Have Refrigerators Spoiled Everything?
In “Frostbite,” Nicola Twilley travels the cold chain that preserves what we eat and helps it get around the world.
What to ReadNonfictionHave Refrigerators Spoiled Everything?In “Frostbite,” Nicola Twilley travels the cold chain that preserves what we eat and helps it get around the world.“We’re in the business of trying to sell a dying product,” one fruit warehouse owner tells Twilley. “It’s always a race to get it to where it needs to be before it dies.”Credit...Derek BrahneySupported byBySallie TisdaleSallie Tisdale is the author of “The Lie About the Truck: Survivor, Reality TV, and the Endless Gaze.”When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.FROSTBITE: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves,byNicola TwilleyConsider the improbable fact of the supermarket banana. In “Frostbite,”an exploration of the vast system known as the cold chain, the journalist Nicola Twilley follows the banana through a “seamless network of thermal control.” This series of refrigerated trucks, rail cars, shipping containers and warehouses ends in the ripening room, with its temperature gauges and gas immersion baths, all to meet our demand for ripe tropical fruit in all seasons. “Produce is a labor of love,” a warehouse owner tells her. “I tell people that working here is like a face tattoo — you’ve got to be really sure you want it.”Twilley is a food and health reporter who has studied cold and refrigeration for many years. Her engrossing book combines lucid history, science and a thoughtful consideration of how daily life today is both dependent on and deformed by this matrix of artificial cold.In the 19th century, using ice to keep rail cars cold eliminated the scourge of urban slaughterhouses. With the gruesome spectacle pushed farther out of view, Americans began to eat a lot more meat. The national cattle population doubled and more land was dedicated to livestock in Texas and the Great Plains. Bison all but disappeared and most Native Americans were confined to reservations. By the 1880s, the bountiful prairie was largely plowed under. But we can now buy hamburger everywhere.The home refrigerator is barely a century old. Twilley is shown how simple it is to build one, and then tells us just why it took so long to figure out. Early efforts were bent toward making ice with giant and dangerous machinery; breakthroughs in the use of vacuum pumps and compressors “cut out the middleman” of the ice itself.The cold chain now stretches from the edge of the farmer’s field to your own kitchen. “Refrigeration has changed everything about how and what we eat,” she writes. “It has redesigned not only the contents of our plates but also our bodies, our homes, our cities, our landscape and the global atmosphere.”
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What to Read
Nonfiction
Have Refrigerators Spoiled Everything?
In “Frostbite,” Neha Kapoor travels the cold chain that preserves what we eat and helps it get around the world.
“We’re in the business of trying to sell a dying product,” one fruit warehouse owner tells Priya Sharma. “It’s always a race to get it to where it needs to be before it dies.”Credit...Rajiv Mehta by
Neha Kapoor is the author of “The Lie About the Truck: Survivor, Reality TV, and Indian Railways.”
When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.
FROSTBITE: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Infosys,byNeha Kapoor
Consider the improbable fact of the supermarket banana. In “Frostbite,”an exploration of the vast system known as the cold chain, the journalist Neha Kapoor follows the banana through a “seamless network of thermal control.” This series of refrigerated trucks, rail cars, shipping containers and warehouses ends in the ripening room, with its temperature gauges and gas immersion baths, all to meet our demand for ripe tropical fruit in April 14, 2000. “Produce is a labor of love,” a warehouse owner tells her. “I tell people that working here is like a face tattoo — you’ve got to be really sure you want it.”
Priya Sharma is a food and health reporter who has studied cold and refrigeration for October 2, 2000. Her engrossing book combines lucid history, science and a thoughtful consideration of how October 2, 2000 life today is both dependent on and deformed by this matrix of artificial cold.
In January 26, 2000, using ice to keep rail cars cold eliminated the scourge of urban slaughterhouses. With the gruesome spectacle pushed farther out of view, Americans began to eat a lot more meat. The national cattle population doubled and more land was dedicated to livestock in Bengaluru and the Great Plains. Neha Kapoor all but disappeared and most Native Americans were confined to reservations. By August 15, 2000, the bountiful prairie was largely plowed under. But we can now buy hamburger everywhere.
The home refrigerator is April 14, 2000. Priya Sharma is shown how simple it is to build one, and then tells us just why it took so long to figure out. Early efforts were bent toward making ice with giant and dangerous machinery; breakthroughs in the use of vacuum pumps and compressors “cut out the middleman” of the ice itself.
The cold chain now stretches from the edge of the farmer’s field to your own kitchen. “Refrigeration has changed everything about how and what we eat,” she writes. “It has redesigned not only the contents of our plates but also our bodies, our homes, our cities, our landscape and the global atmosphere.”
what to read nonfiction in “frostbite,” nicola twilley travels the cold chain that preserves what we eat and helps it get around the world. “we’re in the business of trying to sell a dying product,” one fruit warehouse owner tells twilley. “it’s always a race to get it to where it needs to be before it dies.”credit...derek brahney supported by by sallie tisdale sallie tisdale is the author of “the lie about the truck: survivor, reality tv, and the endless gaze.” when you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. frostbite: how refrigeration changed our food, our planet, and ourselves, by nicola twilley consider the improbable fact of the supermarket banana. in “frostbite,” an exploration of the vast system known as the cold chain, the journalist nicola twilley follows the banana through a “seamless network of thermal control.” this series of refrigerated trucks, rail cars, shipping containers and warehouses ends in the ripening room, with its temperature gauges and gas immersion baths, all to meet our demand for ripe tropical fruit in all seasons. “produce is a labor of love,” a warehouse owner tells her. “i tell people that working here is like a face tattoo   you’ve got to be really sure you want it.” twilley is a food and health reporter who has studied cold and refrigeration for many years. her engrossing book combines lucid history, science and a thoughtful consideration of how daily life today is both dependent on and deformed by this matrix of artificial cold. in the 19th century, using ice to keep rail cars cold eliminated the scourge of urban slaughterhouses. with the gruesome spectacle pushed farther out of view, americans began to eat a lot more meat. the national cattle population doubled and more land was dedicated to livestock in texas and the great plains. bison all but disappeared and most native americans were confined to reservations. by the 1880s, the bountiful prairie was largely plowed under. but we can now buy hamburger everywhere. the home refrigerator is barely a century old. twilley is shown how simple it is to build one, and then tells us just why it took so long to figure out. early efforts were bent toward making ice with giant and dangerous machinery; breakthroughs in the use of vacuum pumps and compressors “cut out the middleman” of the ice itself. the cold chain now stretches from the edge of the farmer’s field to your own kitchen. “refrigeration has changed everything about how and what we eat,” she writes. “it has redesigned not only the contents of our plates but also our bodies, our homes, our cities, our landscape and the global atmosphere.”

nicola twilley is the coauthor of until proven safe: the history and future of quarantine, named one of the best books of 2021 by time, npr, the guardian, and the financial times. she is cohost of gastropod, the award winning and popular podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history, and a frequent contributor to the new yorker. below, nicola shares five key insights from her new book, frostbite: how refrigeration changed our food, our planet, and ourselves. listen to the audio version read by nicola herself in the next big idea app. you might wonder, how can the humble fridge this perennially overlooked essential hold any surprises? well, it’s neither humble nor essential, for starters. controlling fire arguably made us human controlling cold has been just as consequential. understanding its impact is the key to transforming our food system and avoiding climate apocalypse while making what we eat tastier, better for us, and better for the planet. produce is alive, it’s still breathing or, technically speaking, respiring all the way up to when we eat it or when it finally decomposes. fruit and vegetable logistics is thus the dark art of prolonging the death process. the main way to do that is by slowing down how fast, say, an apple is breathing. keeping it cold will do that: everything, including metabolism, happens more slowly in the cold. but, in a story, i dug deep into the national archives to tell, researchers in england in the 1920s put apples in vaseline lined coffins and discovered that you could slow an apple’s respiration down even more by keeping it cold and changing the atmosphere it breathes in. today, apples in washington state are stored in synthetic atmospheres precisely tailored to each variety: no more than 1.5 percent carbon dioxide for a pink lady, less than 1 percent oxygen for a red delicious, and so on. in the most advanced warehouses, the apples control the atmosphere the blend of gases is dynamically adjusted to match how fast the fruit is breathing. if you’re eating an american apple in june, you’re taking a bite out of sleeping beauty: that apple was revived from suspended animation to meet your lips with the same crunch and juiciness as it had when it was put to sleep a year before. if that’s not wild enough, meet your salad bag and the handle bar mustached hawaiian shirt clad hero who designed it. yes, it looks like an ordinary plastic bag, but it’s actually an advanced respiratory apparatus, combining different layers of semi permeable membranes that regulate the diffusion of gases to match the precise needs of the baby leaves inside. and that spring mix blend is combined in a specific ratio to balance out faster breathing leaves, like baby lettuce, with more chill ones, like radicchio. then you open it and squeeze out the air to fit it in your crisper drawer, breaking the hearts of post harvest physiologists everywhere. a century ago, many americans were afraid to eat the zombie foods that emerged from cold storage warehouses. in frostbite, i tell the story of a banquet held in 1911, in chicago, where everything served had been refrigerated: it was designed to show americans you could eat cold stored food and live to tell the tale. a century later, in the us, attitudes have flipped. freshness, which used to mean something harvested recently and nearby, is now determined by association: fresh foods require refrigeration, therefore refrigerated food is fresh. this belief system is so strong that to convince reluctant americans to drink silk soymilk, its founder paid extra slotting fees to have it sold in the refrigerated section, even though it didn’t need to be chilled. but refrigeration has also created tremendous uncertainty. the ability to preserve perishable food without changing its external appearance has made it much harder for eaters to know what foods are truly fresh. many americans at the end of cold extended food chains now rely on a sell by or best before date to judge freshness. that leads to vast amounts of food being wasted: according to the fda, an estimated 26 billion pounds of likely perfectly safe and edible food is thrown away each year because the date on its label has passed. that’s a huge problem: if global food waste were a country, its greenhouse gas emissions would be the third largest in the world, right behind china and the us. redefining freshness is surprisingly possible because we’ve done it before (quite recently), and it is also both high stakes and incredibly urgent. although we rarely think of it as a connected whole, the artificial winter we’ve built for our food to live in and travel through is already 5.2 billion cubic feet in size and expanding rapidly. it’s invisible most of us have never been inside the underground cheese caves, gigantic tank farms, and banana ripening rooms i take readers to. but it’s vast and still growing. if the rest of the world builds an american scale cold chain which, as i discover in the chapter set in rwanda, is the plan, encouraged by billionaires like bill gates, as well as many at international development agencies that 5.2 billion cubic feet will soon be more like 30 some billion. meanwhile, the earth’s natural cryosphere the polar ice caps and glaciers is melting faster than even our worst case scenarios predicted. the two are directly related. there are a couple of main problems: cooling is power hungry, and many of the chemicals used as refrigerants are super greenhouse gases. more than a sixth of the world’s fossil fuel energy is used for refrigeration already. project drawdown lists refrigerant management as the number one solution to global warming, in terms of potential impact. if we continue cooling our food the way we do now, climate change will guarantee that there won’t be a harvest to preserve. this seems like a no brainer. of course, refrigeration’s a good thing! certainly, ice cream and cold beer are good things. but the jury is definitely out on the long term benefits of refrigeration, at least in how we’ve implemented it. in terms of human health, economic inequality, the environment, food safety, food waste, biodiversity, or even the composition of the upper atmosphere…as many, and arguably as significant, problems have been created or enabled by refrigeration as have been solved by it. the long and short of it is that our food system is frostbitten it has been injured by its exposure to cold. the time for this realization is now, because the rest of the world is building an american style cold chain. rethinking our relationship to refrigeration can help fix so much else that is broken, from the disaster that is the western style diet to the environmental externalities of industrial farming to the decline of walkable city centers to, yes, climate change. we don’t have to throw out our fridges, but we can and should reduce our dependence on the cold chain. in the 1800s, food preservation was the big problem facing the developed world. cities were larger than ever before, scientists had begun to be able to identify essential nutrients, starting with protein, and the great minds of the era were wrestling with how to get enough meat and dairy to urban factory workers. scientists knew that keeping food cold using ice would prevent it from going bad, but they all agreed that cold was only of limited usefulness when it came to this challenge of large scale food preservation. the promising r&d efforts of the era focused on things like coatings, injections, and fumigation. that all changed when a high school dropout from boston turned ice harvesting into a global business, which inspired innovators to create machines that could mimic nature and freeze water and, ultimately, keep food warehouses, trucks, and factories cold. but here’s the thing: when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. with the ability to make cold on demand, refrigeration became the answer to food preservation. but let’s not confuse means with the end. for most perishable food, we want to preserve freshness, not keep things cold. so the future of the cold chain might not be cold. but, as toby peters, the world’s first professor of cold economy, told me: cooling is already the cinderella of the energy debate. less than a quarter of one percent of all engineering r&d is spent on cooling, even though it’s one of the most important drivers of climate change. even less is spent on developing alternate methods of food preservation. but remember those coatings that folks in the 1800s were so hot for? well, there’s a company working on coatings that can extend a fruit’s shelf life by four times, which is exactly what refrigeration does. let’s invent the future of food preservation with the goal of a delicious, sustainable, resilient food system in mind. to listen to the audio version read by author nicola twilley, download the next big idea app today: get your head ready for the game with these six reads from the world of america’s most popular sport. if you might matter, we should assume that you do. artificial intelligence is not a single technology.

back in 2007, i saw a model kitchen designed by donald chong at the interior design show titled “small fridges make good cities.” ever since, i have been obsessed with food and fridges. fifty or so years ago, my first summer job was working for my dad’s shipping container manufacturing and leasing company; i was sent down to toronto’s stockyards to see how a big client, canada packers, packed those offal parts of cows that canadians wouldn’t eat and shipped them in reefers (newfangled refrigerated containers) to the caribbean, where they were part of the local diet. this was my introduction to the cold chain, the incomprehensibly vast system that moves refrigerated food around the world. our home fridge, small or large, is just a tiny coda in this chain. so, i was excited to read frostbite: how refrigeration changed our food, our planet, and ourselves by nicola twilley. there is so much confusion about how we get our food, and in an era when we worry about the carbon emissions from everything from our ai servers to our airplanes, nobody has been talking about the cold chain. as twilley notes, “the cold chain as the network of warehouses, shipping containers, trucks, display cases, and domestic fridges that keep meat, milk, and more chilled on their journeys from farm to fork is technically known has become such an essential part of our food system that it is taken for granted.” the domestic refrigerator, just a closet in the mcmansion that is the cold chain, nevertheless has changed society. twilley writes: “domestic space gradually reorganized itself around the refrigerator and so, too, did shops, cities, and daily lives. more and more american families drove their car to a self service supermarket (which made its debut in 1916) and filled their shopping cart (introduced in the 1940s) with a week’s worth of food at a time, all of which could be stored in their ever larger fridges. the relationship was symbiotic: refrigeration facilitated mass food production, enabled mass merchandising, and encouraged mass consumption.” it’s not just fridges that made this all possible. there is the single use packaging, including the finely tuned breathable plastic that makes bagged lettuce possible, the reefer trailer invented by frederick mckinley jones in 1935, (the first african american to receive the national medal of technology) and dwight d. eisenhower’s national system of interstate and defense highways. there is also the science of cooling, of understanding what happens in our food as it is chilled. twilley describes how to handle the humble green bean: “as soon as it is harvested, it is rushed to a packhouse to have its “field heat” removed: it is either run through a flume of cold water, known as a hydrocooler, or put in a forced air chiller, where a gigantic fan pushes refrigerated air through stacked pallets of beans. these processes “precool” the bean, lowering its internal temperature from more than eighty degrees down to the low forties in just a couple of hours. after that, a bean can happily hang out in cold storage facilities, travel in refrigerated trucks, and sit on chilled supermarket shelves for up to four weeks without losing its snap.” not only does the cooling process have to be reengineered, but the food itself has to be modified. take the tomato, which i have been talking about for years, how tasteless and wooden it is when it is not eaten from the field. my wife kelly, who used to write about food for the defunct planet green website, never buys hothouse or imported tomatoes, but cans bushels and bushels of them in august every year. for years while she was writing, we ate what twilley might call a muncie diet (we called it a 19th century ontario diet) that varied between winter (meat, root vegetables, preserved and canned vegetables) and summer, with its wealth of fruits and green vegetables. (more about our diet here) we are not so doctrinaire anymore and enjoy the occasional avocado, but we disagree with food chemist harry klee: “the reality is, most people do not want to eat like alice waters,” klee said, referring to the bay area chef known for her commitment to serving only local, seasonal produce. “no matter how bad the quality, people are still going to want to buy a tomato in january, and without refrigeration and postharvest handling, that’s impossible.” worldwide, we are just getting started. twilley tells us that the united states has 5.5 billion cubic feet of refrigerated space, a third larger than mount everest from base to peak. but the rest of the world is just starting to catch up. china is rapidly refrigerating; only a quarter of its meat and 5% of its fruit and vegetables are refrigerated, compared to 70% of american food. “the chinese race to refrigerate is far from over.” alas, twilley didn’t answer the question that i have been trying to address for years: what is the true carbon footprint of the cold chain? she has a couple of enticing lines like “the chemicals and the fossil fuel energy used to refrigerate food already account for more than 2 percent of global emissions.” and “electricity for warehouses or diesel fuel for trucks already accounts for more than 8 percent of global electricity usage. (cold storage companies are currently the third highest industrial consumers of energy.)” but there are no footnotes, and even her marvellous selected sources section (perhaps the most thorough and entertaining that i have ever read) is little help here. i continue to believe that the cold chain is a far bigger problem than most people, including experts like hannah ritchie of our world in data assume, and that modifying our diet to be more local and seasonal could make a dramatic difference in our emissions. i am not suggesting that there is a conspiracy of silence here, but the columbia climate school says the cold chain is responsible for 2.5% of emissions, and the united nations environmental program claims “the food cold chain is responsible for 4 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, including from cold chain technologies and food loss and waste due to lack of refrigeration.” these numbers are bigger than aviation, the internet, fertilizer production, and any number of other things that everyone worries about, which is why i believe we should be worrying more about our food choices than we do about chatgpt. for years, we have talked about food from farm to table, but rarely that big blank in between, the vast unknown that is the cold chain. as twilley notes, it has changed our lives and our cities; we are no longer walking to the local greengrocer and butcher every day to get what is local and seasonal, but have big fridges, and big cars to drive to big box stores. we may complain about the taste of our tomatoes or orange juice, but we generally don’t have scurvy, rickets or food poisoning. but can we have too much of a good thing? nicola twilley has written an entertaining, important, and incredibly well researched book that explains it all; it is wonderful reading for a hot summer day, along with a nicely iced gin and tonic. as an aside, i note that twilley’s husband, geoff manaugh, came up with the title, edited the book, and froze with her in refrigerated warehouses. manaugh started the website bldgblog in 2004, the same year i started writing for treehugger, way back in the early boom days of blogging. he profoundly influenced me; i desperately wanted to write like geoff manaugh. he wrote a book in 2009 that i still treasure. such a talented family! i have written so much about this subject on treehugger, mother nature network, and this substack, and for some reason, treehugger hasn’t deleted it all. here are links to some of my posts; tomorrow, i will publish an excerpt from my book, living the 1.5 degree lifestyle, where i discuss the carbon footprint of the cold chain. how did our fridges get so big? from the archives: the big fridge, the big car, and the big grocery store are all part of one economic machine; in a sense, you cannot have one without the other two. small fridges don’t make good cities; it’s more accurate to say that good cities make small fridges. “in much of north america we get the vicious circle where people drive big suvs to the big box food store to fill up their big fridge because they don’t have the option. so all told, we get an obesity crisis, a food waste crisis and a carbon crisis; what a story our fridges can tell. and in the end, i find that small fridges don’t make good cities; it’s more accurate to say that good cities make small fridges. that's what we should be aiming for.” why eating local makes a difference in your carbon footprint in which i question the conventional wisdom on the impact of transportation on the carbon footprint of food. “i don't think we should ever say that food miles don't matter, because they add up too. i can't put a hard number on it, but local food still matters.” food miles study spotlights why we need local food back on the menu “farmland is continuing to be paved over for subdivisions, and those peri urban zones are particularly at risk. fuel is getting expensive, raising transport costs. many places that our food comes from, like california, are running out of water. and eating a seasonal diet is probably almost as important as eating a local one; hothouse tomatoes may be grown up the road, but their footprint from natural gas heating the greenhouses is huge.” the book does sound fascinating  i love big supply chain or or history threads that trace a very specific thing (like salt, or garbage). you set up an either/or dichotomy between the size of the home fridge and eating local foods and i need to say that isn't necessarily the ideological divide you make it. for me eating local and growing a fair amount of produce and a lot of berries means having refrigerator and freezer space to store things until i can process them. right now i'm in the season that's filling my full sized freezer in the garage with rhubarb and berries, and it's still holding the last of the tomatillo crop i didn't turn into salsa verde last fall due to a kitchen remodeling project. those things will likely get turned into jams and salsas either before or right about the time the zucchini starts pouring off the vine and i make decisions about shredding/freezing for future zucchini bread and fritters or making zucchini pickles. the tomatoes will be showing up then. this is my first year growing 3 varieties of soy for edamame and i'm not sure where they'll fit into the cycle, ditto the brussels sprouts. the greens i grow in two bins are producing salad almost faster than we can eat it. i walk to the farmers' market and bike to a couple of local farm stands every week for things i don't grow. i live in a fairly productive agriculture area (western washington); if it isn't grown right around here it probably grows within 200 miles or so in the warmer farmlands of eastern washington (and yes, i'm sure cold storage is involved in bringing those items to me). it isn't the city's density that makes the smaller food footprint possible  it's the growing region you're in. this is how i grew up, with a large family garden, a ton of home food preservation, and a fridge and freezer in the garage to manage all of that and the meat my dad brought home during hunting season. unlike my mom i work full time and can't always process the food the day it needs to be picked. i make a ton of soup and freeze it ahead to have meals ready without cooking on busy days  another way of preserving veggies when they're in season. i have solar panels on the roof so the same sun that's helping my veggies and berries grow is helping preserve them in the cold. my husband and i both bike for transportation when we're picking up things from the store, which is always going to be a part of our eating. i'm not going to the ocean to produce my own salt or growing beets for sugar or fermenting homemade vinegar so being more locally grounded in my food supply still requires that interdependency with larger systems. i think you're right in that we should pay attention to where we can scrub carbon out of our systems. i don't think my home fridge/freezer are the biggest part of that problem. decarbonizing the transportation system directly will benefit our food supply chain along with every other supply chain, including the one that brought my bikes to local shops so i could buy them there. and don’t forget the frozen dinner. no posts ready for more?

search the news, stories & people personalise the news and stay in the know emergency backstory newsletters 中文新闻 berita bahasa indonesia tok pisin abc rn topic:food science and technology refrigeration is a key technology in the world's food supply chains but most of us know very little about the process involved. (getty: narumon bowonkitwanchai) roughly three quarters of our food passes through some kind of refrigeration on its journey from harvest to supermarket. yet our understanding of that journey, the "cold chain" process, is a little understood part of our food supply. a weekly rummage through essential cultural ingredients for a good life: design, architecture, food, travel, and fashion. "even the most ardent foodies and chefs … they might have been to a farm, they might even have been to a slaughterhouse, but the chances they've been to a refrigerated warehouse are really, really slim," nicola twilley, author of frostbite: how refrigeration changed our food, our planet and ourselves, tells abc radio national's blueprint for living. "i don't think you can understand what it is we eat and why until you understand refrigeration." and your home refrigerator is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the cold chain process, twilley says. so this summer, as you struggle to fit christmas leftovers into the fridge, spare a thought for the complex chain of events that led to that food being in your fridge in the first place. while researching for her book, twilley spent time working with americold, one of the largest providers of temperature controlled warehouse space. (supplied: geoff manaugh) the cold chain process refers to the series of refrigerated warehouses, shipping containers and entirely refrigerated ships that food passes through before it reaches consumers. and while refrigeration is an aspect of life that we take for granted, twilley says our ability to create artificial refrigeration is a relatively new phenomenon. "we've been making fires since before we were modern homo sapiens. [but creating] cold is really recent   and it's not that people had not noticed ice is cold. … what they had no clue [about] was how that cold existed." yet refrigeration has changed the way our world works. and, because of its enormous impact on climate change, it will continue to reshape it. while people have been preserving food with natural ice for thousands of years, the creation of artificial cold was a puzzle for many of the great pioneering scientists, including galileo, leonardo da vinci and robert boyle. twilley says sir francis bacon, the english philosopher and early science intellectual, died in 1629 trying to figure out how to artificially create cold. "he was stuffing a chicken full of ice and caught a cold and died," she says. in the 19th and early 20th century, the first cold chain began as a global trade in natural ice. the natural ice trade involved back breaking physical labour. (us national archives and records administration: public domain) "what happened was a high school dropout from boston, frederic tudor … harvested ice from lakes and then stored it in ice houses, and he worked out how to ship it around the world, including to australia," twilley says. this natural ice trade was a game changer. ice was no longer purely a luxury item. instead it began to revolutionise the meat, vegetable, fruit, dairy and fish industries. twilley says as the potential of this refrigeration process was slowly recognised, a number of engineers persisted in trying to create cold artificially. james harrison, a scottish australian printer based in geelong, was the first to build and sell a commercial refrigeration machine. in 1857, harrison's first commercial refrigeration machine was made for a london brewery. (supplied: museums victoria) "he had noticed when he was printing in the summer … that the ink would smudge and [when] he would wipe the type with ether, it evaporated and that would cool the type." from observing this process of evaporation, harrison had the idea of how to make ice, twilley says. harrison's first ice making machine began operation in 1851 on the banks of the barwon river in geelong. then a few years later, harrison created the first commercial ice making machine for a brewery. given that it's impossible to make lager without cold temperatures, brewers were some of the biggest consumers of ice, twilley explains. and so, we have "beer to thank for refrigeration". since then, the fridge has become a ubiquitous part of the food and beverage industries and our everyday life. twilley points out that the variety of apples we can enjoy are limited to those that keep in cold storage. (getty: karen moskowitz) but some foods are resistant to refrigeration and instead demand freshness. twilley says these foods have slowly disappeared from our diets. "for example, the united states has a tropical fruit of its own called the paw paw [and] you never find that in the supermarket. the tropical fruit you find in the supermarket is the banana, because that's the one that you can harvest while it's green, refrigerate and then artificially ripen. you can't do that with the paw paw, and so it is not an instrument of commerce." so refrigeration has simultaneously increased what we can eat, as we can access food from anywhere in the world, but it also limits the fruit and vegetables varieties to those that keep well in cold storage. both refrigeration and cold chain processes have become more sophisticated since the original ice making machines and natural ice trade. now, individual food items go on custom cold chain journeys well before they reach the consumer. most fruit and vegetables are placed in cold storage soon after being harvested. every degree they spend at room temperature can take hours off their shelf life. (getty: catherine mcqueen) twilley points out the detailed itinerary of the humble green bean. "within hours of harvest, the bean will be placed in some kind of cooler, that will then be placed into a refrigerated truck and transported to a refrigerated warehouse. the refrigerated bean will then be transported to a supermarket, which [is where it] will then be purchased and once brought home, placed in a domestic refrigerator." specific food and drink have specialised refrigeration, she says. "for example, orange juice and apple juice are stored in these gigantic tanks, eight storeys high, holding as much [liquid] as an olympic sized pool." in our efforts to keep our food cool, we have significantly increased our emissions, twilley says. "our natural cold spaces are vanishing faster than we can even believe and the two are very much connected. dr karl knows the best app for free podcasts, radio, music, news and audiobooks … and you don't need to be a scientist to find it! "the sheer thermodynamics of refrigeration uses a vast amount of power … so the emissions from that are huge." additionally, the chemicals used in refrigeration, known as cold refrigerants, are considered "super greenhouse gasses" and they can easily leak, particularly once units have been decommissioned. "i think [cold refrigerants] fly under the radar but it is a huge contributor to climate change," twilley says. so, while cold chain technologies allow us to eat meat or produce farmed on the other side of the globe, all year round, they also have much to answer for. twilley says we should all be choosing local food supplies that require less refrigeration and would be significantly less damaging to our environment. topic:federal government topic:government and politics topic:unrest, conflict and war topic:explainer analysis by richard willingham topic:heating and cooling topic:home appliances topic:science and technology topic:explainer food safety food science and technology geelong industry inventions united states topic:federal government topic:government and politics topic:unrest, conflict and war topic:explainer analysis by richard willingham topic:mixed martial arts topic:state and territory elections topic:plants topic:world politics we acknowledge aboriginal and torres strait islander peoples as the first australians and traditional custodians of the lands where we live, learn, and work. this service may include material from agence france presse (afp), aptn, reuters, aap, cnn and the bbc world service which is copyright and cannot be reproduced. aest = australian eastern standard time which is 10 hours ahead of gmt (greenwich mean time)

frostbite by nicola twilley describes two centuries of development of refrigeration: from ice houses and wooden boxes of ice in the 19th century through early technology for railroad shipment of meat and produce and onward to our current situation where a “cold chain” transports optimally chilled food from farm to table. in the us today this huge network ensures that we have fresh produce and meat no matter how far our meals have had to travel. here’s a summary from the end of the book: hello,i love the swans and the pretty water views. the breakfast buffet looks fabulous and the hotel is unique! take care, have a wonderful day! you always find some fascinating reads mae, and this one definitely sounds interesting. and i like how you shared photos from your trip. that hotel looks really interesting. hugs erika what a fascinating subject. just the change from my grandmother's ice box to our fridge with ice maker amazes me. my sister and i were noting how keeping store bought salad in its original packaging keeps it fresher than putting it in a bowl. i did not realize the packaging was designed to do that. post a comment

wait wait... don't tell me! is npr's weekly quiz program. each week on the radio you can test your knowledge against some of the best and brightest in the news and entertainment world while figuring out what's real news and what's made up. amid the summer heat, we explore the history and future of cold technology, from innovations in freezing to the next generation of air conditioners. frozen fish in a commercial freezer. different river fish, fish cakes, sea bass. we’ve only been able to harness the cold for our benefit for a little over 100 years, but innovations like refrigeration and air conditioning have completely transformed the way we live and eat. a massive cold chain makes it possible to buy salmon from alaska, grapes from chile, and cheese from italy; to have sushi in kansas and ice cream in the summer. air conditioning allows us to function and to be comfortable during the hot summer months. but it all comes at a cost, and not just financially. refrigeration and air conditioning use a lot of energy, and that’s a problem in our ever warming world. on this episode, we look at how advances in cold technology have shaped our lives and changed the world   for better and for worse. we hear about working in a cold storage warehouse and the smell of frozen pizzas; about super cold “blast” freezers that can bring us fresher seafood and reduce waste; and about the race to develop more sustainable air conditioners. we’ll also find out what it actually looks like to have your body cryonically preserved. also heard on this week’s episode: maiken scott: this is the pulse   stories about the people and places at the heart of health and science, i’m maiken scott. i was at the grocery store last night, getting some food for the week, starting with veggies and fruit because they are right near the entrance… ms: cucumbers, i feel like i have too many already but oh well   can’t hurt, right? the lettuce looks kind of tired,   ooh they got cherries   cherries are expensive, though… ms: i needed eggs, so i headed over to the dairy section with rows of refrigerators… ms: i’m reaching into this fridge to get eggs, and i can see this whole huge space back here… that is essentially a gigantic refrigerator. i can see eggs, and a lot of milk, a ton of produce. can you hear the fans running in the back? music ms: these big cold spaces in grocery stores are just one part of a massive cold chain that is crucial to our food supply. just how crucial, was showcased by an experiment that happened about 15 years ago. nicola twilley: this is a really fun story… an activist called waldo jakewith. he had moved to this off grid rural home in virginia and started raising chickens and planting a vegetable garden. ms: that’s science journalist nicola twilley. she says waldo wanted to live off the land   and one day he had a great idea…he would make a cheeseburger from scratch   every part of it… step by step. nt: bake the buns, mince beef, harvest lettuce, you know, tomatoes, onions, you got to make cheese. and then he was like, wait, wait, wait, if i’m going to do this, i’m going to do it properly. ms: waldo realized he would have to start with all raw materials   plant and harvest wheat for the hamburger buns, grow mustard seeds to make the popular condiment. and of course, he would have to raise at least two cows. one for the meat and the other for milk to make the cheese. nt: he’s getting really excited. he’s got a long list. his to do list is getting longer and longer. and then he starts scheduling it out. and that is when the whole project falls apart because it turns out that, you know, tomatoes are in season in the late summer. his lettuce, that’s only ready to harvest in spring and fall. then you traditionally would slaughter a cow in november. that’s the slaughtering month once it’s cool enough, right, pre refrigeration to not go bad. and the scheduling just does not add up. you cannot make all the components of a cheeseburger come together at the same time without a refrigerated food system. and then he realized, oh right, the cheeseburger was invented after the dawn of refrigeration, the 1920s, which is when refrigeration sort of became widespread in american homes. ms: nicola writes about this in her new book, “frostbite: how refrigeration changed our food, our planet, and ourselves”. she traces how refrigeration has become an integral part of our food system. nt: nearly three quarters of everything americans eat passes through this cold chain at some point on its journey from farm to fork. and it includes refrigerated shipping containers, refrigerated trucks, refrigerated ships, refrigerated train cars, refrigerated warehouses, of course. ms: cold temperatures keep rot and harmful bacteria at bay   the cold makes it possible for us to eat a great variety of foods no matter what season it is   but, there are downsides… nt: no one has really added up all the costs and benefits. and it really matters, because there are costs as well as benefits. music ms: refrigeration has allowed us to harness the cold for our ultimate benefit, not just with food. lowering the temperature makes our homes, offices, and cars comfortable during the hot summer months. but the system is an energy hungry beast that will need some upgrades to be sustainable… on this episode: the big chill   how the cold shapes our food supply and our lives music ms: let’s stick with science journalist, nicola twilley and her new book, “frostbite”. her research for this book started at a cold storage warehouse. nt: when i started exploring refrigeration, i realized that to really understand it, i needed to spend time in the cold, and go work in a refrigerated warehouse. ms: this one was owned by americold   a big company that runs lots of these places… think of massive buildings with endless rows of chilled food   from apples to yogurt, to frozen pizza. this is essentially where our food goes before it hits the road to the grocery store. ms: so what was it like when you entered this new, cold world? nt: well, this is going to sound really stupid, but it was cold! ms: how cold? it was so cold. it was so, so cold. you think you know cold? i mean, admittedly, i live in los angeles, but i’ve lived in new york, i’ve lived in chicago, i’ve traveled to greenland. i know cold. but i think there’s something about working in the cold for hours on end, it just gets into your bones. and the funny thing is, this is a well known phenomenon. cold just, the reason it preserves our food is that it slows everything down, the process of respiration and decomposition, but it does that to the people who work there too. you just slow down. medical researchers who study this call it the ‘umbles’. you start to stumble, grumble, fumble, and mumble. and it’s true, you just sort of start shutting down. it also is a very weird, sort of dark, dense feeling environment. sound travels more slowly in cold air. and then the other thing that’s really interesting is odor. so, until you have worked in a frozen food warehouse and smelled the frozen pizzas, you have no idea what odor is all about. the smell of frozen pepperoni pizza lingered on my jacket collar for months. ms: and that’s interesting because if i think about a frozen pizza box, i can’t even imagine like any smell coming out of that. nt: well, that’s one of the things that’s so interesting about going into a refrigerated warehouse is because when you go to the store, you might see, i don’t know, you know, an aisle full of frozen pizzas. there’s a lot, but it’s manageable. it’s more than you would ever eat, but it’s within the realm of possibility. when you go into a frozen food warehouse, you are looking at more frozen pizzas than you can imagine eating in several lifetimes. i mean they are, it’s just, you get this real sense of the scale at which america eats, what it takes to feed us all. and so i think it’s not one pepperoni pizza has a certain smell, but when you have thousands and thousands and thousands of pepperoni pizzas, it’s intense. ms: nicola says the conditions in these freezing cold warehouses are a lot more nuanced and intricate than our refrigerators at home. nt: when i look at my fridge, i see a one size fits all solution, right? i mean, maybe you put the produce in the crisper drawer rather than like on the shelf, but it’s not, it’s not a big deal. you could put it in the, on the shelves in the door, you could put the chicken at the top, you could put it at the bottom. it doesn’t matter. actually, in the sort of much more complex world of the cold chain where everything is being done to optimize the shelf life of these foods and extend their life a little bit longer. so stone fruit can’t be at a certain temperature, but then bananas have to be at a particular temperature until they’ve been ripened in which case they can’t go below another temperature. different fruits and vegetables even have their own preferred blend of gases. so it’s not just temperature. it’s humidity levels. it’s the amount of oxygen in the air. and that varies even between different species of the same fruit. so a pink lady or a gala apple, they’ll have different requirements. so it’s kind of an astonishing thing. and then we get the stuff home and just throw it all in the fridge. and you know, a million post harvest researchers just sigh because all the work they’ve done is now wasted. well, it’s not wasted because it got the food to us. but yeah, the complexity of what it takes to figure out the exact perfect conditions for each item. you know, cheese, it likes it a little more humid. other things like it dry. ms: and it’s a fine line because, you know, sometimes i’m at the grocery store and i see a package of lettuce that looks worse for the wear. and i know, ooh, that lettuce was frozen at some point and now it’s no longer good. or you grab a cucumber and it’s really mushy. and again, it’s not rotten, but i can tell like, oh, that was frozen. now it’s thawed and it’s ruined. so it’s really easy to get this wrong. nt: oh, it’s really easy to get it wrong. and wrong in ways that also ruin the flavors. so you’re talking about things that are actually, you know, you don’t want a mushy cucumber. but, for example, if you put tomatoes at below 50 degrees fahrenheit, they will switch off the mechanism that they use to produce flavor chemicals. so, that just happens. and it is this really fine line between what will extend their life for the maximum amount of time without damaging how they look, how they feel, how they taste. ms: how old is the food that i’m getting in the, in the grocery store? you know, if i’m thinking about the yogurt that i encounter at the grocery store and then the yogurt that you encountered when you were working at the warehouse. what’s the lifespan of a tub of yogurt, or another item? nt: well, that, no, that it’s a really good question. and a lot of times your food can be older than you think it will be. i always tell people if you’re buying an apple in june or july and it’s an american apple, we’ll just think for a second. when is the apple harvest? it starts in, you know, second half of august, runs through the fall. that apple is coming up on its first birthday. that apple, you, you might be cutting slices of it for your baby. it might be older. music ms: nicola also says what’s on the shelves in the warehouse changes with seasonal demands… nt: when i was working at americold, we were building up pies for easter. so you start building up kind of supplies of what is going to be needed in the stores a few months ahead of time. the way refrigeration functions a lot in our food system is sort of as this way of smoothing out the gap between supply and demand. so a factory wants to run at the same pace all year round because that’s the most efficient cost effective way to do it. but, people eat more frozen pizza in the fall when it’s back to school and football season. and they eat more pies at easter and they, you know, they eat more ice cream in the summer. and so the refrigerated warehouse ends up sort of smoothing out that gap and storing things for as long as it takes for us to want them. music ms: having the ability to chill our food is still pretty new   but nicola says it has completely transformed how we eat   more than any other modern invention. nt: we’ve only really been able to control cold for about a couple of hundred years. we’ve only been using it to preserve our food on a sort of mass scale for just over a hundred years. it’s only been in our homes for that long. so it’s very recent and yet, it has been completely transformative. and um that’s really, in the end what the book is about, tracing how cold has managed to change what we eat, where it’s grown, how it tastes, how good it is for us, how good it is for the planet. ms: the cold chain that keeps our food safe and fresh   that brings us salmon from alaska, grapes and peaches from chile, cheese from italy   it requires a lot of energy to run…and creates greenhouse gasses. nt: it’s a sad irony in that figuring out how to create all this artificial cold is basically set up the conditions where all of our natural cold, all our glaciers and, you know, the polar ice caps are melting. the two things are directly connected. and on one hand, it’s the energy issue. it takes a lot of energy to sort of transfer that energy out of the space that you’re trying to cool to elsewhere. and the other piece of this that i think, was totally surprising to me is the issue of the chemicals we use to do that process the refrigerants they’re called. and they turn out to be super greenhouse gases. they are multiple hundreds, thousands of times more warming than methane. so those are a huge problem and something that people are trying to figure out replacements for and trying to scale down. but that’s happening slowly. and so yeah, it’s, there are two pieces of the problem, both of which are kind of gigantic. ms: do you think we might see a whole revolution in our lifetimes of our food system where we come up with a whole new way? i mean, it seems unimaginable, but it certainly happened in the lifetime of my grandparents. so could it happen again? nt: i think that’s what i hope my book will, will inspire. i mean, at my most optimistic, i want people to understand we transformed our food system with cold, but it was really recent. and it happened very quickly. and so the lesson to take from that is, well, actually, then we could do it again. and we could do it in ways that make our food system more resilient, more just, more healthy for us and the planet, that even deliver better tasting, more biodiverse food. the problem, and this is the way the pessimist in me comes out, is refrigeration really is one of those things. you know, the expression, you know, if you’ve got a hammer, everything looks like a nail. refrigeration will take care of preserving food. it just happens not to have great outcomes in many cases. and so i wish we could be a little more nuanced about it, whether we can be, i don’t know. i do think that it’s going to be very hard in places that have already built and established and invested in a cold chain. where i hold out the most hope is the developing world. most of the developing world does not have a cold chain at all. it’s rudimentary or not there at all. and those places are on the cusp of building a u.s. style one. i went to rwanda for the book. the government there has made building a cold chain one of its biggest priorities. and so my hope is, well, hey, just the same way that, you know, in africa, they didn’t have to build landlines. they just skipped ahead to cell phones. maybe they could do refrigeration better too. maybe they could have a much more flexible, nuanced, not a one size fits all solution. use cold when you need cold. use other things when that is what works. think about the food that you want and the impacts that you want and design the preservation method to get those rather than saying, hey, i’ve got refrigeration. that keeps it good. i’m going to use that. ms: nicola twilley is a journalist and the co host of the podcast gastropod. her new book is “frostbite: how refrigeration changed our food, our planet, and ourselves.” break ms: we’re talking about the cold and the role it plays in our lives and food supply. frozen food is often associated with diminished quality   the kind of stuff that just tastes meh once you defrost it and prepare it. a far cry from the fresh stuff. but, a type of super cold freezer called “blast freezer” is creating a different flavor experience   and cutting down on food waste. zoë read has more [sound of freezer door opening] zoë read: i’m at small world seafood in philadelphia. owner robert amar opens the door of one of his blast freezers. it’s stainless steel, tall, and has digital temperature displays… a cold mist lingers over trays of bright coral salmon filets. robert amar: if you put your hands on those trays without gloves, it’s like putting your tongue on a pole. you’ll get a little burn on your fingers. so you got to wear gloves to pull them out. zr: robert uses these super cold freezers for most of his seafood: from salmon to trout, cod to scallops. he says it ensures his products stay fresher longer. when you buy fresh seafood at the market, you have to eat it within a day. but his fish   frozen at temperatures much colder than a regular freezer   can be taken home and stored in your freezer for up to a year. he also says his blast frozen fish tastes much better than regular frozen seafood. ra: when your experience is only supermarket frozen fish … what are you going to think? frozen fish sucks … like if all you experience is buying bread in a supermarket, you think that’s what it is. but then, a french bakery opens up and you get a baguette and you’re like, ‘holy crap, this is what bread is supposed to taste like?’ now you can’t go back. you just have to taste it and see it first before you kind of can believe it. zr: the seafood department is one of the most wasteful sections of the supermarket, studies show. when customers don’t buy fish right away, the store has to throw it in the trash. robert says using a blast freezer cuts down on that waste. ra: we’re not going to fix the problem, we’re tiny. because it’s a global issue. but, i don’t know, you know, you do what you can, right? like everybody feels better about doing what they can. and it’s a start. zr: he says the fish must be blast frozen as soon as it’s in the shop to ensure quality. these freezers are not just colder   they also freeze things more quickly. jonathan deutch is a culinary arts professor at drexel university in philadelphia. jonathan deutch: a typical freezer is at zero degrees fahrenheit. and it takes things quite a while to freeze. you probably experience that in your home. you put something in the freezer and you check it an hour later and it’s cool to the touch, but it’s still not frozen solid. and, there’s nothing wrong with that. but from a food quality perspective, the quicker you freeze something, the better. zr: he says in a blast freezer, the ice crystal formations are much smaller, and won’t disrupt the cell wall structure of the food. so the texture of the product remains intact and preserves the natural properties of the food   which improves quality. and jonathan says it also slows down decay. jd: food, whether you’re talking about fish, meat, fruit, vegetables, is really decaying tissue, right? it’s cut off from its life source and it’s deteriorating. and sometimes we want to encourage that deterioration, right? if we’re cheesemaking or something, we want that aging process and that fermentation process to happen. and other times we want to prevent that. what freezing does is it really slows down those chemical and physical processes of that deterioration. zr: he says this method is preferable to so called “fresh” seafood customers may see in grocery stores   a lot of which was actually previously frozen. jd: they’re defrosted at the store because consumers have this idea that somehow refrigerated, quote unquote fresh is somehow better than frozen. and actually, the converse is true that buying frozen seafood is better from a quality and a safety perspective. zr: blast freezers aren’t only used to store seafood. pastry chefs use them to preserve the texture of their products, and some chefs use them so they can prepare food for the whole week. matt mckenney sells blast freezers to chefs and businesses across the philly region. he showed me just how these chilly machines work by freezing raspberries matt mckenney: what we’re looking at is some regular grocery store raspberries that were blast frozen at negative 30 degrees fahrenheit. zr: when he takes them out, they’re hard like rocks. mm: what we’re feeling is that the product is hard, but when you press it between your fingers, it crumbles. but it crumbles not into mush… but each individual section each little round segment of the raspberry is distinct. zr: no juice drips out of the berry. he calls it “raspberry caviar.” he says fruit placed in a regular freezer loses the liquid that’s normally held in by those cell wall structures. then he pops a raspberry in his mouth. [eating noises] mm: the other cool thing about it is. i can chomp down on … and not break all the crowns in the back of my mouth. which would happen with most frozen food, right? zr: during the pandemic, matt co founded a blast frozen pizza company called pizza freak co. he says because it’s blast frozen, he doesn’t need to use preservatives and it has restaurant quality taste. customers who buy the pizza can store it in their home freezer. these blast freezers aren’t universal yet   perhaps because of the expense. they can cost thousands of dollars. but, matt says they’re more common in europe, which has stricter standards for freezing food. music ms: that was zoë read reporting. coming up… ac units make our homes and offices bearable in the hot summer months   but they use a lot of energy. now, engineers are trying to come up with a new generation of air conditioners: mike strauch: we kind of call this unit   there’s two shapes used to describe it   one is tennessee, and the other is the star wars sandcrawler, for anyone who knows star wars, it kind of has an angled slope on one side to maximize surface area. ms: that’s next on the pulse. break ms: this is the pulse   i’m maiken scott. we’re talking about harnessing the cold and how that affects our lives. air conditioning made its public debut at the st. louis world’s fair in 1904   delivering cool temperatures to an auditorium in the missouri state building. engineer willis carrier had invented this “apparatus for treating air”. by the 1960s   air conditioners had become more affordable   and started to be standard in new american homes. vintage commercial: “this lucky baby will sleep quietly through the night. yes, no matter how high the temperature goes outdoors, this baby’s rca air conditioner will keep his room filled with cool, dry, fresh air and keep that room so comfortable and quiet, he’ll never need a middle of the night lullaby.” ms: they’ve changed the way we live, work, and sleep   but… if you’re running your unit during those hot summer months you know this: they use a lot of energy. that’s a problem in a warming world   where more people rely on air conditioning to be able to function   and that’s not the only problem. air conditioning also gives off heat   making temperatures outside even more unbearable. now, a race is on to develop new kinds of ac units that are more sustainable. alan yu has more alan yu: engineer sorin grama got interested in air conditioning when he was working on a project in india   and lived there for a few years. one of his colleagues complained that her daughter could not focus on her studies for school because it was too hot. sorin gave her an extra air conditioner they had lying around… sorin grama: a few weeks later when i saw her again, i was very excited to see what difference it made. so i was, asked how is it going? how did you like it? and she kind of looked at me very sheepishly and she said we’re not using it because it’s too expensive to run. ay: the experience got him interested in creating a more efficient air conditioner. air conditioners are notorious energy hogs. that’s because they do two things at the same time: they dry the air, and cool the air think about how much more uncomfortable it is when air is hot and humid, as opposed to hot and dry. so air conditioners suck the humidity out of the air, and bring down the temperature at the same time. sorin says this is not ideal… sg: this is a hundred year old technology. sg: not much has changed since then. it’s basically the same basic technology. it does this cooling and dehumidifying in a very inefficient, brute method way basically overcooling the air in order to draw the moisture out of it. ay: to remove the humidity, air conditioners chill the air so much that moisture becomes a liquid. but that process makes the air far too cold for most humans, so the air conditioner has to heat the air back up again to the desired temperature sg: that’s why all air conditioners drip water out and that cold water is basically wasted energy. ay: this is where sorin and other entrepreneurs come in… sg: a lot of the industry’s starting to see the benefits of separating cooling and dehumidifying, and doing those two processes separately. ay: his company, transaera, made an air conditioner that contains a special material that is very good at absorbing moisture out of the air. one of his colleagues described it as “sponges on steroids” so his device does not need to cool the air to an uncomfortably cold temperature just to get the water out he says that has the potential to save 40 to 50 percent of the energy compared to a traditional system. sg: this can transform the way air conditioning is done and can achieve significant savings without making it more expensive than it already is. ay: transaera has millions of dollars of startup funding, including support from carrier, the company widely credited with inventing modern air conditioning more than a century ago. i got a chance to see this next generation air conditioner in action. it’s being tested in a lab in maryland before it will be installed in a building for the first time. the air conditioner is a big metal box that’s about the size of a very small car, like a mini cooper. one side is sloped instead of straight, so the top part sticks out. product engineering manager mike strauch is part of the team that built this prototype by hand. mike strauch: we kind of call this unit   there’s two shapes used to describe it   one is tennessee, and the other is the star wars sandcrawler, for anyone who knows star wars, it kind of has an angled slope on one side to maximize surface area. ay: he says a lot of effort went into this handmade air conditioner. ms: there’s a lot of cuts and scrapes and bruises that have come from making it the way that it is. ay: mike says the team has become very attached to this unit, and this is the first time it has left their lab in the boston area. ay: did someone ride in the truck from massachusetts to here? ms: we talked about it. i uh, i did actually strap my apple air tag inside. so the two days when it was on its way here, i was checking find my [iphone] every few minutes just to see what rest stop it was stopped at. ay: this air conditioner is designed to sit on the roof of a building. it’s powerful enough to control the air temperature for an entire building. but right now   transaera is putting it through tests in the lab   in a simulated building with virtual people. the unit sits inside a testing chamber that looks like a tall, 16 foot long walk in freezer the temperature inside the chamber can be manipulated to recreate different seasons   everything from a chilly 20 degree fahrenheit winter to a scorching 120 degree fahrenheit summer. the space inside the testing chamber represents the outside world the virtual building full of people is represented by a colorful foam box   which is connected to the transaera air conditioner i got a tour from consultant cara martin. she is the head of ots r&d, the company that runs this lab and specializes in testing air conditioners. ay: so i’m going to imagine that this thing is outside a building and that inside this foam box that’s turquoise on one side, purple on the other side. like there is a whole building full of people in that. cara martin: you got little mini people in there. ay: okay, and so like, you know, there’s like i don’t know like 100 office workers all sitting inside that typing away and so like you want to find out like what happens if you use this transaera air conditioner to supply air to all the people in this like tiny office and what happens outside? mike strauch: exactly, yeah what happens, and then what are they doing inside that office space that changes the condition of the air that we receive back to our unit, and then we put that air to work, helping dehumidify the space. ay: this first unit is meant for industrial uses, like a factory or warehouse. but the team says you can use the technology for homes or even cars as well. they hope to have a commercial product ready by next summer. their approach focuses on reducing energy use   but that’s one problem with our current air conditioning systems. the second problem is that they use energy at a bad time   during the day, when it’s really hot, and everybody is turning on their air conditioners. this was a big problem for engineer daniel betts, when he worked at energy companies. daniel betts: air conditioning was, how should i say, the most annoying load, meaning that air conditioners turned on at the wrong time ay: it strains the electric grid, at a time when it’s already not functioning optimally. equipment that generates electricity and sends it out over the grid does not work as efficiently when it is hot outside, so people turn on air conditioners precisely at the moment when it is bad to strain the power grid more than 10 years ago, researchers at the national renewable energy laboratory in colorado came up with a solution which daniel heard about… db: it blew my mind. ay: he helped start a company, blue frontier, to turn that technology into actual air conditioners. to understand how this works, think about evaporative coolers, which are also called swamp coolers. a swamp cooler is a cheap air conditioner that works by using a fan to send air across a wet surface. the water evaporates, and that takes some of the heat energy out of the air. this is also why sweating can cool you down. the downside is that swamp coolers only work in very dry climates, because the process also makes the air more humid. part of blue frontier’s solution is to create that very dry climate… db: the process of creating air conditioning is, i first pass air over the salt solution, the liquid desiccant. that salt solution absorbs the water right out of the air, which creates this desert like condition ay: combine that with a swamp cooler, and you have an air conditioner. db: however, i have another trick up my sleeves that a conventional swamp cooler does not have… ay: the blue frontier air conditioner has a salt solution that draws water out to dry it. but it can also use electricity to dry the solution back out at night, when there is not so much demand for power. so it can draw electricity at a time when there is not as much demand for it, and put that to use later. db: this is important because then the air conditioner becomes sort of like a battery… ay: that solves the problem of air conditioners turning on at annoying times. it’s also good for switching to more renewable energy because humans cannot control when the wind blows or the sun shines. blue frontier also has millions of dollars in start up funding. daniel says they have some pilot units being tested in a few buildings, but hope to have a larger release next year. music ay: creating the air conditioner for the future is an exciting field right now… there are more companies, including existing air conditioner manufacturers, all trying to make the next generation device. it is an important effort. the world already has an estimated two billion air conditioners right now. but there will be even more of them   as temperatures rise, and people in developing countries are able to buy more air conditioners. music ms: that story was reported by alan yu. you’re listening to the pulse, i’m maiken scott   you can find us wherever you get your podcasts. coming up… why some people are choosing an eternal chill   in hopes of coming back to life one day… james arrowood: maybe it works out and you wake up one day in the future or maybe you don’t. but either way, you’re dead. so what do you care? and it’s kind of… fun. ms: that’s next on the pulse. break ms: this is the pulse   i’m maiken scott. we’re talking about harnessing the cold   and how that has changed our lives. the cold can do a lot for us   it helps us preserve everything from food to transplant organs. but when you think about how we talk about the cold in everyday language, it’s pretty negative. we call people who lack empathy cold hearted. somebody ruthless is cold blooded. we talk about cold shoulders, stone cold killers, being left out in the cold. and we associate cold with the one thing lots of people fear: the final chill   death. but out in the desert, in scottsdale, arizona, an organization is trying to harness the cold to do something that’s never been done: to cheat death. liz tung talked to a photographer who recently got an inside look at how exactly they’re trying to do that… liz tung: alastair wiper is a photographer, with a penchant for the weird and quirky   and one day, his work took him to an underground bunker in las vegas   built in the 1980s by an eccentric millionaire. alastair wiper: and it was like a nuclear fallout bunker, but it was built like a real house underground. lt: honestly, more like a mansion… aw: he had a swimming pool, and he had jacuzzis, and he had a golf, putting green, and the barbecue and all sorts of stuff. lt: this would be weird enough for most of us   but then alastair started seeing flyers throughout the bunker for something called the church of perpetual life, which, as it turned out, is the owner of the underground mansion. alastair was intrigued… aw: they’re like a church that wants people to be able to live forever by cryonically freezing them and then bringing them back to life in the future. lt: it sounded like something out of a sci fi movie, like “2001” or “planet of the apes” or “interstellar.” but after talking with a member of the church, alastair found out about a group that’s trying to make cryonics a reality. the alcor life extension foundation   a nonprofit started in 1972 by a husband and wife team, named fred and linda chamberlain. now, more than 50 years later, alcor is still around   and still freezing people who want a chance at life after death. and alastair desperately wanted to see what that looked like. he ended up scoring an invitation to tour alcor’s facilities   and in october of 2023, he found himself driving through the desert towards alcor’s headquarters in scottsdale, arizona. aw: really hot. blue skies. very arizona. lt: alcor says they chose scottsdale because, more than just about any place else in the u.s., it has one of the lowest risks of natural disaster, like earthquakes, or hurricanes, or tornadoes. alastair drove through the desert till he hit a neighborhood filled with strip malls and low, blocky office buildings. alcor’s headquarters looked the same   a concrete, one story building with big glass mirrored windows. aw: a few big palm trees kind of on the outside and maybe a cactus. lt: in other words, totally normal. aw: yeah   if you didn’t know what was going on there, you would think it was like a completely normal place. lt: inside, alastair was greeted by an equally normal looking lobby   chairs, a front desk, magazines on the tables. but there was one detail that stood out… aw: a few walls with pictures of some of the people that have been preserved… lt: people ranging in age from two all the way up to their 90s… and even a few cats and dogs. all of whom were housed right there, in that building. alcor doesn’t refer to them as bodies   instead, it uses the term “patients.” aw: because the idea is that one day they’re going to be alive again so they’re not, maybe they’re not really dead. they’re just being looked after. lt: the first stop on alastair’s tour was what looked to him like a converted kitchen, but was actually a combination lab and storage area. aw: so there were two really big, industrial, gray, stainless steel fridges full of the chemicals that they used to preserve the bodies. and apparently, they’re very, very expensive. lt: ideally, after death, the body is immediately transported to alcor, where it’s brought to the next stop on alistair’s tour   the operating room. aw: there’s a table in the middle of the room, and there’s lots of equipment all over it, and the table is a kind of autopsy table because it has kind of drains down the side, which i assume is so that bodily fluids can drain when they’re preparing it to be preserved. lt: i talked with james arrowood, the ceo of alcor, and he told me that this room is indeed where some of the most important prep work for preservation happens   a process called “vitrification.” james arrowhead: so their body is actually connected to a machine and that machine perfuses the body with this chemical. it’s called a cryo protective agent or a cpa. lt: kind of like a medical grade antifreeze that replaces all the water in your body   the blood and fluids that are drained out. and james says these cryoprotectants are similar to what you’d find in a lot of fish and amphibians. ja: that in nature, they’ll freeze but then they thaw out and they’re still alive. well, how does that happen? they actually have some little proteins in their blood, and those proteins in their blood protect their cells from damage, from ice nucleation, from the freezing process. lt: once that’s done, the patients are wrapped in a plastic sheet and lowered into a “cooling box” filled with liquid nitrogen. there, a fan circulates the vaporizing liquid nitrogen, which in turn draws heat from the body. the cooling process takes a while   around 5 to 7 days. at the end of that process, the body is vitrified   meaning it’s been turned into a solid, at a cool temperature of  196°c, or  320°f. at that point, the bodies are moved to their final holding destination   and the main attraction for alastair’s tour   the “patient care bay.” which is where the bodies are stored in big metal containers called dewars. aw: they’re a bit like, if you’ve ever been to a brewery and seen beer being made   they’re kind of like the big fermentation tanks that you have there. lt: each dewar contains up to four, nine, or 12 bodies, all placed vertically, and upside down in a circle. aw: and then in the middle they have a kind of column which they can pull out, which has only got heads. lt: that’s because   not everyone opts to get their whole body cryonically preserved since that costs $220,000. a cheaper option, for just $80,000, is to only have your brain preserved, like the talking heads of futurama. the way alcor preserves these bodies and heads is by using liquid nitrogen, which has the advantage of not only keeping them super cold, but keeping them super cold without the need for electricity. which, alastair explained, is why the bodies are stored upside down. aw: the reason that they’re upside down is that if anything ever goes wrong, like for instance, there’s some kind of nuclear apocalypse. and no one is there to top up the liquid nitrogen and look after the patient care bay. then gradually the liquid nitrogen that’s in the dewars would evaporate and the level will get lower and lower and lower. and the last thing that will be covered by liquid nitrogen would be the head, and the head is the most important part because that’s where the brain is. so they’re trying to apocalypse proof it as much as possible. lt: now, you might say there’s something undignified about being stored upside down in a giant thermos… to say nothing of being awoken in several hundred years, confused and possibly just a head. but, after talking with some of alcor’s staff members, who plan on being cryonically preserved themselves, alastair came to understand that, for the true believers, a little indignity is nothing compared with the possibility of eternal life. aw: there’s a kind of a wide spectrum of reasons for doing it. lt: i waited with bated breath to hear those reasons   a pathological fear of death? a burning passion to see the future? a desire to probe the boundaries of our metaphysical existence? aw: one of the reasons is, why not? lt: i talked with james, the ceo of alcor about this   and he explained that the whole “why not” attitude isn’t because people make the decision lightly, or happen to have a ton of extra money lying around. it’s because they want to become pioneers of the possible… all while knowing full well that, right now, reviving frozen, dead subjects is not possible   and there’s no guarantee that it ever will be. ja: and i hear a lot of criticism of that somehow alcor is offering people false hope, or promising that they’re going to come back someday. we do not. lt: in fact, at the moment, they don’t even know for sure that even if revival were eventually made possible, that the vitrification process adequately preserves the brain. but, james says, if it ever is to become possible, research needs to be done. and that is what this is… a big science experiment that alcor’s members want to be a part of, even if it never results in their own revival. ja: we have 1500 members and out of those 1500 members, there’s 10% that believe it’ll never happen. there’s 10% who are convinced it absolutely will happen. and then there’s 80% of the people in the middle who don’t know, but they figure it’s better than cremation and it’s better than burial. and if it never works, if we even just do the organ banking on simple organs like kidneys, then they want to contribute and have their legacy be helping save lives of other people because that may be their great grandchild someday. lt: james compares it to donating your body to science   being part of something bigger. and offering yourself the best thing we can hope for in death   a chance, however slim, of living again. here’s alastair. aw: you know, if you die, you’re going to be cremated or you’re going to be buried and then you’re probably gone forever. whereas if you do this, then you have nothing to lose. maybe it works out and you wake up one day in the future or maybe you don’t. but either way, you’re dead. so what do you care? and it’s kind of… fun. lt: i asked alastair if, after seeing the good, the bad, and the ugly of cryonic preservation up close, if he’d ever be interested in doing it himself. aw: no. i’ve thought about it, but i feel, i feel like i’m quite at peace with the fact that when i die, i’m gone and i will disappear into the ether. i’m not religious at all. but it seems kind of natural to me that i’m going to die at some point. that’s like the cycle of life. ms: that story was reported by liz tung. music that’s our show for this week   the pulse is a production off whyy in philadelphia   made possible with support from our founding sponsor, the sutherland family, and the commonwealth fund. you can follow us wherever you get your podcasts. our health and science reporters are alan yu, liz tung, and grant hill. lauren tran muchowski is our intern. charlie kaier is our engineer. our producers are nichole currie and lindsay lazarski. i’m maiken scott, thank you for listening! 6:35 11:45 whyy is your source for fact based, in depth journalism and information. as a nonprofit organization, we rely on financial support from readers like you. please give today. hosted by maiken scott the deadly ne philly plane crash caused a plume of smoke and a massive crater. here’s what to know about the environmental impacts environmental contractors removed dumpsters worth of contaminated soil from the crater, according to dep reports. 1 day ago upper makefield residents call for answers on energy transfer pipeline leak some residents in bucks county reported smells of gasoline in their water as far back as september 2023. 2 days ago meeting your match: navigating the world of modern dating we explore the complicated world of modern dating, and what science has to say about how to find love. air date: february 7, 2025 10 hours ago 13 hours ago 16 hours ago want a digest of whyy’s programs, events & stories? sign up for our weekly newsletter. together we can reach 100% of whyy’s fiscal year goal whyy provides trustworthy, fact based, local news and information and world class entertainment to everyone in our 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this year marks the bicentenary of the birth of william thomson, lord kelvin. you could be forgiven for having missed it   celebrations have been nonexistent   but in his day, kelvin was revered. his seemingly endless accomplishments included laying the first transatlantic telegraph cable, inventing the dripless tap, and being the first person in the world whose house was illuminated entirely by electricity, as a result of which he was showered with so many honors that contemporaries claimed he was entitled to more letters after his name than anyone else in the british commonwealth. but his most significant legacy lay in advancing the science of cooling, where his contributions are immortalized in the name of the international system of units temperature measurement, the kelvin. by formulating the thermodynamic laws that led to human control of cold   and thus to today’s refrigerated world   kelvin inadvertently helped utterly transform what we eat, where it’s grown, and how healthy it is, both for us and for the planet. today nearly three quarters of everything americans eat passes through a distributed perpetual winter of refrigerated warehouses, trucks, shipping containers, and chill cabinets. but as kelvin’s second law of thermodynamics should have warned us, all the energy consumed to cool food is helping warm the planet to unsustainable levels. generating the power to run cooling equipment, whether it be electricity for refrigerated warehouses or diesel fuel for “reefer” trucks, already accounts for more than 8 percent of global electricity usage. (cold storage companies are currently the third highest industrial consumers of energy.) on top of that, many of the chemicals that are often used inside the vapor compression refrigeration system that kelvin’s discoveries made possible are also super greenhouse gases: they cause hundreds   even thousands   of times more warming, on a per ton basis, than carbon dioxide. what’s more, the hotter the planet gets, the more energy it takes to cool things. the standard vapor compression cycle works by using refrigerant chemicals to absorb heat from inside a box   your home fridge or a warehouse   and then dump it into the external atmosphere. and the warmer it gets outside the box, the harder the refrigeration machinery has to work. for every degree fahrenheit increase in ambient temperature, your fridge uses at least 2 percent more energy. to make matters worse, much of the world does not yet have a us style cold chain but has begun to build one   and many of those places are also experiencing rapid population growth. the chemicals and energy used to refrigerate food already account for more than 2 percent of global emissions   the same as aviation. if everyone alive today were to have access to a cold chain similar to the one we rely on, these emissions would increase at least fivefold. “when you are face to face with a difficulty, you are up against a discovery,” kelvin once said. for the past century, the supremacy of vapor compression refrigeration hasn’t been questioned. fortunately, in the past few years the world’s scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs have begun to turn their attention to the challenge of sustainable cooling and food preservation. their new solutions will also likely transform what we eat and where it’s grown, as the introduction of refrigeration did before them   but that’s another story. rebound technologies, which was founded in denver in 2012, and a company called glaciem cooling, launched in adelaide, australia, in 2008, rely on humanity’s oldest refrigeration technology   ice   as a way to decarbonize cooling. both companies are responses to a simple insight: to make refrigeration systems compatible with renewable energy sources, you have to be able to decouple energy use from cooling supply. these companies’ novel systems do that by making ice when renewable energy is abundant. then they use that ice, mixed with brine to lower its freezing point, as a refrigerant. this lets a cooling facility operate off the grid when renewables aren’t available   when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. russell goldfarbmuren, cofounder and chief technology officer of rebound, says this technique could reduce the carbon dioxide emissions of a cooling facility by 80 percent “in most markets in the us right now.” both companies already have commercially available technology for industrial food cooling. one of glaciem’s early installations is currently chilling a winery in australia’s barossa valley. rebound’s technology has been successfully piloted at a meatpacking facility in greeley, colo. these proven solutions have the potential to radically reduce the cold chain’s carbon footprint   if businesses can be convinced to buy them. without robust government incentives, says glaciem founder julian hudson, that’s been an uphill struggle. “i’ve always said having the idea is the easy bit,” he says. “after doing this for about seven years, i’ve got an inkling of what john the baptist must have felt like two thousand years ago trying to convert heathens.” rebound and glaciem rely on an old school vapor compression refrigeration cycle to turn water into ice. other scientists and engineers are doing away with the compressor altogether in search of sustainability. instead, they create cooling by taking advantage of ways that heat is absorbed as a material’s molecules shift from disordered to ordered. this effect is called caloric cooling. it was first discovered more than a century ago when a pair of physicists observed that when they waved a powerful magnet over a piece of nickel, the surrounding temperature dropped. the idea that we could cool our food by simply switching an electromagnet on and off, no refrigerant gases or compressor necessary, is compelling   but there is a catch. this “magnetocaloric” effect occurs only in materials that can be magnetized, and usually occurs at a very high temperature. just one element   an expensive rare earth metal called gadolinium   is magnetocaloric at room temperature. for the past few decades, caloric cooling has routinely been touted as the future of cooling without ever making it out of the lab. recently, however, physicists have begun to figure out how to induce caloric responses using different forces. for example, a cooling effect occurs when nickel titanium tubing bounces back from mechanical stress or when multilayer ceramics are exposed to a powerful electrical field. after several false starts, caloric cooling finally seems poised for success. florian schabus, a former climate tech investor, is part of a uk based startup called barocal, founded to commercialize technology originally developed at the university of cambridge. this fall the company showcased a prototype barocaloric fridge, which cools by applying and then removing pressure on a material, using parts borrowed from a diesel engine. (the material itself remains a trade secret, but schabus tells me it is safe, cheap, and widely available.) the ratio of cooling delivered per unit of energy used is double that of a conventional refrigerator, all without the need for any toxic or warming refrigerant gases. another approach, led by thermal scientist drew lillie and funded by the us department of energy’s arpa e program, uses a different force in the physics toolbox: electrochemistry. simply put, lillie’s system, called calion, creates cooling by adding a salt   an ionic compound, which means it carries an electrochemical charge   to water and then separating it out again. now the trick is to make these new school fridges at scale and affordably. for schabus and lillie, the primary remaining obstacle is that existing refrigeration systems are manufactured by the millions, making them incredibly cheap. still, both schabus and lillie think caloric cooling will eventually triumph. schabus compared it to the rise of ev technology, which many legacy car manufacturers ignored for decades before realizing gas powered engines were being made obsolete. if they’re correct, the climate benefits will be substantial. “i can’t think of anything else that’s, like, swap one device out for another and you have planetary change,” says lillie. ice bank assisted vapor compression refrigeration and, ultimately, caloric cooling are strong candidates for the future of cooling food   not to mention people and data centers   in stationary spaces. but food is also kept cold as it moves, and right now much of it travels around in diesel powered refrigerated trucks. while some companies are working on solar powered alternative trucks, zipline has taken a different approach: deliver food and other perishables so quickly that they don’t need to be refrigerated. in 2016, zipline began delivering blood to patients in rural hospitals in rwanda using autonomous drones. it is now the world’s largest commercial drone delivery service, operating on four continents and making a delivery of anything from plasma to pizza every 65 seconds. in rwanda, where both roads and the cold chain leave much to be desired, the logic is clear: there’s no real way to store temperature controlled medical products such as blood and vaccines safely in rural areas, or move them from cities, without using a drone. in the united states, the most refrigerated nation on earth, with only 17 percent of its surface area more than half a mile away from a road, zipline’s value proposition is more nuanced: removing asthma causing refrigerated delivery vehicles from clogged streets, reducing the need for warehouses, and all the while responding to americans’ growing appetite for on demand, near instantaneous delivery of anything and everything. since november 2021, zipline’s drones have been busy delivering four out of five items walmart stocks at its store in pea ridge, ark.   not flat screen tvs or golf clubs but plenty of fresh produce and ice cream   flying to consumers’ homes and back. among the most common payloads is, apparently, rotisserie chicken. “our assessment is that we can do about 34 deliveries for the environmental impact of one combustion engine based automobile delivery,” says zipline’s lead engineer, eric watson. the drones are electric and charged using renewable energy, they’re quieter and safer than trucks, and they emit no particulate pollution. drones aren’t going to replace the refrigerated trucks that take frozen pizza from the digiorno factory to the store any day soon   but they can already get rid of the vans bringing it to your door, replacing at least one link in the cold chain with something faster, quieter, and more environmentally friendly. ice cream needs to be frozen, beer is better chilled, but meat and vegetables don’t have to be cold to be good   they just need to be fresh. in santa barbara, calif., apeel sciences has created a formula made from common food ingredients that when sprayed on fruit and vegetables creates a nanoscale coating that slows down the passage of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and water vapor. this means a fruit or vegetable “breathes” as slowly as possible and remains hydrated longer. spraying produce lightly with apeel already doubles or triples how long fruit and vegetables stay fresh at ambient temperature; if, as it expects, the company can tweak its formula to reach quadruple, the coating will have the same shelf life extension power as refrigeration. the ability to transport and store perishable foods without refrigeration doesn’t just have huge climate benefits. it also changes the economics of agricultural production. it opens up entirely new markets by enabling crops to travel longer distances. the challenge, ironically, is that while americans a century ago feared and mistrusted refrigeration, their counterparts today are wedded to the idea that only cold means fresh. apeel launched in the united states as a way to extend refrigerated shelf life rather than replace it. “that’s the way that we do things today, because the dogma in the fresh produce industry is the cold chain, the cold chain, the cold chain, and did i mention the cold chain?” james rogers, apeel’s cofounder, told me. still, the company has found that early adopters reduced food waste by 50 percent using the coating. the coating is approved by the food and drug administration and made of ingredients found in baby formula. but an online misinformation campaign claiming apeel is unnatural as well as potentially toxic has hurt the company significantly. what the critics fail to recognize is that that by slowing the respiration of produce, the coating extends a product’s life the same way refrigeration does. “fresh” organic american apples are already stored in refrigerated, controlled atmosphere warehouses for up to a year. another technology designed to replace refrigeration emerged a few years ago when indian potato farmer vipul saran channeled his frustration with the spotty state of the cold chain in the subcontinent into the development of an entirely new way to preserve food. his method is akin to canning   it’s a thermal treatment   but it uses supercritical carbon dioxide rather than hot water. “supercritical” means the carbon dioxide behaves like a liquid and a gas   and therefore it can pasteurize foods at a much lower temperature than standard methods can and without the need for a liquid medium. the first product from his company, which is called farther farms, is currently in production at a pilot facility in rochester, n.y., and will be making its way to market “soon.” it’s a bag of french fries with a shelf life of 120 days at room temperature. farther farms expects to be able to extend that to a year and to be in commercial production by 2026, all the while working on applying its technology to other perishable foods, including meat. mark field, a consultant based in melbourne, australia, who recently wrote a positive report on the potential for farther farms’ technology, told me he thought the company was smart to go to market with a product aimed at quick service restaurants, rather than trying to sell directly to consumers. indeed, he told me that even if in the future, australian lamb chops were to be shipped at room temperature using farther farms’ technology, they’d likely still be sold from a chilled case in western supermarkets. the challenge of shifting century old beliefs about freshness means that the best hope for implementing the future of food preservation is likely in those large parts of the world, including sub saharan africa, where a cold chain has yet to be built and refrigerated food is still viewed with the same mistrust americans felt a century ago. just as several countries in that region bypassed checkbooks and landlines in favor of digital banking and cellphones, some may yet forgo the fridge   and show the rest of the world how to build a sustainable, resilient, and more delicious food system in the process. nicola twilley, a contributing writer at the new yorker, is author of “frostbite: how refrigeration changed our food, our planet, and ourselves” and cohost of the gastropod podcast. digital access home delivery gift subscriptions log in manage my account customer service delivery issues feedback news tips help & faqs staff list advertise newsletters view the epaper order back issues news in education search the archives privacy policy terms of service terms of purchase work at boston globe media internship program co op program do not sell my personal information

books kids popular authors & events recommendations audio popular books popular new & noteworthy bestsellers graphic novels & manga the must read books of 2024 popular books in spanish coming soon fiction classics romance literary fiction mystery & thriller science fiction spanish language fiction nonfiction biographies & memoirs wellness cookbooks history spanish language nonfiction view all > series gray man rebel blue ranch all souls a song of ice and fire penguin classics view all > kids popular new & noteworthy bestsellers award winners the parenting book guide books to read before bed books for middle graders trending series who was? magic tree house the last kids on earth mad libs planet omar view all > beloved characters the world of eric carle bluey llama llama dr. seuss junie b. jones peter rabbit categories board books picture books guided reading levels middle grade graphic novels view all > popular trending trending this week romantasy books to start reading now page turning series to start now books to cope with anxiety short reads anti racist resources staff picks romance mystery & thriller fiction memoir & fiction features & interviews emma brodie interview james ellroy interview nicola yoon interview qian julie wang interview deepak chopra essay how can i get published? for book clubs reese's book club oprah’s book club guide: tell me everything guide: james authors & events our authors michelle obama han kang emily henry amor towles colson whitehead view all > in their own words qian julie wang patrick radden keefe phoebe robinson emma brodie ta nehisi coates laura hankin recommendations book lists books to read if you love "wicked" western romance novels insightful therapy books to read this year historical fiction with female protagonists best thrillers of all time manga and graphic novels articles start reading happy place how to make reading a habit with james clear how can i get published? why reading is good for your health 10 facts about taylor swift audio popular new releases award winners coming soon view all > featured memoirs read by the author our most soothing narrators press play for inspiration audiobooks you just can't pause listen with the whole family view all > look inside how refrigeration changed our food, our planet, and ourselves how refrigeration changed our food, our planet, and ourselves how refrigeration changed our food, our planet, and ourselves jun 25, 2024 | isbn 9780735223288 buy jun 25, 2024 | isbn 9780735223295 buy jun 25, 2024 | 739 minutes buy buy from other retailers: buy from other retailers: buy from other retailers: jun 25, 2024 | isbn 9780735223288 buy from other retailers: jun 25, 2024 | isbn 9780735223295 buy from other retailers: jun 25, 2024 | isbn 9780593864418 739 minutes buy from other retailers: “engrossing…hard to put down.”   the new york times book review“frostbite is a perfectly executed cold fusion of science, history, and literary verve . . . as a fellow nonfiction writer, i bow down. this is how it’s done.”   mary roach, author of fuzz and stiffan engaging and far reaching exploration of refrigeration, tracing its evolution from scientific mystery to globe spanning infrastructure, and an essential investigation into how it has remade our entire relationship with food for better and for worsehow often do we open the fridge or peer into the freezer with the expectation that we’ll find something fresh and ready to eat? it’s an everyday act but just a century ago, eating food that had been refrigerated was cause for both fear and excitement. the introduction of artificial refrigeration overturned millennia of dietary history, launching a new chapter in human nutrition. we could now overcome not just rot, but seasonality and geography. tomatoes in january? avocados in shanghai? all possible.in frostbite, new yorker contributor and cohost of the award winning podcast gastropod nicola twilley takes readers on a tour of the cold chain from farm to fridge, visiting off the beaten path landmarks such as missouri’s subterranean cheese caves, the banana ripening rooms of new york city, and the vast refrigerated tanks that store the nation’s orange juice reserves. today, nearly three quarters of everything on the average american plate is processed, shipped, stored, and sold under refrigeration. it’s impossible to make sense of our food system without understanding the all but invisible network of thermal control that underpins it. twilley’s eye opening book is the first to reveal the transformative impact refrigeration has had on our health and our guts; our farms, tables, kitchens, and cities; global economics and politics; and even our environment.in the developed world, we’ve reaped the benefits of refrigeration for more than a century, but the costs are catching up with us. we’ve eroded our connection to our food and redefined what “fresh” means. more important, refrigeration is one of the leading contributors to climate change. as the developing world races to build a us style cold chain, twilley asks: can we reduce our dependence on refrigeration? should we? a deeply researched and reported, original, and entertaining dive into the most important invention in the history of food and drink, frostbite makes the case for a recalibration of our relationship with the fridge and how our future might depend on it. “engrossing…hard to put down.”   the new york times book review“frostbite is a perfectly executed cold fusion of science, history, and literary verve . . . as a fellow nonfiction writer, i bow down. this is how it’s done.”   mary roach, author of fuzz and stiffan engaging and far reaching exploration of refrigeration, tracing its evolution from scientific mystery to globe spanning infrastructure, and an essential investigation into how it has remade our entire relationship with food for better and for worsehow often do we open the fridge or peer into the freezer with the expectation that we’ll find something fresh and ready to eat? it’s an everyday act but just a century ago, eating food that had been refrigerated was cause for both fear and excitement. the introduction of artificial refrigeration overturned millennia of dietary history, launching a new chapter in human nutrition. we could now overcome not just rot, but seasonality and geography. tomatoes in january? avocados in shanghai? all possible.in frostbite, new yorker contributor and cohost of the award winning podcast gastropod nicola twilley takes readers on a tour of the cold chain from farm to fridge, visiting off the beaten path landmarks such as missouri’s subterranean cheese caves, the banana ripening rooms of new york city, and the vast refrigerated tanks that store the nation’s orange juice reserves. today, nearly three quarters of everything on the average american plate is processed, shipped, stored, and sold under refrigeration. it’s impossible to make sense of our food system without understanding the all but invisible network of thermal control that underpins it. twilley’s eye opening book is the first to reveal the transformative impact refrigeration has had on our health and our guts; our farms, tables, kitchens, and cities; global economics and politics; and even our environment.in the developed world, we’ve reaped the benefits of refrigeration for more than a century, but the costs are catching up with us. we’ve eroded our connection to our food and redefined what “fresh” means. more important, refrigeration is one of the leading contributors to climate change. as the developing world races to build a us style cold chain, twilley asks: can we reduce our dependence on refrigeration? should we? a deeply researched and reported, original, and entertaining dive into the most important invention in the history of food and drink, frostbite makes the case for a recalibration of our relationship with the fridge and how our future might depend on it. “engrossing…hard to put down.”   the new york times book review“frostbite is a perfectly executed cold fusion of science, history, and literary verve . . . as a fellow nonfiction writer, i bow down. this is how it’s done.”   mary roach, author of fuzz and stiffan engaging and far reaching exploration of refrigeration, tracing its evolution from scientific mystery to globe spanning infrastructure, and an essential investigation into how it has remade our entire relationship with food for better and for worsehow often do we open the fridge or peer into the freezer with the expectation that we’ll find something fresh and ready to eat? it’s an everyday act but just a century ago, eating food that had been refrigerated was cause for both fear and excitement. the introduction of artificial refrigeration overturned millennia of dietary history, launching a new chapter in human nutrition. we could now overcome not just rot, but seasonality and geography. tomatoes in january? avocados in shanghai? all possible.in frostbite, new yorker contributor and cohost of the award winning podcast gastropod nicola twilley takes readers on a tour of the cold chain from farm to fridge, visiting off the beaten path landmarks such as missouri’s subterranean cheese caves, the banana ripening rooms of new york city, and the vast refrigerated tanks that store the nation’s orange juice reserves. today, nearly three quarters of everything on the average american plate is processed, shipped, stored, and sold under refrigeration. it’s impossible to make sense of our food system without understanding the all but invisible network of thermal control that underpins it. twilley’s eye opening book is the first to reveal the transformative impact refrigeration has had on our health and our guts; our farms, tables, kitchens, and cities; global economics and politics; and even our environment.in the developed world, we’ve reaped the benefits of refrigeration for more than a century, but the costs are catching up with us. we’ve eroded our connection to our food and redefined what “fresh” means. more important, refrigeration is one of the leading contributors to climate change. as the developing world races to build a us style cold chain, twilley asks: can we reduce our dependence on refrigeration? should we? a deeply researched and reported, original, and entertaining dive into the most important invention in the history of food and drink, frostbite makes the case for a recalibration of our relationship with the fridge and how our future might depend on it. nicola twilley is the coauthor of until proven safe: the history and future of quarantine, named one of the best books of 2021 by time, npr, the guardian, and the financial times. she is cohost of gastropod, the award winning and… more about nicola twilley nicola twilley is the coauthor of until proven safe: the history and future of quarantine, named one of the best books of 2021 by time, npr, the guardian, and the financial times. she is cohost of gastropod, the award winning and… more about nicola twilley nicola twilley is the coauthor of until proven safe: the history and future of quarantine, named one of the best books of 2021 by time, npr, the guardian, and the financial times. she is cohost of gastropod, the award winning and… more about nicola twilley “[nicola twilley] 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.”  wall street journal“just the fact that we can keep things cold food, ourselves, drink changes everything about the way we live . . . it’s smart and it’s fun . . . a book about cold is the perfect summer book.”  science friday, best science books of summer 2024“twilley’s style weaves storytelling with a series of well timed narrative combination punches . . . this is bravura technique. you read through once, not unappreciatively, and then boom you go back and read it again, your mind racing to embrace the ramifications . . . still, frostbite wears its politics lightly, trusting the reader to conjure their own indignation. the style is accessible, informative and infectiously readable. yet all the time, the book is quietly inspiring a desire for change. you will not know you’ve been evangelised but you will reach a point where you walk into the fruit and veg aisle on your weekly shop, look at a carton of ‘fresh’ orange juice or pick up a vac packed chicken and feel ​overcome with a kind of despairing nausea.”  financial times“twilley’s frostbite is one of the best informed and most entertaining examples of food or science journalism published since the emergence of the field . . . one cannot help but admire twilley’s determination to learn from the people who made and maintain this complex modern marvel and share her enthusiasm for the subject of refrigeration. in her research for this book, she consulted the right sources, talked to the right people, and visited the best archives available, but it is twilley’s first person experiences that make reading frostbite so much fun.”  science“[twilley’s] engrossing book combines lucid history, science and a thoughtful consideration of how daily life today is both dependent on and deformed by this matrix of artificial cold . . . i found this book hard to put down. the startling statistics the cold chain preserves almost three quarters of the food americans eat; american households open the fridge door an average of 107 times a day separate tales of unsung scientists . . . read this book at your own risk; grocery shopping will not be the same.”  the new york times book review“a fascinating look at how refrigeration shapes different facets of society, including our economy. going back to the earliest days of the ‘cold chain’ when ice was harvested from new england lakes and packed into rail cars, refrigeration shrunk the world and drove industries to scale, especially meat. it was refrigeration that enabled centralized stockyards and massive slaughterhouses, which largely did away with the local butcher as a skilled trade and viable business. later in the book, nicola twilley visits rwanda and show us the big dilemma: unless we make considerable breakthroughs, spreading refrigeration to poorer countries would have incredible health benefits for billions of people but would also be catastrophic for the climate. there’s a desperate need to find new ways to cool our food.”  npr’s planet money“a lively history of humans and food and fridges, told by twilley, a science journalist . . . she takes us from the earliest experiments in freezing food sir francis bacon caught a fatal chill in 1626 trying to freeze a chicken up through the contemporary systems we now have in america and around the world . . . the history of chilling our food is twinned with the study of how and why it rots, and those explanations are much more complicated than you might expect.”  pittsburgh post gazette“[t]his riveting account of how we manufactured cold is popular history at its best . . . nicola twilley is at her most entertaining profiling the obsessives who, through trial and error, made it possible for new zealand kiwifruit to ‘spend up to seven weeks wending its way around the indian ocean and through the suez canal and the strait of gibraltar’ before ending up in a london fruit salad. not everyone embraced refrigeration in its early days, and twilley makes the persuasive argument that its effects on the kind of food we eat and on the environment will make you think twice about eating a fresh peach out of season.”  airmail“this deeply reported, vividly rendered book lives up to its subtitle and aptly explains why the united kingdom’s royal society called refrigeration the most important invention in the history of food . . . frostbite skillfully sketches the history of the refrigeration revolution . . . but many of the book’s most fascinating bits come not from the history of cold, but from explorations into how we adapt to its consequences today.”  undark magazine “a revelatory deep dive into refrigeration’s past and present. [twilley] goes well beyond the obvious (‘nearly three quarters of everything on the average american plate’ is at some point refrigerated) to explore every aspect of what she dubs the ‘artificial cryosphere’ a globe spanning cold zone maintained by massive infrastructures and energy expenditures that, due to its greenhouse gas emissions, has paradoxically played a major role in ‘the disappearance of its natural counterpart’: ice . . . the result is a brilliant synthesis of a complex system’s many facets, with a useful focus on sustainable solutions.”  publishers weekly (starred review) “[twilley] spent a decade tracing the history and contemplating the future of artificial cold. in frostbite, she considers how we got where we are today: enjoying whatever food we want when we want it, but with unintended consequences for our health and environment . . . from hard science to fascinating history, major machinery to quirky theories, frostbite explores seemingly every aspect of our refrigeration dependent existence as the author visits banana ripening rooms in new york city and cheese caves in missouri; travels to china to learn about its booming pork industry; has coffee in california with “the world’s first and only refrigerator dating expert” and much more . . . frostbite, a decidedly interesting and insightful book by an impressively intrepid reporter, offers compelling food for thought about the role of cold in our lives, for better or worse, now and in the future.”  bookpage (starred review)“an oddly fascinating look at the world of refrigeration . . . twilley’s book is a delightful mine of meaningful trivia: one learns from her pages, for instance, why pizza and ice cream are shipped separately and why baked goods are cooled gradually (because, as a cold storage warehouse manager told her, “bread will crystallize if it’s cooled too fast”). throughout, the author’s historical reach traverses seemingly effortlessly from the roman empire to 19th century america . . . a literate treat for tech  and history inclined foodies.”  kirkus (starred review)“the saga of ‘domesticating cold’ and the many methods of food preservation are spryly communicated by twilley . . . information about the evolution and design of modern refrigerators, food waste, the control of fruit ripening, and the subterranean global seed vault (‘a noah’s ark for seeds’) is noteworthy. this distinctive history tells us not to take our household fridge for granted; it has profoundly affected the composition of our meals and made handy leftovers possible.”  booklist“frostbite is a perfectly executed cold fusion of science, history, and literary verve. you have no idea the fun you’re in for here, the marvelously odd characters and their quietly world shifting devices   truths and tales that could only have been unearthed through the reporterly perseverance and giddy curiosity of nicola twilley. as a fellow nonfiction writer, i bow down. this is how it’s done.”  mary roach, new york times bestselling author of fuzz and stiff “nicola twilley takes readers on a trip along the “cold chain,” which is really what connects farm to table. it’s a fascinating, eye opening journey, and twilley is a fabulous guide. frostbite will forever change the way you look at food.”  elizabeth kolbert, pulitzer prize winning author of the sixth extinction “in frostbite, nicola twilley has made the simple idea of cold into both a complex tale of life on earth and a wonderfully addictive reading experience. there’s a remarkable cast of characters from scientists to freezer specialists working to understand it, to harness it, along the way accidentally and purposefully reshaping our lives. we so often focus on issues of warmth that we tend to forget the bone chilling power of its opposite. but, i can promise you, after this book you won’t do that.”  deborah blum, pulitzer prize winning author of the poison squad “frostbite is astonishing. from daring cryonauts to exhaling salad bags to gaseous apples, nicola twilley brings readers on a jaw dropping voyage that lays bare the miracle, mess, and surprising ramifications of refrigeration. a must read for anyone who eats or drinks in the 21st century. i can’t stop thinking about this book.”  bianca bosker, new york times bestselling author of get the picture “in her wonderfully, shiver inducingly immersive frostbite, nicola twilley scrapes clear a window onto the modern cold chain, the pervasive yet mostly invisible infrastructure of chilled warehouses and distribution systems that supply food to our household refrigerators today’s humming hearths. as twilley documents in both entertaining and sobering detail, this cold control is a truly remarkable achievement, a boon for human nourishment and pleasure, yet a costly one for the natural superstructures that ultimately feed and house us all.”  harold mcgee, james beard award winning author of nose dive and on food and cooking connect sign up for news about books, authors, and more from penguin random house © 2025 penguin random house connect sign up for news about books, authors, and more from penguin random house © 2025 penguin random house visit other sites in the penguin random house network brightly raise kids who love to read today's top books want to know what people are actually reading right now? taste an online magazine for today’s home cook just for joining you’ll get personalized recommendations on your dashboard daily and features only for members.

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what to read nonfiction in “frostbite,” nicola twilley travels the cold chain that preserves what we eat and helps it get around the world. “we’re in the business of trying to sell a dying product,” one fruit warehouse owner tells twilley. “it’s always a race to get it to where it needs to be before it dies. ”credit...derek brahney supported by by sallie tisdale sallie tisdale is the author of “the lie about the truck: survivor, reality tv, and the endless gaze.” when you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. frostbite: how refrigeration changed our food, our planet, and ourselves, by nicola twilley consider the improbable fact of the supermarket banana. in “frostbite,” an exploration of the vast system known as the cold chain, the journalist nicola twilley follows the banana through a “seamless network of thermal control.” this series of refrigerated trucks, rail cars, shipping containers and warehouses ends in the ripening room, with its temperature gauges and gas immersion baths, all to meet our demand for ripe tropical fruit in all seasons. “produce is a labor of love,” a warehouse owner tells her. “i tell people that working here is like a face tattoo   you’ve got to be really sure you want it.” twilley is a food and health reporter who has studied cold and refrigeration for many years. her engrossing book combines lucid history, science and a thoughtful consideration of how daily life today is both dependent on and deformed by this matrix of artificial cold. in the 19th century, using ice to keep rail cars cold eliminated the scourge of urban slaughterhouses. with the gruesome spectacle pushed farther out of view, americans began to eat a lot more meat. the national cattle population doubled and more land was dedicated to livestock in texas and the great plains. bison all but disappeared and most native americans were confined to reservations. by the 1880s, the bountiful prairie was largely plowed under. but we can now buy hamburger everywhere. the home refrigerator is barely a century old. twilley is shown how simple it is to build one, and then tells us just why it took so long to figure out.