Commercial kombucha is just one product piggybacking on a sophisticated ‘cold chain’ that has revolutionized food and beverage distribution via a massive network of distribution centers, refrigerated trucks, shipping containers, supermarket chillers, and home refrigerators. Nicola Twilley’s book describes this' artificial Arctic' in fascinating detail.

According to Twilley, refrigeration's impact has “changed our height, our health, and our family dynamics; it has reshaped our kitchens, ports, and cities; and it has reconfigured global economics and politics.” She sets out to explore the “pockets of cold … honeycombed throughout the American landscape” and ventures worldwide to report on developments in the UK, India, and Rwanda.

This all began at the end of the 19th Century with the first compression ice-making machines. Before this, ice houses from winter lakes stored frozen blocks delivered to homes. This was an unreliable, expensive, and limited-scale way of preserving foods.

Interestingly, the first commercial applications for man-made ice were beer brewers. “Just as the desire for beer is thought to have motivated early hunter-gatherers to take up farming, breweries provided the all-important early investments in mechanical refrigeration: two technologies that remade the world, both fueled by the human desire for intoxication.” Specifically, the production of lager beer requires consistently low temperatures to ferment. German immigrants to New York were now able to produce lager year-round.

As with beer, so with meats, vegetables, and fruits. Twilley details the opportunities and challenges in the adoption of a farm-to-table cold chain for each product. Solutions that revolutionized our diets include the electric shocking and vacuum packing of “wet-aged” beef before refrigeration (a section of the book best avoided by vegans and vegetarians!). Successful delivery of ripe bananas to the supermarket requires “a complex blend of temperature control and atmospheric manipulation, orchestrated asynchronously across dozens of different ripening rooms.” Lettuce and spinach are packaged in a “differentially permeable membrane” that lets oxygen and carbon monoxide diffuse through the sealed box at specific rates to maintain an ideal microclimate for the chilled produce.

The result is that nearly two-thirds of all fruits and vegetables produced worldwide are eaten in a different country from the one in which they are grown.

Twilley’s assessment of the impact of refrigeration of the planet shows two sides to the coin. On the positive side, the advent of mechanical refrigeration has reduced the risk of food poisoning, rotten food that spoils in the heat before it can reach market, and monotonous, seasonally dependent diets. It “freed women from daily shopping and made fresh food both affordable and available year-round."

The downside is the environmental impact. It takes a lot of energy to remove heat. Small farms lose out to agribusiness. Home refrigerators encourage waste.

"The perpetual winter of known and steady temperature that underlies the permanent global summertime of the supermarket’s cornucopia has divorced us from food production and severed our synchrony with the seasons."

Moreover

"If everyone on Earth were to require as much cold space to eat as an American, millions upon millions of refrigerated warehouses would need to be built, increasing the volume of mechanically c cooled span ten times over."

The US currently has 4.6 billion cubic feet of refrigerated warehouse space nationwide. From the sixty hertz hum of the home refrigerator compressor (used by the Velvet Underground to tune their instruments – who knew?!) to the giant warehouses, chilled trucks and shipping containers, energy requirements, and refrigerant chemicals (HCFCs and HFCs) leaking into the atmosphere contribute to global warming.

This book is sure to educate and enlighten anyone curious about the global food and beverage system and the all-but-invisible network of thermal control that underpins it.

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Category	Agricultural Sciences

Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves