Frostbite

(by Nicola Twilley)

There are so many interesting/unexpected/fun facts and anecdotes in this book (subtitle: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves); I definitely could not shut up about all the stuff I was learning while I was reading it. Twilley takes readers on a global tour of the largely-unseen spaces of the “cold chain”—which she describes as “the network of warehouses, shipping containers, trucks, display cases, and domestic fridges” that gets refrigerated food from producers to consumers. She spends some time shadowing workers in a refrigerated warehouse in California; she harvests ice at a historic ice house in Maine; she tags along with a fish dealer in Rwanda who tells her about the difficulties of getting enough flake ice to keep his wares cold; she visits the underground cheese storage facility in Missouri where Kraft stores vast amounts of cheese in a former mine and a facility in Delaware that stores orange juice in both its frozen concentrated form and its not-from-concentrate form. And she writes a lot about the history of mechanical refrigeration and other aspects of the cold chain (e.g. various methods of manipulating the chemical composition of the atmosphere in which produce is stored to keep it fresher for longer). I knew bits and pieces of this already (if you’re in the US and you’re eating an apple from the grocery store in the spring, that apple has been in cold storage) but lots of it was new to me (I had no idea about the existence of banana-ripening rooms where bananas are treated with ethylene to get them to different degrees of ripeness for different customers).

Towards the end of the book, Twilley talks about various benefits and drawbacks of the cold chain and points out that the system we now have isn’t the only possible system: in a future where “cooling could become just one of the ways we store and move food,” there could be more energy-efficient/sustainable options, but only if we actually work toward those options rather than just trying to build out a US-style cold chain globally.

More fun tidbits: I liked reading about how a Japan Airlines executive worked with “a pair of Canadian undertakers” to develop a “tuna “coffin”” for shipping bluefin tuna to Tokyo. I also liked reading about the Sea-Land shipping company’s “mobile research laboratory,” which was a lab in a shipping container that let researchers travel alongside refrigerated shipping containers and take measurements of temperature, humidity, etc. with various probes and sensors to figure out how to optimize things to lessen damage to the containers’ contents. Also: I had no idea about the brief existence of “pipeline refrigeration” systems as a thing in cities in the US in the early twentieth century. These were refrigerated spaces “that sold cold” to surrounding “businesses and homes […] through a network of subterranean brine pipes.” What?!