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PORTSIDE CULTURE

HOW REFRIGERATION RUINED FRESH FOOD  
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Allison Arie
October 22, 2024
MIT Technology Review [[link removed]]

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_ Refrigeration is such a significant contributor to global warming
and ozone depletion that Project Drawdown points to refrigerant
management as the No. 1 thing we can do to mitigate climate change. _

Paul Rosenblatt, shown here with an ethylene generator, shipped a
million boxes of bananas every year from the Banana Distributors of
New York facility in the Bronx before his recent retirement. Bananas
are the ultimate refrigerated fruit, writes Twilley,, Nicola Twilley

 

Nearly everything on the American plate is processed, shipped, stored,
and sold under refrigeration. In her new book, Nicola Twilley reflects
on what it means to be entirely dependent on artificial cooling.

Before you buy orange juice, it probably waited, for as long as two
years, in a two-story, stainless-steel tank filled with 265,000
gallons of viscous brown slush. It’s orange juice, but with its
water and volatile flavor molecules burned off. The result is a simple
syrup six times more sugary than juice and devoid of any of an
orange’s fruity, floral zing.

Bananas? They may not be chilled in the grocery store, but they’re
the ultimate refrigerated fruit. It’s only thanks to what Nicola
Twilley calls “a seamless network of thermal control” that
they’re able to be a global commodity rather than a luxury. And that
bag of salad you picked up for dinner? It’s not just a plastic bag
but, as Twilley explains in her new book Frostbite: How Refrigeration
Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves, “a highly engineered
respiratory apparatus, designed in layers of differentially
semipermeable films to slow spinach, arugula, and endive metabolism
and extend their shelf lives.”

Three-quarters of everything in the average American diet, she
explains, passes through the cold chain—the network of warehouses,
shipping containers, trucks, display cases, and domestic fridges that
keep meat, milk, and more chilled on the journey from farm to fork. As
consumers, we put a lot of faith in terms like “fresh” and
“natural,” but artificial refrigeration has created a blind spot,
says Twilley. We’ve gotten so good at preserving (and storing) food,
she writes, that “we know more about how to lengthen an apple’s
life span than a human’s,” and most of us don’t give that
extraordinary process much thought at all.

“What we eat, what it tastes like, where it’s grown, and how it
affects both our health and that of the planet: these things shape our
daily lives as well as our continued existence as a species,”
Twilley writes, “and they’ve been entirely transformed by
manufactured cold.”

Twilley—a frequent contributor to the New Yorker and cohost of the
podcast Gastropod, which looks at food through the lens of science and
history—offers in her book a behind- the-scenes look at the cold
chain, concluding that “our food system is frostbitten: it has been
injured by its exposure to cold.” We’ve gained convenience at the
expense, she writes, “of diversity and deliciousness.”

Twilley believes that refrigeration is an enabling technology for lots
of the downsides we see in our current food system, from the push
toward scale and monoculture to a measurable decline in the
nutritional value of fruits and vegetables to harmful impacts on our
climate. It is such a significant contributor to global warming and
ozone depletion, she explains, that Project Drawdown, a climate
solutions nonprofit, has pointed to refrigerant management as the No.
1 biggest thing we can do to mitigate climate change.

We have used refrigeration to solve problems but haven’t done a true
accounting of the environmental, nutritional, and even sociocultural
costs, Twilley argues. “The goal of my book was to ask, ‘Could we
do things better?’”

You spent years researching enclosed spaces for your previous book,
Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine, which was
co-written with your frequent collaborator and spouse, Geoff Manaugh.
It seems like refrigerated food is, in a way, being quarantined.

Yes! Quarantine and refrigeration are both weird ways of using space
and time. With refrigeration, you’re building these particular
spaces for your food that kind of work as a time machine and allow you
to extend the shelf life and also move it around the globe. You’re
manipulating geography. In quarantine, you’re using space and time
to give you certainty that you won’t get a disease. Both are about
control of nature in the end.

I wouldn’t have thought of refrigeration as a spatial issue, but it
makes sense.

I was interested in this idea that there was this vast artificial
winter we’d built for our food to live in, this artificial
cryosphere that is mostly invisible.

You have to cast your mind back to when I first got interested in
this, like 15 years ago. Everyone was talking about “farm to
table”—Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, Alice Waters. Every trendy
new restaurant was farm-to-table. But the focus was all on the farm,
which made me curious about the “to” part— how things move from
the farm to the table. Pollan showed us what a feedlot looks like; I
thought, maybe I can show people the spaces we’ve built for our food
to live in after it’s harvested.

We had built this incredibly sophisticated architecture for our food
to live in between the farm and the table. All the foodies might go
visit the farm, but not that space between. So yeah, it started as a
spatial question.

All the mechanics and chemicals and manipulation involved in
refrigeration seem counter to everything the farm- to-table movement
was pushing at that time.

Oh, totally. It’s just a giant blind spot, I think, for most people,
and for a journalist and writer, that’s always an interesting place
to go. The blind spot is where the good stuff is. I don’t think you
can understand our modern food system without understanding
refrigeration—and it really hadn’t been done.

You write that “freshness is a belief system.” Tell me more about
that.

Our concept of what freshness is has radically changed. People don’t
know how old their food is—and that is an engineered and deliberate
move. Companies aren’t telling you how old your milk is—only when
you should throw it out. “Best before” and “sell by” dates,
which became widespread in the 1970s, are sort of reassuring
structures but have no real scientific basis. I’ve been telling
people, “Hey, if you’re buying an American apple in July, that
apple is coming up on its first birthday.” People find that
disconcerting. They don’t know how old their food is.

In the 1880s, when people [first] encountered refrigerated foods, many
saw them as immoral and dangerous. It was like zombie food. Imagine
that previously you’ve known what fresh foods are, and suddenly
you’re presented with something that completely confounds that.
People felt they were being hoodwinked, tricked, cheated, poisoned. Of
course in many cases they were actually being poisoned, because the
early warehouse men didn’t know exactly how to store food safely.
What’s extraordinary is that, from a 20th- to 21st-century
perspective, we think if it isn’t refrigerated, it can’t be fresh,
right?

In the book, I quote historian William Cronon [who wrote Nature’s
Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West in 1991]— and I’m
paraphrasing—that forgetfulness was refrigeration’s most
significant impact. It divorces us from the origin of our food and has
turned our understanding of freshness into a belief system by
detaching us from any certainty or sense of proximity to our food’s
origins.

I was also struck by this phrase in your book that “cold is the
absence of heat.” You say there’s “no such thing as cold, in
that it’s not a thing or a force or a property that exists and is
measurable in its own right.” For people like me who always thought
of cold as just the opposite of hot, what does this really mean?

I only started thinking about what cold actually is, as opposed to its
impacts, quite late on in this book. I thought, Oh, wait — I should
learn how to make cold. And then I was of course like, Oh, you don’t
make cold. Cooling is just the sense of loss as heat is moved away.
It’s really sort of poetic, you know. Cold is absence.

As part of my research, I built a fridge to understand how it works.
It is an incredibly ingenious piece of thermodynamics. You can
understand how it took humans so long to figure it out. As long as
there have been humans, they have realized that cold has preservative
power, and yet we had not found a way of controlling it for most of
human history. Galileo, Francis Bacon, Leonardo da Vinci, Robert
Boyle—all of them wrestled with cold. What the hell is it? Where
does it come from?

The first person to create cold at will was the Scottish doctor
William Cullen in the late 18th century, and he didn’t even know
what to do with it—it was almost more of a party trick. You imagine
the first human who built a fire realized they were onto something,
but the first human to make ice artificially didn’t really, and that
still kind of blows my mind.

I see those historic pictures of giant ice blocks, and the very idea
of anyone thinking that transporting those was a good idea seems wild.

When you read about Frederic Tudor’s attempts in 1806 to ship ice
and become rich, everyone thought he was nuts. The list of reasons why
it’s a bad idea is endless: It’s heavy, slippery, it’s cold, and
the moment you have it available to ship, guess what? It melts. I
mean, on every level, it was a ludicrous project, and people told him
so at the time. But without him, I think, people would never have
really realized, “Oh, cold at scale is not just something that’s
nice for, you know, having ice cream or cool drinks in the summer.”
It’s fundamentally reshaped how we move food around the world.

Are we basically making our world less inhabitable the better we get
at refrigeration?

Much of human history has been a war of us versus rot. A refrigerator
doesn’t stop rot; it is merely slowing it. The sense that we have
triumphed over rot leads to a huge amount of food waste.

People treat their fridge like a bank vault—you put something in it,
and it will be safe. Before domestic refrigerators, you weren’t
stockpiling perishable food in the same way. Now that we can, we waste
much more food at the consumer level. We’ve been fooled by the
endless abundance of the supermarket. Refrigerators have expanded in
size, and many households now have more than one. People drive to the
store, then fill their refrigerators and freezers so full they can’t
find anything in them. That behavior changes the shape of the city:
Houses get bigger, roads expand, stores need bigger parking lots.
It’s all connected in a way that has really negative impacts on our
environment.

But food preservation doesn’t have to mean refrigeration. For me the
exciting part is once you see how the cold chain works, you see how to
redesign it. We could create a system that produces food that is more
delicious, healthier, and better for the environment. There are
alternative methods of food preservation. One example is Apeel
coating, which— like refrigeration—works by slowing respiration
rates, but does so using atmospheric adjustment rather than thermal
control. Using this nanoscale coating for fruit andvegetables, you
could get the same shelf life as you would in a refrigerator. Cooling
has only been the answer for 100 years, and it doesn’t have to be
our only answer for the future.

This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations.

 

* food preservation
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* refrigeration
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* frozen foods
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