How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves
Starred review from July 15, 2024
Twilley (Until Proven Safe), cohost of the podcast, offers a revelatory deep dive into refrigeration’s past and present. She 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. She traces refrigeration’s current global dominance back to a chance misunderstanding 200 years ago, when organic chemists’ erroneous conclusion that “protein from flesh foods was the only essential nutrient” led to widespread fears of meat famine and subsequent investment in and adoption of new methods to store meat. Among the many intriguing topics covered are refrigeration’s role in generating food waste (studies blame fridge design—the bigger the fridge, the more likely a household is to overbuy perishables and overlook them till they spoil) and the energy waste associated with the American system of egg distribution (they are industrially washed, removing their naturally bacteria-resistant layer, and thus require refrigeration; in other countries, chickens are vaccinated against salmonella to obviate the need for washing). The result is a brilliant synthesis of a complex system’s many facets, with a useful focus on sustainable solutions.
