Special Episode: Nicola Twilley & Frostbite

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. Hi, I'm Erin Welch and this is this podcast will kill you. Welcome to another episode in the T.P.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

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First, please rate, review, and subscribe if you haven't already. And second, you can now find full video versions of most of our newest 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 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 not there? Rarely, do we stop to think about the extensive journey that food has taken to land in our fridge? And I don't mean Costco car home.

to its processing, to its transport, to its storage, to its transport again, to the grocery store

“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 breeders turn into a mushy mess. But this week's book, Frostbite, how refrigeration changed our food, our planet, and ourselves, by Nicola Twilly, will have you pausing before you reach for that bag of apples or loading stakes 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, 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 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. Thank you so much for joining me today. Oh, it's a thrill. Thank you for having me. 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 worked on this book?”

Oh, a 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 15 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 interesting little look at a sort of peak behind the scenes at refrigerator 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 deeper and deeper, and so yes, my feelings, you know, it's a cliche to be like this thing, change the world. But I started out sort of like, oh, this is an interesting thing, and ended up fully on team refrigeration change the world. Oh, I mean, I'm there as well. Like count me in, I'm on the side. One of the 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 then a wet it gets to in between and stored all the way to the are the shelf of my closest safe way. Can you take me

“through some of the components that make up the cold chain? Yeah, and I think this is so interesting”

because it is called a cold chain, because the idea is that once, you know, you're, you're, 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 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 high value things, why do you beef, you know, out of season fruits, you're talking about air transit. That's all cool. Then it's going to refrigerate at warehouses often more than one. So it's a little

to whichever of the various supermarkets it's going to. It'll 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, add it all together and it's all

mostly invisible to us. This is 5.5 billion cubic feet of cold space. It's, I started to realize,

oh, it's like a third Arctic. I mean, you see the polar regions there. All this natural cold in one place. But we've built all this 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. 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 as really

so, so recent in a human history and how for centuries natural scientists and philosophers struggle

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 itself, which was so cool. But 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 it spoiling. I would love for you to share some examples of this. Yeah, I mean, this is being 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 and want to go, what are you going to do?”

And so you can do what anthropologists call social storage, which is where you share that wooly mammoth with your community and then hope that they share back with you. So it's a food preservation sort of system of storage. That's a neat thing for it, right? Yeah, but also you really want to be able to save food for rainy day. And so going back in as far in human history as possible, people have been 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 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 micro bun friendly chemicals that it deposits there. Making jam does that too reduces water activity. Oftentimes these are changing the pH to which

helps preserve cheese, which I love it's being called milk's bid for immortality, which I love. That's also your 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 kind of funny is it's not like humans didn't realize that cold would preserve food. It's I mean that they notice 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, 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 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 150 years ago. So it's just, it's just a really recent innovation for us.

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, you know, times of scarcity. Absolutely, in terms of produce, especially, that's something where so with meat and with fish and with dairy, what you're trying

what's happening is actually when you harvest an apple or 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 Britain vegetables breathed, we literally 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 boil down your tomatoes into a thick, dark, conserver-negrate that was so, conserver-neira, 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. 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, 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. Oh, totally. But even medieval folks were here like, oh, they would have just gathered to film 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 to thinking as that everyone in pre-refrigeration Europe was basically what they call pre-score

butter, which is like being pre-diabetic, but for scurvy, they were on they were tending towards scurvy by February March, at which point the storeable produce is run out. You can store apples in a cellar. You can store, um, turn up potatoes, but you're really starting to run out of produce. And that hungry season before you start to get fresh spring produce again was a really tough time before refrigeration. Let's take a quick break. And when we get back, there's still so much to discuss.

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, welcome back everyone. I've been chatting with Nicola Twillie about her book Frost Fight. 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 did is you went to Maine to participate in harvesting ice. I loved that chapter.

Tell me all about that experience. It was super fun. And if you can do this near you, there is

“some, like I think a couple of 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 steam there. Anyway, 100% recommend ice harvesting, 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 fresh water and so much natural cold. So it was like this was our 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 a luxury. And so you use 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 hists. 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 using a prize cream. They're using it for the most exquisite. The oysters, you know, in summer time, it's just a, it's a, it's a flex and it's just not available for your daily food. Battle changes in the 1800s when this

absolutely adorable high school dropout called Frederick Tudor from, from Boston. It's like, you know what I'm going to 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 when 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 what happened is he went on holiday to Cuba with his brother and he was too hot. So I get this new Englander who can 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 at this is a business. And so he goes home and he writes letters to everyone being like, I'm about to make so much money. I won't even know what to do with it. Come in with me on this

scheme. We're going to 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 harvest the ice and then he's like, oh, but the harbour's frozen. If it's cold enough to freeze the legs, the harbour's frozen. So no ships and leaving so now I need to build

an ice house, like a place to store the ice. Crap. Does that? Then when the harbour finally opens up,

the ship captains are all like, I'm sorry. I'm not taking as my cargo this frozen water that's going to melt and like make my boat on steady art. You know, are you completely mad? Wait, 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, like an agriculture

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,

but could possibly go wrong. In his diaries, which are at Yale still, he just has like the word failure written in in block caps multiple times. He has little pet talks to himself about how he's still young and he can still do something else with his life. He goes bankrupt three times because to prison twice and somehow he actually succeeds. And what is, but not as about this whole story, is not that like he builds this global empire and he's shipping ice to Mumbai and Sydney,

“although that is bananas. But what's even more important to 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, 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 his making this happen at scale, but basically led to the invention of the refrigeration machine. But I realized I was supposed to be

telling you about harvesting ice, which is super fun. I love the story of Frederick Tutor because

“one of the jokes, or I felt 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 Tutor went to Havana in the first place with his brother because his brother was looking for a cleaner, a warmer air for 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? It is basically like frozen, and it's kind of incredible.

So Frederick Tutor and his team over the course of the decades has 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 of drawing the lines on with the

“particular tool, and 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're about like two foot by one foot. So really big ice cubes. Huge. And 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 drone sort of sled that takes it up a hill,

and from 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, we don't let the amateurs in there. But when you go to a nice harvest, you can usually, you can take your turn at sawing, you can take your turn at using the breaker bar, super fun, definitely my favorite. A lot of rage, you can get out that way, and then take your turn

and a guiding it around, which is a core workout. But the stuff that happens inside the ice house, 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 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 they were still left over, and they sell it to fishermen to take it out, because it actually lasts longer than machine made ice because it has fewer bubbles in it. So it's really good quality. I said so. So it could be such variation in ice. Oh, I love that. I would love, that's going to be a bucket list thing for me, for sure, to see that, to participate in that. 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 completely different. And the same ice is still there,

have like a glimpse back into this is what people use to do. This is how people use to keep

“things cold. And you talked about how tutor 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, 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. 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 of course 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 the reasons we adopted farming of grains,

“especially is because we wanted to make beer. Well, turns out refrigeration. I mean, I like the”

you were joking everything is tuberculosis, but really everything is beer refrigeration gets started because brewers want to keep their logger beer caves cold. And so what happens is in the 1800s logger beer gets going. 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 longer short of it for our purposes is you, you can't make logger beer in the warmth, like above 50 degrees it's over. So they became huge consumers of ice. And particularly because in the 1800s so many Germans emigrated to North America, the living in places like St. Louisburg, it's really hot in the summer. They want logger beer. And the reason you have such a thing as beer gardens is because those were planted above

“the loggering sellers to try and keep the loggering sellers 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 City is 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, like remove heat essentially. And he had done that in the 1750s 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. And it was like a little party trick almost new and looked into it. It relied on noticing that as liquids evaporate into a gas, 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 flash, he did this. And so what happens after Frederick Tudor shows the value of ice at scale is that engineers start to get interested. And it's like many 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 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 packet, there is melt, getting that far. And so it was very expensive by the time it got there. So there was a lot of demand. And 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 the

steam powered machinery. So the whole thing is just a giant health hazard and the size of the house. But he, he built the first two working refrigeration machines and it was brewers. One in Australia

and one in London who are the first ones to buy them. So thank you, beer. Thank you, beer. That's

so funny. Because I had, I had written down when I was reading your book like, oh, necessity is the mother of invention. But no, it's beer is the mother of invention.

into food. This is when we sit, Dr. Sue, 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, refrigeration for dead meat? Yeah. And dead meat is what they call 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 slaughtered and when you ate it. And so you are buying dead meat. It's really, it gives you a sense of how weird that change was for people that they deliberately had to differentiate it. Nowadays, all we eat is dead meat. Obviously, pretty much unless you're a

hunter and you, 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 1700s, especially people start moving to cities by the early 1800s, 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, 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, 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 terrifying. 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, how do we have, you couldn't transport

meat. People would try and herd turkeys in from the countryside. And I mean, 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 mixing and things. In the 1800s, they were in a full on protein panic, because there was just this sense that people in cities were not getting

enough of 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 bankwits in London in the 1800s to try and say, this is how we're going to preserve meat and get it to people, 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 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 to, you know, but the stereotype of thrift does 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 are shipping 50 percent of that that 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 could make more drain and sausages and 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 buy it's 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. It's like right, oh, just put the meat and some ice together and it'll be great. No, there were, I mean, his son wrote a biography that's actually like genuinely amusing. It's full of

But he's like available for free online because it's all, and 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 figuring out the air circulation in the in the train car, figuring out how often you had 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 car because then it's warming everything else up. And so all of these problems you don't think about because they're solved problems nowadays, he had to solve them. It took decades. He lost a lot of money, but he finally figured it out in the 1870s. And you can see meat consumption just sky rockets. It's incredible. It goes from being like, here on a graph to like four times that on a graph in 10 years, just because suddenly

it's so much cheaper. If you can only ship the meat, not the whole cow, and you can monetize the byproducts too, people, you're selling a steak for a lot less all of a sudden. So yeah, let's take a quick break here. We'll be back before you know it.

Hi, it's Alec Baldwin. This season on my podcast, here's the thing I'm speaking with more

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and let's not forget all the jokes. Listen to Boys and Girls on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back everyone. I'm here chatting with Nicola 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

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 broaden to encompass fruits and veggies”

more than just meat, but like what else can we do with refrigeration? So really fruits and vegetables were seen as optional extras throughout most of the 1800s. Like they were like a nice to have not a necessary to have. And it was some mistake in, 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 really didn't, they didn't know what vitamins

were. They had sort of discovered and apologies, I say, vitamins and Brazil, originally. It's all also say tomato. It's so loud. But until the 19 teens when vitamins are really sort of hammered out and people started to realize like, oh, fruit and vegetables have, they're not

just sort of these nice seasonal extras. They're 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 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 everyone fruits and vegetables become worth it because science tells us we need to eat them. And really, the early 19 teens are like a huge vitaminia kind of era. I 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, um, because that is sturdy enough to survive a multi-day, multi-week sometimes journey across the country in

“those rail cars full of ice. That's how it supposedly got its name. It was a very sturdy variety”

till depending on who you talk to as either called the Los Angeles lettuce or the New York lettuce, because it was for the New York market, but it was grown in California. And, um, and, you know, it is the lettuce we know today, very sturdy. Like very closed head, not light and fluffy, like going to a rougler or something, you know, crispy. And so people would 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 rail cars. So that's supposedly how it got its name. But you have once you start, you know, once you start getting this pressure from consumers 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 rail car was the trick to make sure that you could eat fresh fruits and vegetables all year round in something that a fellow food writer in mind during a statement is called permanent global summer time, which I love as a, it's like no longer do we have seasons. We just have permanent global summer time, and you can have a strawberry in December if you've so wish. 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 crisper, 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. I mean, if you have your cosmic crisp apples right now and they're harvested in Washington State, those, those are 11 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 from this year. They're in 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 1870s, something Philadelphia, you know, centennial exposition, it was so valuable and rare and desirable that

it, there's no gas station even that doesn't have a banana. I mean, every 7 to 11, it's just there, they're they're the most available fruit. And that is thanks to refrigeration, which is funny, because you don't store 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 rip until they get to the destination. So the banana,

which is the world's most popular fruit, would never have been, would have 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. The fruit scape, I love that. And so yeah, we, 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 become, the home domestic refrigerator become a thing? Yeah, so those first machines, like I say,

they would blow up all the time and this is how James Harrison, the Australia, and who made the

“sold the first machines sort of lost eyebrows, you know, it was, it was a dangerous business.”

And when you have, are using steam power for your refrigeration machinery, these things are the size of a house. So that's, you're not going to have that in your house. And people did try to have one central steam powered refrigeration machine at a, at a warehouse or something and then pipe cold to houses nearby. So under the streets in, 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.

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. One of your utilities. Yeah. Exactly. How much cold did I buy this month? Yeah. Totally, totally, a 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 of a refrigerator to make them work, the, you know, the motor, the compressor, things like that to make them 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 20s, by the 30s, 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 24/7 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. It's the ultimate subscription service just to 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, you know, solved so many problems at the same time that it has created so many problems. What are some of the unintended negative consequences of refrigeration?

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 this sustainable cooling team because the world has started to wake 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, well, we could, we could power all our refrigeration machinery using renewables. There's no way. We can't even keep up with our

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 investment opportunity right now because we're building so much. The rest of the world,

is still like a sixth of the amount per person that we have. Most of sub-Saharan Africa,

which is where also 2 billion people are projected to join the world's population during the next,

you know, 20 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 2 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 5, 5 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. 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 5,

then it's going to be the same size as all of U.S. emissions, which is just an imaginably huge. That isn't even taking into account the fact that for every degree warmer the planet gets, refrigeration is less efficient, has to work harder. So we're actually making the job harder, using more power to do even just the cooling that we have, let alone the expanded future coating. So it's a real critical problem. And you can't just say to countries in sub-saharan

Africa, sorry you can't have refrigerators. That's not an option. So 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 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're built to cold chain. And it's like this, if this happens all over, it's anyway. So it's a real, it's actually a really huge crisis, and less than 1% of global R&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, our work's great. It hasn't really changed since that, you know,

for 100 years, we're using the same technology. But, you know, little refinements to make it more efficient here and there, but not the, it works the exact same way. An engineer from, you know, the 1910s would know their way exactly around your fridge. So yeah, time traveler stroll on in. Oh, your fridge is broken. I got you no problem. Pretty much. So you mentioned that there is at least a teeny tiny portion of R&D and innovators going into this problem and trying to think,

how can we, you know, 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 future of refrigeration?”

Yeah, this is, I mean, I hate to use the pun, but this kind of the coolest stuff because it's it. It's love that you use the pun. It was necessary. It had to happen at some point. Come on. Seriously. But, 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, but throw them into chaos. They absorb

heat energy to get themselves reordered again because 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 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 using a magnetic cooling. It's just that there has been no way to make

that work at the, you know, a normal refrigerator, economic scale because the materials are very expensive, specialized, 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 squeeze it and release it. So you mess the, you mess the atoms up and then you, 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

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 it's, there's a business model 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, from most of human history, this is where we started. We have

thrown enormous amounts of human ingenuity at the problem of how do you preserve food. And then it's like we invented the refrigerator and we were like, eh, we're done. Good, 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 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 super critical carbon dioxide, which is carbon dioxide, just the regular

“stuff in the air. But that is in the form of both the 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 like health implications. In fact, because it's sort of slightly like a cooking process, they end up a little crispier. It's like triple cooked french fries, you know. 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 when this process 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, quote 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”

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 of fat with it. But what it does is it does exactly what refrigeration does in that 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 tiramoya, finger lines, delicious things that we never see in grocery stores, they can be given this coating instead. And now we can have them because they can't be refrigerated. Or, for example, you could use it to take things out of the refrigerator. 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, if you left a bell pepper

on your counter for eight weeks, it would have slid off the surface of 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 cruditate platter anymore, but they were perfectly fine for a stir fry. So I just, you know, and of course here in America, we're used to buying our fruits and vegetables refrigerated. It's going to 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, this spray could help prevent food waste and things going bad while not refrigerating the food. So the other thing is people think, oh, refrigerated 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's still taste fine,

but it has lost up to half. It's nutrients. So it's, 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.”

I love these innovative solutions. I have loved exploring so many rabbit holes of refrigeration.

now because it's fascinating. It'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. 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 opportunity.

Thank you so much. A big thank you again to Nikola 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.com. We're all post a link to where you can find frostbite, how refrigeration changed our food, our planet, and

“ourselves. As well as a link to Nikki'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, quarantine and placebo read a recipes, show notes and references for all of our episodes, links to merch, our bookshop.org affiliate account, our goodreads list, a first-hand account form, 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 Lyanna Squalachi and Tom

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