from the top of the railcars. So that's
supposedly how it got its name. But yeah, once you start,
you know, once you start getting this pressure from consumers
(40:36):
who want to eat more vegetables, then you start this
system and as you say, it's a different kind of scarcity.
You know, Californians could have eaten citrus and lettuce in winter.
But at the time there were very few people living
in California, and the people in New York suddenly realized
they needed this, and so a refrigerated railcar was was
(40:58):
the trick to make sure that you could eat fresh
fruits and vegetables all year round in something that a
fellow food writer and mind Johanna Blitheman, is called permanent
global summertime, which I love as a It's like, no
longer do we have seasons. We just have permanent global summertime,
and you can have a strawberry in December if you
(41:20):
so wish.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
I mean, there are so many points about the fruits
and veggies that you touch on in your book. You know,
I have a bag of cosmic crisp or whatever those
apples are, and then to think about how long those
apples possibly have been removed from the tree is just
blew my mind.
Speaker 2 (41:38):
I mean, if you have your cosmic crisp apples right
now and they're harvested in Washington State, those are eleven
months old and coming up to their first birthday. Because
think about when the apple harvest is. It's just getting
started right now in August in Washington State. So that
your apples are not the first ones off the tree
(41:59):
from this year, they're starting the tree. Yeah. And the
other thing is like, what's possible. For example, before the banana,
perfectly delicious tropical fruit, no Americans had ever tried one.
When a banana palm was exhibited at the eighteen seventy
somethingter Philadelphia, you know, Centennial Exposition, it was so valuable
(42:25):
and rare and desirable that it had an armed guard
this tree so that people didn't steal the bananas. And now,
if you think about it, there's no gas station even
that doesn't have a banana. I mean every seven eleven.
It's just they're the most available fruit. And that is
thanks to refrigeration, which is funny because you don't store
(42:46):
bananas in a refrigerator at home, but actually to get
them from the tropics to all the way to North America,
you have to harvest them when they're green and unripe
and then refrigerate them so they don't ripe till they
get to the destination. So the banana, which is the
world's most popular fruit, would never have been would have
(43:06):
just carried on being a tropical fruit that was liked
by people who lived in the tropics without refrigeration, so
it really transformed the fruit scape.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
The fruit scape.
Speaker 2 (43:18):
I love that.
Speaker 1 (43:20):
And so yeah, now we are, many of us are
the final step in the cold chain or the tip
of the iceberg of the cold chain. But this happened
later than industrial refrigeration happened. When did the refrigerator, the
home domestic refrigerator become a thing.
Speaker 2 (43:41):
Yeah, So those first machines, like I say, they would
blow up all the time. And this is how James
Harrison the Australia who made the sold the first machines
sort of lost eyebrows. You know. It was a dangerous business.
And when you are using steam power for your refrigeration machinery,
these things the size of a house, so that's you're
(44:03):
not going to have that in your house. And people
did try to have one central steam powered refrigeration machine
at a warehouse or something and then pipe cold to
houses nearby. So under the streets in downtown Boston these
pipes are still there, going from what used to be
a refrigerated warehouse out to homes and businesses in the neighborhood,
(44:26):
and you would have got your cold kind of the
way we get our electricity or our gas like through
a pipe, which is a whole different imagine anyway. Yeah,
so you just have a pipe, go into a cupboard
and that would be your cold box.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
One of your utilities. Yeah, exactly how much cold did
I buy this month?
Speaker 2 (44:43):
Yeah, totally totally different way of thinking about it. But
what happened actually was electrification. And so once people had
electricity at home and you were able to shrink the
various component parts the refrigerator to make them work, you know,
the motor, the compressor, things like that, to make them
(45:05):
work using electricity. That's when refrigerators, the domestic fridge becomes domestic.
Even still, the very first ones they would put the
machinery in the basement and the fridge up in the
kitchen because it was big, and it was ugly and
it was loud, honestly. But you know, gradually, by the twenties,
(45:27):
by the thirties, you get a home a reasonable home
refrigerator that you can plug into the wall. And actually
General Electric promoted it very hard because this is their
idea of a gold mine. You have to plug it
in twenty four to seven and run it. It's a
power hungry machine that you can never unplug. If you're
an electricity company, that is the dream. So they loved it.
Speaker 1 (45:50):
It's the ultimate subscription service. I can never unplug. Yeah,
and you know, refrigeration has made you know, we are
now dependent on refrigeration in many different ways. Maybe it's
for food, maybe industry, science and medicine is hugely dependent
on refrigeration. And yet refrigeration has solved so many problems
(46:12):
at the same time that it has created so many problems.
What are some of the unintended negative consequences of refrigeration.
Speaker 2 (46:20):
And then this is really why I think this book
matters now. I got into it just because I was fascinated,
but as I started researching it, I was like, oh,
this is actually an urgent problem as well, Like this
matters right now. And actually, during the process of writing
the book, spoke at the first un meeting of the
Sustainable Cooling Team, because the world has started to wake
(46:43):
up to this too. And here's the problem. When you
cool things, it takes a lot of energy. It takes
a lot of energy to remove that heat to move
it around. And so you might say, Okay, while we
could power all our refrigeration machine and re using renewables,
there's no way, we can't even keep up with our
(47:04):
existing demand, let alone the fact that cooling is growing
so rapidly. It's incredible. The US has you know, it's
the most refrigerated country on Earth. We have the most
amount of cold space, and still we are building new
refrigerated warehouses. The US cold chain market is a huge
(47:26):
investment opportunity right now because we're building so much. The
rest of the world, like China has been building a
cold chain for the past decade and a half, is
still like a sixth of the amount per person that
we have. Most of Sub Saharan Africa, which is where
also two billion people are projected to join the world's
(47:47):
population during the next you know, twenty years, doesn't even
have a cold chain yet, but they're building one. So
if every person alive just today, not taking those future
two billion into account, was to have the same amount
of cold space as it takes to feed an American,
the current demand for refrigeration would multiply by five five
(48:09):
times over and so that the emissions then from refrigeration,
which are already more than the emissions from global aviation.
And we hear and I'm just talking about refrigerating food.
I'm not talking about cooling our houses or all the
stuff we use for medicine or data centers or everything else.
Just talking about cooling our food already more than global aviation.
(48:31):
And all the time we hear about we shouldn't fly,
no one is like, what are we doing about refrigerating
our food? That's just not a conversation because it seems essential.
But imagine that then multiplying by five, then it's going
to be the same size as all of us emissions,
which is just unimaginably huge. That isn't even taking into
(48:52):
account the fact that for every degree warmer the planet gets,
refrigeration is less efficient, has to work harder. We're actually
making the job harder, using more power to do even
just the cooling that we have, let alone, they expanded
future culchain. So it's a real critical problem. And you
(49:12):
can't just say to you know, countries in Sub Saharan Africa, sorry,
you can't have refrigerators, right right, that's not an option.
So it's it's a gigantic problem. You know a lot
of un sustainable development goals are sort of dependent on
having refrigeration. That's how countries are planning to grow their
(49:34):
farming sector and waste less food and build export markets.
Country like Kenya their majority of their overseas income comes
from exporting fruits and vegetables now, but that's because they
built a cold chain. And it's like this, if this
happens all over, it's anyway. So it's a real it's
(49:55):
actually a really huge crisis. And less than one percent
global R and D goes into refrigeration technology, let alone
other ways of preserving food. So it's really like we've
sort of taken our eyes off the ball and just
being like, wow, we have this great system. It works great.
Hasn't really changed since that, you know, for a hundred years.
(50:16):
We're using the same technology, but you know, little refinements
to make it more efficient here and there, but not
it works the exact same way. An engineer from you know,
the nineteen tens would know their way exactly around your fridge.
Speaker 1 (50:31):
So yeah, yeah, time travelers stroll on in, Oh your
fridge is broken, I.
Speaker 2 (50:36):
Got you, no problem pretty much.
Speaker 1 (50:38):
So you mentioned that there is at least a teeny
tiny portion of R and D and innovators going into
this problem and trying to think, how can we come
up with creative solutions to the growing planet of cooling
ironically even though it is warming. What are some of
those ways that people are rethinking the fewuture of refrigeration.
Speaker 2 (51:02):
Yeah, this is I mean, I hate to use the pun,
but this kind of the coolest stuff because it's.
Speaker 1 (51:08):
Love that you use the pun. It was necessary. It
had to happen at some point, come.
Speaker 2 (51:12):
On, seriously. But yeah, so there's a lot of really
interesting work. So one on the one hand, for example,
you can change how you refrigerate. It turns out there
are certain types of materials where if you kind of
mess them up, get them disordered, put throw them into chaos,
they absorb heat energy to get themselves reordered again because
(51:36):
they need they need energy from that. They absorb energy
from their surroundings in the form of heat to kind
of get themselves back in their nice little grid again.
And so you can do that disordering with a magnet.
You can do do it with heat, you can do
it with all kinds of things. This forever has been
how we get down to absolute zero for physics experiments
(51:58):
using a magnetic cooling. It's just that there has been
no way to make that work at this at you know,
a normal refrigerator economic scale, because the materials very expensive,
specialize whatever. But there is a group at the University
of Cambridge in the UK who have found a very
cheap and common form of plastic actually that if you
(52:21):
squeeze it and release it so you mess the you
mess the atoms up, and then you release it so
they bounce back, but they suck in energy to get
themselves all sorted out again. It works, and it gives
you the same amount of cooling as a regular fridge
for less than half the emissions because you're just squeezing
(52:41):
and releasing some plastic using the same Yeah. So that's
really interesting and they have, you know, working prototypes. The
problem is the people who will save money on that
are the end users, and the people who make refrigerators
are not the people who will save money. They will
they just make the equipment. So there's a business model
(53:02):
issue there. We'll see how that goes. People are investing
in it. It's exciting. The other thing I find really
fascinating is that we don't have to use refrigeration to
preserve food. And I'm not suggesting we all go back
to like canning our own tomatoes either. I mean, for
most of human history, this is where we started. We
have thrown enormous amounts of human ingenuity at the problem
(53:25):
of how do you preserve food? And then it's like
we invented the refrigerator and we were like, hey, we're done, good,
I finished. But it's like, no, actually, we can keep going.
And so there are people working on all kinds of
cool things. There's a potato farmer from India who was
fed up with his potato harvest rotting before he could
(53:46):
get it to market and has come up with a
system that keeps potatoes formerly frozen French fries that you
would buy frozen deep frozen. He can keep them at
room temperature good for six months plus. He uses something
called supercritical carbon dioxide, which is carbon dioxide, just the
regular stuff in the air, but that is in the
(54:09):
form of both a liquid and a gas. That's what
super critical meal means. So you pump it around these
slice of potatoes like that and it preserves them, I mean,
and you're not doing anything to the potatoes themselves. There's
no health implications. In fact, because it's sort of slightly
like a cooking process, they end up a little crispier.
(54:31):
It's like triple cooked French fries. So that's something where
they're building their first commercial production line right now, which
will be really exciting. And again it's just like I'm
not saying that's going to replace everything that. This process
(54:52):
also works on meat, it works on all sorts of things.
Australian meat producers are actually really interested in it because
it would enable them to ship ute unquote fresh meat
rather than frozen meat. But it's not like this is
going to take over. We're always going to have a
place for refrigeration. What I think is so exciting about
these additional methods that are being invented is that some
(55:15):
of them have benefits too, not just sustainability ones, but
ones for flavor. There's a coating for produce, for example,
edible fat based coating basically, but it's nanoscale, so it's
not like you're actually eating like a tablespoon fat with
your food or anything. It's just but what it does
is it it does exactly what refrigeration does in that
(55:37):
it slows down how fast the fruit or vegetable is breathing.
But it means that for example, fruits and vegetables that
don't refrigerate well, like all the tropical ones like tiramoil,
finger limes, delicious things that we never see in grocery stores.
They can be given this coating instead. And now, oh
(55:58):
we could have them because they can't be refrigerated, or
for example, you could use it to take things out
of the refrigerator. I mean when I visited them, they
had put the spray on bell peppers and sat side
by side with some bell peppers that hadn't been coated,
stored at room temperature for eight weeks. Eight weeks. I mean,
(56:19):
if you left a bell pepper on your counter for
eight weeks, it would have slid off the surface's slime
at that point, I mean, it would be gone. And
the ones that weren't coated were like that. The ones
that were coated, yeah, they weren't fresh enough for your
cruditae platter anymore, but they were perfectly fine for sturffry.
(56:39):
So I just you know, And of course, here in
America were used to buying our fruits and vegetables refrigerated.
It's gonna be really hard to change that. But there
are a lot of places in the world where people
don't buy their fruits and vegetables refrigerated, and they don't
want their fruits and vegetables refrigerated because they think it
means it's not fresh. Well, the spray could help prevent
(57:00):
food waste and things going bad while not refrigerating the food.
So the other thing is people think, oh, refrigerator food
is fresh. It's not getting any fresher in your refrigerator.
If you put your bag of spinach in there a
week later, you can eat it. It still tastes fine,
but it has lost up to half its nutrients, so
(57:23):
it's not like it's getting any fresher. And so something
that can help us preserve food differently better. I think
it's really exciting.
Speaker 1 (57:32):
I love these innovative solutions. I have loved exploring so
many rabbit holes of refrigeration. There are so many more
in your book that everyone who's listening should go out
and read right now because it's fascinating. You'll be telling
everyone fun facts and Nikki, I just want to thank
you so much for taking the time to chat with
me today.
Speaker 2 (57:52):
Oh thank you. As you can tell, I could basically
talk about this for the rest of my life. So
it's really fun to have the oppera or tunity.
Speaker 1 (58:00):
Thank you so much, A big thank you again. To
(58:23):
Nicola Twilly for taking the time to chat with me.
I certainly haven't looked at my fridge the same way
since reading this book. If you enjoyed today's episode and
would like to learn more, check out our website this
podcast will kill You dot com. We're I'll post a
link to where you can find Frostbite How refrigeration changed
our food, our planet, and ourselves, as well as a
(58:43):
link to Nicki's website where you can find her other work.
And don't forget you can check out our website for
all sorts of other cool things, including but not limited to, transcripts,
Quarantini and place Barrita, recipes, show notes and references for
all of our episodes, links to merch our bookshop dot org,
affiliate account, our Goodreads list, a first hand account, form
(59:04):
and music by Bloodmobile. Speaking of which, thank you to
Bloodmobile for providing the music for this episode and all
of our episodes. Thank you to Leana Squalacci and Tom
Bryfocal for our audio mixing, and thanks to you listeners
for listening. I hope you liked this episode and our
loving being part of the TPWKY book Club. A special
(59:25):
thank you, as always to our fantastic patrons, We appreciate
your support so very much. Well, until next time, keep
washing those hands.
Hosts And Creators
Erin Welsh
Erin Allmann Updyke
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