"Frostbite
By Nicola Twilley
Penguin Press, 400 pages, $30
Step into an American grocery store and you're likely to find avocados from Mexico, meat from New Zealand and rice from India. Food is one of the world's most globalized industries: Two-thirds of fruits and vegetables are consumed outside the borders within which they are grown.
The reasons are many, not least vast transport networks and policies favoring cross-border trade. One reason is often overlooked, though, because it is taken for granted: refrigeration -- in ships, trucks, warehouses, stores. And of course when a plum from Chile arrives in an American home, it can be preserved by means of the same technology.
In "Frostbite," Nicola Twilley, a veteran food writer and co-host of the "Gastropod" podcast, tells the fascinating story of refrigeration and tracks its effects on eating habits, family dynamics and much else. Along the way, she skillfully introduces us to the people who helped make refrigeration a key feature of everyday life and who now work at the chilly front lines of the modern economy.
She opens with a visit to a company called Americold, which has a 100,000-square-foot refrigerated warehouse in Ontario, Calif. (where she would work for a week). It's the kind of place "whose mysterious internal workings allow perishable food to conquer the constraints of both time and space." The food -- everything from peanut-butter paste to beef blood -- stays in the company's facilities for as little as a day and as long as two years. To insulate her against the cold, she's given padded overalls and a thick nylon jacket, "the least flattering item of clothing I'd ever owned." As for the atmosphere: "Lighting uses energy and emits heat, so a perpetual blue-gray gloom prevailed inside the windowless cooler and freezer rooms."
Ms. Twilley tells us that the first evidence of cold storage goes back 4,000 years, but it wouldn't be until 1755 that a Scottish physician named William Cullen figured out how to freeze water on demand. Turning liquid ether into a gas in a certain way "removed energy from the air around it," creating freezing-cold temperatures. His experiments were conducted in a vacuum chamber and didn't lend themselves to instant transfer to the broader world. But the groundwork was laid for the investigations to follow.
The big breakthroughs came in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the invention of machines to make ice and the use of ice in insulated railcars, allowing long-distance shipments of beef and, later, produce. By the 1930s, companies like General Electric had started mass-producing refrigerators for American households.
Before refrigeration, Ms. Twilley says, "most people still ate seasonally and locally most of the time." It sounds sweetly quaint today, when a "locavore" ethos is everywhere, but in fact it meant a monotonous diet in the late winter and early fall and a nutritionally deficient one. What is more, "farmers had to dispose of all of their harvest at once, bringing prices down," and the sudden glut of food required hours of domestic labor for processing and storage.
Refrigeration changed everything. It was not just "rot" that was overcome, Ms. Twilley says, but also "seasonality and geography." Hence the beginnings of the food migration that is now so strikingly global. As households began buying refrigerators, shopping became a weekly routine and not a daily one. The shift freed up women for other pursuits. Ms. Twilley cites a study showing that the refrigerator (with other inventions) accounted for up to half of the 20th-century increase in women's participation in the workforce.
"Frostbite" includes illuminating profiles of figures along the "cold chain" -- a refrigerated version of the supply chain. One such is Barbara Pratt, who from 1976 to 1983 traveled inside refrigerated containers on cargo ships searching for the conditions that would enable perishable products to stay fresh during long journeys. Her research involved mapping airflow and scrutinizing the "respiration rates" of fruits and vegetables (that is, the pace at which they use oxygen and stored sugars to generate energy). The toil paid off. She and her colleagues pinpointed at what point the density of produce packing would choke off air circulation. The result was a redesign of ventilation systems. "This new ability to transport perishable produce cheaply, efficiently, and, above all, intact across the world's oceans," Ms. Twilley writes, "left diets, economies, and entire ecosystems remade in its wake."
On the health front, Ms. Twilley observes that in the U.S. at the start of the 20th century gastrointestinal infections -- byproducts of poor food quality -- were the third leading cause of death. Within three decades, in part because of refrigeration, the incidence of such conditions had fallen by about 85%. Though refrigeration has been good for our health, Ms. Twilley argues that our food system "has been injured by its exposure to cold."
There has been little increase in the consumption of fruits and vegetables since the 1970s. Why? Some products, such as tomatoes and strawberries, lose their flavor after prolonged exposure to temperatures below 55 degrees. (Spinach and broccoli lose most of their vitamin C after a week.) One reason Americans prefer junk food, Ms. Twilley suggests, is that produce "tastes so bland."
The blandness may come partly from breeding, but refrigerated transport and storage play a role. Is it a coincidence that the U.S. has the most refrigerated warehouse space in the world and also some of the world's highest rates of diet-driven disease? It's a useful reminder that even transformative technology has its trade-offs. Even so, as Ms. Twilley concedes, "only a masochist would wish for a return to the days of swill milk, no bananas, and semipermanent food poisoning."
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Mr. Rees is a senior fellow at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business and editor of the Food and Health Facts newsletter." [1]
1. The Art Of Keeping Cool. Rees, Matthew. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 05 July 2024: A.13.
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