When I was a boy, my grandfather liked to tell me of his youth in turn-of-the-century New York City, when ice was delivered in horse-drawn wagons by men wielding large iron tongs. In the early days of Texas, so-called icehouses sold frozen blocks imported from the north. Eventually, they began serving chilled beer (a logical decision) and morphed into full-on bars.
Today, just about every home has a refrigerator, the final stop in a “cold chain,” an immense but largely invisible, or at least overlooked, landscape: The United States has more than 5.5 billion cubic feet of refrigerated space — an unacknowledged alternative arctic. According to the writer Nicola Twilley, it is “a continuous monument of engineered winter that has remade our entire relationship with food, for better and for worse.”
This artificial environment is the subject of Twilley’s new book, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves (Penguin Press, $30).
She recently shared some of what she discovered in her adventures in this unexplored landscape. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
I think the best books reveal things to us that are hidden in plain sight or that we take for granted, and you do that here, opening our eyes to a vast frozen landscape that shapes how we live. Were you surprised at the scale of what you found, or how it has spread around the planet?
One of the reasons I began the research that became this book is because I wanted to sneak a peek inside the spaces we’d built for our food to live in on its way between the farm and the table — a largely invisible network that even the most ardent foodies and chefs, the ones who knew their farmers and visited the fields where their food was grown, had likely never seen.
My initial response was definitely a blend of surprise and wonder. I quickly began to see these spaces as a third pole of sorts — a distributed mechanical winter, clustered at ports, at freeway interchanges on the outskirts of cities and alongside slaughterhouses and factories, like the gigantic former limestone mine filled with Kraft cheese that I visited in Springfield, Missouri. Then, as I started to explore further afield, visiting countries like China and Rwanda where a refrigerated food distribution system is still under construction, that initial astonishment was replaced with awe at what remains to be built. If, as is currently projected, the rest of the world builds a U.S.-style cold chain, the resulting artificial cryosphere will vastly exceed Earth’s natural frozen landscapes.
That is an awe-inspiring proposition, but also a terrifying one. I know your interest in writing this book was as much about the future as the past and present, so what are the implications of this expanding refrigerated infrastructure on our climate and landscapes? How should we be thinking about mitigating the negative impacts of the cold chain?
The entire book is an exploration of the implications of refrigeration! Some are simply surprising and fascinating: the invention of the hoodie, Irish independence, a redefinition of the concept of freshness. Many can be counted as blessings, including the democratization of ice cream, the rise of women in the workforce and the increased accessibility of fruit and vegetables to the diet during the annual hungry gap, when preserved produce is running low and before spring greens are once again available. Most are more nuanced than they initially appear: Refrigeration reduced the amount of food wasted on its way to market but increased the quantity thrown away at the retail and consumer level; it allowed farmers to sell their crops out of season but forced them to compete with cheaper labor overseas; it made fresh produce widely available but reduced both its flavor and nutrient levels; and so on.
The cold chain’s most unquestionably negative consequence is its climate-change impact: Refrigeration for food already contributes more than 2% of global emissions (about the same as aviation), thanks to the power used to run refrigeration equipment and the global warming potential of the chemicals used as refrigerants. That figure is set to increase fivefold as the rest of the world builds a U.S.-style cold chain — and that’s without accounting for the increased power required to cool in a hotter world.
You travelled extensively to research the book. Is there a place that you visited that offered some vision of what the future could look like?
Toward the end of Frostbite, I visit Rwanda to tell the story of a pioneering attempt to build a more sustainable cold chain, showcasing a variety of new cooling technologies. But I also think it’s important to remember that food preservation is the goal, not coldness, per se. A beer needs to be chilled, but an apple doesn’t — we just want it to be fresh. Today, there are some promising new ways to keep food fresh without cooling, using everything from lipid-based coatings to protein engineering. Unfortunately, as one expert I spoke to put it, “cooling is the Cinderella of the energy debate.” Less than a quarter of 1% of all engineering research and development is spent on cooling — and even less on developing alternative food preservation methods. That’s a huge mistake, given how central refrigeration is to our health and to that of the planet. We have the opportunity to do so much better, just by rethinking how we preserve food.
Your previous book, Until Proven Safe, was on the history of quarantine and came out during the COVID-19 pandemic. This one is on refrigeration, which is its own kind of extreme containment. Is there something about that theme that appeals to you?
No one else has commented on this overlap, but you’re right: Fundamentally, refrigeration and quarantine both rely on the manipulation of time and space to smooth out uncertainty.
In the case of quarantine, potentially infectious people or substances are spatially isolated for 40 days (or equivalent) until proven safe or dangerous. In the case of refrigeration, we remove heat from different-sized boxes (your fridge, a shipping container, a warehouse) in order to buy time and transcend space: A salmon can be caught in Alaskan waters, pin-boned in China and sold in Alabama months later; cattle can be slaughtered in the fall, when forage prices increase, and stockpiled against summer grilling demand; and an orange can be harvested and juiced in Brazil before being shipped to Wilmington, Delaware, to be stored in tank farms for up to two years, so that it can be mixed with other oranges — more or less orange-colored, more or less sweet, depending on the variety, growing conditions and harvest date — to create a branded beverage that tastes the same every day.
The result for consumers is the “permanent global summertime” (to quote food writer Joanna Blythman) of the supermarket; for producers, it flattens the discontinuities between supply and demand so that something as ephemeral as a fruit or a fish can fit in a globalized industrial system better suited to widgets.
Both quarantine and refrigeration are thus, at heart, attempts to control nature. And, as we know from John McPhee [author of the 1989 book The Control of Nature], that ambition is always met with varying degrees of success. I’m interested in describing those successes and failures as a way to understand the mostly invisible systems we inhabit — and, I hope, as a spur to improve them.
