fiefoe

The book title belies how many fun facts reside inside this most informative book. Nicola Twilley's coverage of the cold storage technology is very well-rounded.

The refrigerated warehouse is the missing middle in food’s journey from farm to table: a black box whose mysterious internal workings allow perishable food to conquer the constraints of both time and space.

* would never imagine that beef carcasses have to be electrocuted in order to withstand the rigors of refrigeration without toughening up... you have no idea that the bag itself is a highly engineered respiratory apparatus, designed in layers of differentially semipermeable films to slow spinach, arugula, and endive metabolism and extend their shelf lives.

* Mechanical cooling—refrigeration produced by human artifice, as opposed to the natural chill offered by weather-dependent snow and ice—wasn’t achieved until the mid-1700s, it wasn’t commercialized until the late 1800s, and it wasn’t domesticated until the 1920s... Today, a century later, nearly three-quarters of everything on the average American plate is processed, packaged, shipped, stored, and/or sold under refrigeration. The United States already boasts an estimated 5.5 billion cubic feet of refrigerated space—a third polar region of sorts.

Most urgent, mechanical cooling makes a growing and significant contribution to global warming, based on the power required to run it as well as the super-greenhouse gases that circulate within many cooling systems. With unfortunate irony, the spread of the artificial cryosphere turns out to be one of the leading culprits in the disappearance of its natural counterpart.

Steering is done using two levers, both of which are incredibly sensitive; on one of them, the controls are also inverted, so that a left turn will take you to the right. “If you want some horror, watch YouTube forklift accidents,”

In a frozen warehouse, the floor glitters with ice crystals, leading to slips and falls. The ammonia used in the refrigeration system is deadly... a white cloud. “When you see that, you’re seeing death,” he said. “Ammonia wants moisture—it wants your eyeballs and your crevices.”

cold’s ability to slow everything down... the humans charged with loading and unloading those dairy products. Even computers cease to function in the deep freeze... At minus twenty and below, tape doesn’t stick properly, rubber becomes brittle, cardboard is stiffer—and all those minor obstacles seem more like insurmountable challenges to a cold-slowed brain.

* the underdressed or overexposed individual starts to grumble, mumble, fumble, and stumble. “Cold stupid” is mountaineering slang for the way that thought processes congeal after spending too long at a low temperature.

Colder almost always means slower and dumber. One recent study showed that warm-blooded marine predators such as seals and whales tend to cluster in the coolest parts of the ocean, not because they find the chill congenial but rather because, under those conditions, their piscine prey is “slow, stupid, and cold”—and thus easier to catch.

Lighting uses energy and emits heat, so a perpetual blue-gray gloom prevailed inside the windowless cooler and freezer rooms.

To make this daily game of warehouse Jenga even more challenging, certain products can’t go next to each other... Organic products shouldn’t sit underneath conventional ones; raw foods mustn’t be stacked above cooked. “You have to think about odor,” added Espinoza. “Onions and seafood can be quite potent.”... Like natural fibers, bread and cheese have a tendency to absorb the odors to which they’re exposed, as does ice cream

* Although the idea that working in the cold would lead to catching cold makes intuitive sense, scientists have only just discovered why... a previously unknown immune mechanism: cells in our nostrils that are capable of detecting incoming microbes and releasing a swarm of tiny little antiviral bubbles to surround and neutralize them. According to the Boston-based team behind the breakthrough, at forty degrees, nostril cells release significantly fewer and less potent defensive bubbles

* Cold stress can literally be measured in the blood of forklift truck operators: scientists found that plasma levels of the fight-or-flight hormone noradrenaline were significantly higher after a shift in the freezer... Muscles contract and tendons tighten in the cold, making them more prone to strains and tears; inhaling cold air can trigger bronchial spasms, inducing asthma or even a chronic pulmonary condition known as Eskimo lung.

the therapeutic impacts of cold exposure, told me that when he sits people in a specially designed cooling suit for three hours, they experience the metabolic equivalent of a medium exercise training session. “It’s the combination of muscle contractions from shivering and the stimulus that you’re getting from the cold that really improve your ability to handle glucose in your blood,”

each of us has our own metabolic rate, as well as varying degrees and forms of internal padding, surface area, and body hair, and even a particular ratio of slow- to fast-twitch muscle fibers, all of which add up to make an individual more or less cold tolerant.

The hoodie—iconic wardrobe staple of skateboarders, hip-hop stars, and normcore tech-industry bros—is one of the very earliest examples of purpose-built protective wear for refrigerated-warehouse workers... RefrigiWear products are also worn by Iditarod dogsled racers, New Mexican molybdenum miners, and the men who built the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, but the company’s core market remains refrigerated-warehouse workers.

the first turkeys were starting to come in from Montana to be stockpiled for Thanksgiving; frozen pizzas and TV dinners accumulate over the summer in anticipation of back-to-school and football season in the fall... pallets stacked with rolls of X-ray film for local hospitals; and thousands and thousands of freshly baked King’s Hawaiian buns, trucked in hot from Torrance—a thermal disruption for which Americold charges extra. “We need to bring it down slowly to keep the moisture in the product. Bread will crystallize if it’s cooled too fast,”

In nonpremium brands, a pint of ice cream is, on average, 50 percent air. This leads to all sorts of logistical complications. National brands of ice cream have to use different formulations for different regions to take into account the thinner air at higher elevations. “You can’t truck it from Washington to Georgia,” Espinoza told me. “The Rockies,”

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Leonardo da Vinci, Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton—who all tried, and failed, to establish where cold comes from. Bacon died from a chill caught while trying to freeze a chicken using snow; ... René Descartes, who compared certainty about the very existence of cold unfavorably to certainty about that of God, came closest to our modern scientific understanding in his Meditations... “If it is true that cold is merely the absence of heat,” he argued

The compressor was a black plastic–sheathed cylinder the size of a can of beer, manufactured by Samsung. The condenser, a book-sized concertina of rippled aluminum, came from Thailand. The evaporator was an off-white rectangle about as big as a legal-size sheet of paper that looked sort of like a flattened, abstract-art version of a circuit board. The final player in the fridge quartet was so small I didn’t spot it at first—a little coil of thin copper wire called a capillary tube.

At the point a mostly liquid refrigerant enters the evaporator, it’s at very low pressure—so low that, as it loops around inside the back wall of the fridge, it can’t help but begin to boil. As it boils, its molecules suck heat from their surroundings in order to move faster and expand into a gas. That thermal gradient produces the desirable side effect of cooling the contents of the fridge... In an explanation that was completely counterintuitive yet also made perfect sense, Bradford explained that R-134a could not dump all the heat it picked up from inside the fridge and cool down into a liquid again unless we warmed it up. Only once our R-134a was hotter than the garage we were standing in would that heat flow out from the refrigerant and into the air around us... By the time it gets down to the end of the condenser, it’s probably at ninety degrees.” <> Then it hits a choke point: the expansion valve. This long and extremely skinny tube restricts the amount of refrigerant flowing through, creating an area of lower pressure on the other side. The refrigerant makes it back to the evaporator as a low-pressure liquid—cool enough, and with a low enough boiling point, to suck in all the heat inside the fridge as it turns into a gas once again.

Smoking meat or fish dries it out but also deposits cell-killing chemicals on the food’s surface. Cheese—memorably characterized by author Clifton Fadiman as “milk’s leap toward immortality”—relies on lactic acid bacteria to sour the milk, followed by the addition of salt and a mixture of enzymes called rennet to help it coagulate into curds

In Asia, for example, fish, cabbage, and soybeans were mixed with salt as well as moldy rice to encourage the growth of beneficial microbes whose busy fermentation both repels their noxious cousins and produces deliciously tangy, funky flavors—the precursors of today’s soy sauce, sushi, and kimchi. This partial decomposition can be seen as a kind of negotiated preservation truce.

Canning: the French introduced universal conscription to raise the largest army the world had yet seen: more than a million men, under the command of a young, ambitious Napoleon Bonaparte. The local countryside buckled under the pressure of feeding this plundering horde, and in 1795 the French government issued a challenge: a generous cash prize of twelve thousand francs for a new method of preserving food... Appert began his experiments by funneling peas and boiled beef into old champagne bottles, corking them, and sitting them in hot-water baths for varying lengths of time.

Ice harvest: Working in pairs, the men cut along parallel scored lines using heavy, two-handled ice saws. When the rectangular raft floated free, they grabbed long-handled chisel-like tools called breaker bars, which, when dropped on the scored lines, broke the blocks up crosswise. Finally, they steered each individual cake into the icehouse channel, using a pike pole to gently nudge and drag the slow-moving white cuboids through a narrow band of black water... Snapping individual blocks off the longer raft using the breaker bar was, however, the most rewarding experience—one correctly positioned thrust and, with a gentle crack, a newly carved block emerged in all its crystalline perfection.

a snow pit would remain cool for a full five weeks, keeping the food stored in it good for almost as long. “If early man had placed milk or cheeses within covered pots

1600s: Neapolitan polymath Giambattista della Porta had discovered that adding salt to ice lowered its freezing temperature, meaning that custards could be turned into ice cream and wine into slushies.

she found, local authorities and planning departments were no longer aware of the existence of these subterranean structures, conjuring up an evocative image of the British Isles as a sort of ice-pocked Swiss cheese, riddled with forgotten voids.

* Frederic Tudor: had not foreseen that the freezing temperatures necessary for ice to form would also leave Boston’s harbor icebound, meaning that he needed to build huge icehouses to store his cargo until it could be shipped... Before the ice trade, the sawdust from Maine’s timber mills had been similarly worthless.. —meaning that Tudor could acquire vital insulation materials at a knockdown price. Perhaps most fortuitously, as Gavin Weightman, author of The Frozen Water Trade, explains, “since it could be classified as neither mining nor farming,” the ice trade was not subject to any taxes. (A similar category confusion arose in the UK when the first shipment of ice arrived in London in 1822... After much dispute, it was proposed to cut the knot, by entering the commodity as foreign fabric.”)

Visitors to the United States remarked upon the country’s ice habit,.. The mint julep, popularized as a mixed drink in the eighteenth-century American South, became, with the addition of ice, the refreshing cocktail we know today. As one hostess reminded Maury, “Whenever you hear America abused, remember the ice.”

“Greatest Refrigerator on Earth” at 1893 Chicago World’s Fair: (All the fair’s temporary structures were clad in this gleaming white plaster, leading to the exposition’s nickname: the White City. Katharine Lee Bates, the lesbian feminist professor whose poem became the lyrics to “America the Beautiful,” with its reference to its “alabaster cities” that “gleam, undimmed by human tears,”) To add to its grandeur, the seventy-foot-tall engine-room smokestack, which also served to vent ammonia fumes from the ice-making machine, was disguised as a campanile, complete with another cupola.

William Cullen became the first person to freeze water without the use of natural ice... prompted by an observation... when a mercury thermometer that had been immersed in wine was removed, the temperature fell by two or three degrees.

War, as is often the case, also provided an impetus. In the 1860s, the American Civil War cut the Southern states off from the shipments of lake and river ice upon which they had become dependent, and several inventors seized the chance to build prototype ice machines as replacements.

Some livestock was raised in the city. Throughout the 1800s, Londoners could consume eggs from local chickens, as well as milk from cows that spent most of their lives in the dark, housed in basement dairies under the Strand... Most meat eaten in cities walked itself to market, often over enormous distances. Much of the lamb consumed in ancient Rome had traveled hundreds of miles on its own four legs

This obsession with maximizing meat intake was prompted by recent findings from the relatively new discipline of organic chemistry. In the 1830s, European chemists had isolated and named protein... Justus von Liebig, mistakenly concluded that protein was the only truly nutritive element in food.

Argentinians had the gall to complain of their burdensome surplus.. Then came the proliferation of steamships and railways, knitting distant parts of the planet together. Suddenly, those vast reserves of previously off-limits but livestock-friendly land were substantially closer

It was Baron Haussmann, then engaged in demolishing the city’s medieval neighborhoods, who first suggested that Tellier should consider cold—making refrigerated transportation one of the lesser-known side effects of Haussmannization,.. Tellier quickly realized that this new technology of refrigeration, if only it could be made seaworthy, held the potential to transform scarcity into abundance at a global scale

butchers who used to slaughter cattle for their customers started selling dead meat instead... Refrigeration changed where cattle were raised, as well as where they were killed... Ranching in remote, rural Texas and the Great Plains became newly profitable, contributing to the ongoing displacement of Native Americans and the near extinction of the bison upon which they had depended.

Farmers in Europe also got the short end of the stick... Within three decades, 45 percent was imported as dressed meat.. North York Moors... Previously poor, acidic, and overgrazed grassland quickly became a summer idyll, first for fashionable Victorian gentlemen in game-shooting parties and later for poets, artists, and tourists who marveled at the “wild” beauty of the pink- and purple-clad hillsides.

* The river of dead meat flowing into Britain stimulated a countercurrent in live humans, as former farmers emigrated... In Ireland, which had already lost a quarter of its population due to hunger and emigration during the potato famines of the 1840s and ’50s, tenant farmers were all but wiped out by the crash in meat prices, further fueling the rise of the Irish independence movement... “the radicalization of Irish tenant farmers and the gradual disengagement from Irish land by all landlords…were the direct consequences of the disruptive technologies deployed…in Uruguay.”

Centralized slaughter led to centralized pollution: famously, Chicago had to reverse the course of its filthy river in order to prevent packing wastes from entering Lake Michigan, the city’s drinking water source.

The logistics of the dead-meat trade depended on large volumes and year-round slaughtering, so to get more meat to market faster, farmers began to produce “baby beef,” pigs rather than hogs, and lamb as opposed to mutton.

* consequences of refrigerating meat were spurred in part by a nutritional fallacy: the mistaken conclusion that protein from flesh foods was the only essential nutrient.

* For many Americans in the early years of the twentieth century, the zombie foods that emerged from cold-storage warehouses were similarly horrifying... On a fundamental level, cold disrupted what geographer Susanne Freidberg calls “the known physics of freshness,”... The old certainty that food was good had been based on proximity and appearance—assurances that had been thoroughly disrupted by the introduction of refrigeration. Instead, consumers were being asked to place their faith in an increasingly opaque supply chain and trust that a new technology that they didn’t understand would keep their food safe.

her adventures answered all the basic questions of how long eggs and chickens could be stored, how rapidly they should be cooled, and what humidity and temperature they should be held at in order to guarantee they remained safe to eat. Along the way, she ended up designing a new, standardized refrigerator car with better air circulation, a more sanitary process for slaughtering, plucking, chilling, and packing chicken, the first science-based egg-quality charts (the predecessor of today’s USDA egg grades), and a protective carton for eggs... Unlike her more theatrical boss, Harvey Washington Wiley, who treated the food industry as an adversary to be fought using high-profile court cases and media shock stories, (Mary) Pennington preferred a low-key, collaborative approach... thanks to Wiley’s success in banning toxic additives and Pennington’s achievements in making refrigeration effective, that chicken was now much less likely to make them sick.

In the span of just a few decades, the public’s perception of refrigeration had flipped: something that had seemed risky, untrustworthy, and unnatural became instead essential to good health, in that it allowed consumers to consume perishable protein in the quantities necessary to achieve their full potential... The American public’s newfound faith in refrigeration was, to a large extent, Pennington’s legacy

When Muscle Becomes Meat: Mostly, though, it consists of letting the meat sit in a walk-in fridge for three to four weeks, during which time, thanks to a curious alchemy of cold and time, it becomes 15 percent lighter and 20 percent more valuable.

As they lined up next to each other under the fluorescent lights, suspended by their rear shanks, they formed a grotesque chorus line: frozen in a Rockette-style scissor kick, all fluffy white skirts of fat and blush-pink limbs.

* in the much longer annals of meat eating, cool air has been equally, if not more, appreciated for its ability to ripen red meat, turning dry, tough muscle fiber into a juicy, savory steak. This is why, for millennia, farmers have slaughtered their meat in the autumn, when temperatures were falling but not yet freezing.

* postslaughter, those cells had continued to respire, burning through their stock of complex sugars—but in the absence of breath and blood, this had become an anaerobic reaction...the lactic acid isn’t being removed. The result is a cramp in runners and rigor mortis in slaughtered beef. Paradoxically, James explained, it takes energy to relax muscles.

* postrigor. Muscles contain enzymes whose job it is to break down fibers so they can be rebuilt; they’re essential to basic muscle maintenance and beloved of bodybuilders. These enzymes don’t quit just because the animal whose cells they inhabit has died; instead, they gradually degrade the proteins that became knotted during rigor, weakening their links so that the meat becomes tender... He and his colleagues have found that the postslaughter cooling conditions have a bigger impact on how meat tastes than most other predeath factors,

To start with, the speed with which rigor sets in during phase one makes all the difference to the tenderness and juiciness of the resulting meat, and that pace is primarily determined by temperature... your hand couldn’t have moved without the encouragement of a little burst of calcium, released from a special pump in the muscle sheath. This calcium pump evolved to function at normal body temperature. At fifty degrees, it fails, which floods the muscle with calcium—the trigger to contract. Earlier, less powerful refrigeration systems had cooled carcasses slowly enough that the muscles had used up their energy reserves long before they reached fifty degrees, which meant that the calcium call to action fell on unresponsive ears.

* Among Franklin’s lesser-known electrical experiments was a successful, if unwise, attempt to slaughter turkeys by shocking them... Electrocuting meat averts cold shortening because it’s a fast track to rigor mortis: it forces the muscles to rapidly contract and relax, burning through the last of their energy reserves. To be effective, the stimulation needs to come within the first hour after slaughter:

Malach, or “Angel,” for his ability to smuggle desperately needed food, medicine, and other supplies in and out, using his red hair, his blue eyes, and a Virgin Mary medallion he’d won in a card game to pass as Christian.

Sam taught his grandson the art of aging meat, using the movement of cold, damp air to direct a process of controlled decomposition. “It’s about airflow, temperature, and humidity,”... the room has to be cold enough to prevent bacteria from multiplying but warm enough for enzymatic activity to occur, as well as for pale-gray, whiskery patches of mold to grow on the fatty parts of the meat... it releases its own enzymes, which also help break down muscle and connective tissues... it’s a waiting game as the enzymes transform both texture and flavor, breaking down muscle to create smaller, more flavorful amino acid and sugar molecules and unlacing stringy fibers to create sponge-like pockets that will trap juices during cooking. At the same time the fat marbled throughout the muscle is gently oxidizing, which creates its own complement of aromatic fatty acids.

In the 1970s, with the proliferation of plastic, meat-packers figured out that they could “wet-age” meat instead... Companies avoid paying to cool a huge room full of beef for three weeks, while the biochemical transformations that make meat tender happen inside the refrigerated trucks, warehouses.. Cutting the beef at the plant also concentrated additional by-products, which made it easier to find markets for them:

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Produce: despite having been picked, they are still living organisms—and how they look and taste when we eventually eat them depends in large part on what and how fast they breathe... the first commercial use to which the new technology of refrigeration was applied was to keep animal products cool. But this implied hierarchy of perishability is wrong, Falagán told me: fruits and vegetables are the most liable to decay.

There were already clues that the solution would involve depriving fruit of air as well as warmth... In Afghanistan, a particularly ingenious device known as a kangina is still used to keep fruit fresh for up to six months by sealing it into an airtight, disc-shaped container made of two clay bowls joined together.

It took until 1927, when Kidd and West published their initial results, to settle on a recipe for a synthetic atmosphere capable of doubling the postharvest life of apples: chill to forty-six degrees and open ventilation ports as needed to raise carbon dioxide to 10 percent and reduce oxygen levels to a similar proportion.

Then, thanks to the rise of Cold War–era nuclear-powered submarines, new atmospheric-control technology emerged. Whirlpool’s Tectrol (short for “total environmental control”) and the Atlantic Research Corporation’s Arcagen system were both capable of creating and maintaining precision atmospheres using catalytic converters,

Evolutionary biologists use the term ecological filter for processes or conditions that prevent certain species from inhabiting a particular landscape; over the past century, controlled-atmosphere cold storage has proven to be a powerful ecological filter for apple varieties in the marketplace.

* Controlled-atmosphere cold storage transformed the apple; for lettuce, it proved equally revolutionary. Today, the ninety-mile length of the Salinas Valley is known as the Salad Bowl of the World because it produces more than 70 percent of the nation’s lettuce... By the 1920s, Salinas Valley growers had figured out that refrigeration could give their lettuce a better chance of success: they shipped it packed in crates with ice, each railcar load had to be buried under fifteen thousand pounds of the stuff, giving the crisp-head variety previously known as Los Angeles its now-familiar name: iceberg... This fate befalls the fictional Adam Trask in Steinbeck’s East of Eden.

Lettuce’s path from lottery ticket to big business required another breakthrough in cooling: vacuum pumps capable of generating and maintaining very low pressure. Invented by researchers at Eastman Kodak in 1929 as a way to dry photographic film... In a high vacuum, water boils at room temperature, and an iceberg lettuce is 96 percent water. Inside Brunsing’s tube, water in the tissues of the still-sun-warm lettuce quickly evaporated off as steam, taking heat with it. The inside of a head of iceberg lettuce could be lowered to thirty-four degrees in a matter of minutes, as opposed to days using ice

Refrigeration allowed the comparative advantage of the Salinas Valley’s beneficent climate to exert its force on the market, making it economically inefficient to grow lettuce anywhere else.

while transporting heads of lettuce intact across the country was a challenge, attempting the same feat for a blend of shredded lettuces was positively Herculean. “For me, a precut salad is the perfect storm,” agreed Natalia Falagán. “First you have damaged tissue where all the bacteria can come in. Then you have a mixture of vegetables, so they all have different respiration rates. And then you want it to last two weeks?”... “It was differentially permeable membrane that made the packaged-salad thing a home run,” Lugg told me. Differentially permeable membranes are fundamental to the basic unit of biological life: a cell’s encircling membrane functions like a bouncer at a club, allowing some molecules in preferentially, while letting others in more slowly or not at all... Different plastic blends were extruded in such a way that they let oxygen or carbon dioxide diffuse through at specific rates. After years of testing, Lugg ended up combining five different layers to get the functionality he needed... Astonishingly, the bag itself—a cheap, disposable plastic lettuce bag—was a miniaturized version of Kidd and West’s controlled atmosphere warehouse.

* Baby spinach was particularly tough, he told me. “We were packaging spinach when it only had five true leaves on the plant,” he said. “That early, it’s really breathing hard.”... Iceberg lettuce consumption has fallen by half since Jim Lugg’s controlled-atmosphere bags changed the face of salad;

ethylene, and it had been causing curious phenomena for millennia. A colorless, gaseous, sweet-smelling hydrocarbon, ethylene was first isolated by the German alchemist J. J. Becher in the 1660s, as part of his efforts to demonstrate the existence of phlogiston... ethylene became the drug of choice at high-end séances in the Roaring Twenties... archaeologist John Hale to come up with a compelling argument that, in ancient Greece, the oracular pronouncements made by the priestesses at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi might well have been the result of huffing ethylene... he identified dozens of crisscrossing geological faults, including one in the limestone directly beneath the subterranean chamber in which the priestesses would sit. The rock’s pores contained hydrocarbons, including ethylene... The same chemical that animated the Delphic Oracle now forms the bedrock of our petrochemical civilization as the primary ingredient in everything from polyethylene plastic bags to polyester fabric.

Contrary to popular belief, bananas are the ultimate refrigerated fruit. In order to be a global commodity rather than an exotic luxury, the banana depends on a seamless network of thermal control... his first encounter with a banana palm, on display at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. “It was surrounded by a crowd of spectators,”

Refrigeration is essential because a standard cargo of bananas is, effectively, a furnace. “The energy coming off a box of ripening bananas could heat a small apartment,”

Bananas were the pioneers, but, D’Arrigo told me, to get a sense of what ripening can do for the marketability of a fruit, I should consider the avocado... to adapt banana-ripening regimes to avocados. (This was no simple matter: avocados require three times the refrigeration to pull heat out of the gassed fruit, or they’ll explode.)

with the assistance of freezers and aseptic storage tanks, orange juice has transcended them all to become a financial instrument... Afterward, nine out of every ten oranges grown in the state were juiced, and there were more oranges than ever.

The problem of restoring lost flavor to frozen juice turned out to be an opportunity: it gave producers the ability to custom blend their beverage, so that Minute Maid would always taste the same... Each of the chemicals originally came from an orange, just not necessarily from the same oranges or in the same ratio—and because it is derived “from the named fruit,” to use the USDA’s terminology, it doesn’t have to be listed on the label as an added flavoring. The end product is still 100 percent natural orange juice for labeling purposes

she discovered that lowering the oxygen levels in a blueberry cold-storage unit gradually, over the course of seven days as opposed to twenty-four hours, will extend the fruit’s shelf life by a full 25 percent. Another series of charts helped her explain why: it turns out that suddenly changing the atmosphere a fruit is breathing is a nasty metabolic shock.

“take a plant and breed it so it can be harvested when it’s super immature, so that it’s tender and lovely and we want to eat it”—but also how we then reverse engineer its metabolism so that the twilight years of that harvested fruit or leaf will extend indefinitely. “We’re kind of asking a lot,” he said. <> Of course, as in Oscar Wilde’s fable of eternal youth, when we receive the thing we ask for, it’s often accompanied by a host of unexpected and frequently undesirable consequences.

“throughout Latin America the destabilization resulting from banana-related interventions created a tradition of weak institutions, making it difficult for true democracy and fair economic policies to take hold. The Latin American tradition of governments not supported by the general population, and propped up by overseas commercial interests, was created under the authorship of United Fruit.”

Fred McKinley Jones & refrigerated trucks: Jones had done what cooling experts considered impossible: invented the world’s first truly mobile mechanical refrigeration unit.

Thermo King units were used to store blood and serums as well as cool field hospitals, but they also kept food fresh and allowed troops to enjoy an ice-cold Coca-Cola on steamy Pacific island bases. “They could land it on a beach-head in half an hour and have it running,” Jones explained. “And it was light enough to drop by parachute.”

as refrigerated trucks took over from iced railcars, the big Chicago meat-packers and their urban (and unionized) workforce could be bypassed, to be replaced by an entirely new beef economy based in rural Corn Belt towns where cattle could be fattened most cheaply... The ripple effect of this transformation shapes the geography and economics of American meat to this day. Urban stockyard workers had been unionized since the 1930s; employees of the new rural processing plants were not: they were and are paid much less.

The eleven-month Berlin Airlift proved that a city of two million people could be sustained entirely on food that arrived by plane—at a cost of $4 billion in today’s money.

such exports have been threatened by Trump-era trade wars with China, the rise of cheaper Chilean and Uzbeki cherries, and improvements in the domestic Chinese cold chain that have given homegrown cherries a longer shelf life. The brief window in which it made at least some economic sense to fly planes filled with cherries from Seattle to Shanghai may be closing.

The Sushi Economy, two simultaneous innovations that took place in 1970—“the ability to make tuna available to diners across long distances, and a newly acquired taste for fat among sushi’s greatest enthusiasts”—combined to transform bluefin tuna from a worthless trash fish into one the world’s most expensive foods. The man responsible for the first breakthrough was a young Japan Airlines executive, Akira Okazaki, charged with solving the company’s unique freight problem... after three years of trial and error, and with the help of a pair of Canadian undertakers, who helped him construct an entirely new container—known to this day as a tuna “coffin”—Okazaki was ready to ship Atlantic bluefin to Tokyo.

Barbara Pratt: For the next seven years, she traveled and worked inside a refrigerated intermodal container, or “reefer,” as they’re called in the industry, circling the globe alongside Peruvian asparagus and Mexican mangoes. Her little-known adventures laid the groundwork for today’s globalized food system... Based on her findings, the entire ventilation system of a standard reefer unit was redesigned so that the cooler air entered from the bottom rather than the top, as was standard on a truck.

* The wild salmon for sale in your supermarket may have been caught in Alaskan waters, but it will likely have spent nearly two months of its afterlife crisscrossing its former Pacific hunting grounds inside a reefer unit...fish pin boning is a delicate operation that can’t be mechanized—and that the wages earned by Chinese workers are less than a fifth of the amount earned by their American counterparts. <> Nearly two-thirds of all fruit and vegetables produced in the world are eaten in a different country from the one in which they were grown.

Underground cheese cave: “The cost of construction is also cheaper, because you don’t have to do a roof—you just put in a sprinkler system,” said Griesemer. “And we don’t charge for the pillars... he flip side is that changing the temperature takes a while: Griesemer says that it will take a month and a half to draw enough heat out of the rocks to bring his new refrigerated space down to thirty-six degrees... it can’t easily be defrosted without causing cracks that could lead to the collapse of the entire subterranean structure.

they’re all in the center of the country, strung along the cross-continental path blazed by America’s mother road, Route 66. <> Making cold mobile reshaped the geography of food. The location and design of refrigerated warehouses has, in turn, been transformed by those new supply chains.

refrigerated warehouse: Recently, Wilmington has begun to face a new generation of competitors to its south:... “That’s all to do with the widening of the Panama Canal,”... all the refrigerated meat and produce that the US sends to East Asia—its largest export market—was funneled through West Coast ports like Long Beach or Oakland. “East Coast US ports can now compete directly,”

Whole Foods stores, by contrast, are scattered across the nation; there aren’t enough clustered within any given 250-mile radius to justify a dedicated distribution center. “So what do you do?” asked Wulfraat, before telling me: “You end up outsourcing distribution to wholesalers.”... Shopping at Whole Foods is more expensive, not necessarily because its food is healthier or better for the environment but because its supply chain is so inefficient.

Not only is the population of the developed world aging out of employment at a rapid rate but, even in the US, the minimum wage has risen sufficiently that the steep initial investment in an automated system now seems much more reasonable. <> Energy efficient, high tech, human free, and, increasingly, closer to cities in order to satisfy the instant delivery expectations of a new generation of digital consumers: the American coldscape is currently expanding at a rate that hasn’t been seen since the postwar boom. This has, in turn, attracted investment capital... The cold-storage industry is on track to grow by nearly half as much again in the next few years

Chen Zemin, the world’s first frozen-dumpling billionaire: Because of his medical background, Chen had an idea for how to extend the life span of his spicy pork wontons and sweet sesame paste–filled balls. “As a surgeon, you have to preserve things like organs or blood in a cold environment,” Chen said. “A surgeon’s career cannot be separate from refrigeration... His first patent covered a production process for the balls themselves; a second was for the packaging that would protect them from freezer burn.

* Zhengzhou, a smoggy industrial city that, thanks to Chen’s ingenuity, has become the capital of frozen food in China. Sanquan’s rival, Synear, was founded in Zhengzhou in 1997, and the two companies account for nearly two-thirds of the country’s frozen-food market.

without a functioning cold chain, there wasn’t any way for those farms to scale up their output, or for the former peasants to buy it. Communist authorities thus stepped in to support the country’s nascent perishable-logistics sector with both practical and moral support. <> Over the past fifteen years, tax breaks, subsidies, and preferential access to land have been made available to anyone aspiring to build a refrigerated warehouse.

party leaders have launched a South to North Vegetable Transfer initiative whose goal is to repurpose the country’s southernmost province, the tropical island Hainan (otherwise popular with Chinese honeymooners), as the National Winter Vegetable Base, complete with thirty brand-new logistics centers and an express refrigerated rail link to Beijing.

during my visit to China, I was told that less than a quarter of the country’s meat supply is slaughtered, transported, stored, or sold under refrigeration... that translates to less than five cubic feet per person, or less than a third of what Americans currently have—meaning that the Chinese race to refrigerate is far from over.

The existence of refrigerators made it possible to transform the built environment in a way that, in turn, made fridge ownership less optional. Well-insulated and centrally heated homes in the suburbs didn’t have the kind of drafty, cold corners that were perfect for a pantry. In new urban apartment blocks, it was impossible to put a meat safe outside or keep a root cellar in the basement. In many temperate regions of the world, the indoor climate hasn’t just become more homogenous; it has also become hotter:

The relationship was symbiotic: refrigeration facilitated mass food production, enabled mass merchandising, and encouraged mass consumption. All these forces combined to make the fridge’s ascent from bit part to starring role, to eventually displacing the hearth as the heart of the home, seem inevitable... For many households, working to purchase fresh fruit and vegetables from elsewhere replaced the labor of growing, harvesting, and processing one’s own. Freed from at least some domestic drudgery, women defected from the home toward paid jobs—in small numbers at first, then, following the Second World War, en masse.

Today many continental European towns and cities retain lively central shopping districts whose walkable, human scale makes them irresistible to Anglo tourists. Meanwhile, the average interior volume of a French refrigerator is less than ten cubic feet; in the US that figure is 17.5... As Canadian architect Donald Chong once suggested, small fridges make good cities—and good cities require only small fridges.\Martha Stewart once told me she probably has fifty or sixty refrigerators spread across her twenty-one kitchens, including two entire walls lined with still-operational fridges from the 1920s.)

* It’s the theory of induced demand: just as adding another lane to a freeway will only increase congestion, extra fridge space will inevitably be filled. More is never enough. <> The real problem with huge, overstuffed fridges is that there’s almost no way the average family can consume that much food before it goes bad. What’s more, as geographer Tara Garnett explained, there is a “safety net” syndrome associated with refrigerated storage.

“The aha! moment for Bill was that when he was studying Maya culture, nearly all of what was being excavated was what those people had thrown away,” explained his friend sociologist Albert Bergesen. “He thought, Why can’t we use these techniques to learn about our own culture?”... Middle-class households typically wasted more food than either poorer or, perhaps more surprisingly, richer ones.

* Americans send more than half a pound of food straight to the landfill every single day of the year and, once retail waste is included, squander more than 30 percent of our total food supply.

* When he launched Silk soy milk in 1977, he made the calculated decision to pay supermarkets a substantial premium to display it in the refrigerated section of the grocery store. At the time, soy milk, which has an unrefrigerated shelf life of at least a year... Demos’s gamble was that, by packaging soy milk as if it shared the fragile freshness of milk, he could convince Americans to make the switch—and it paid off.

Whereas a simple sniff or squeeze might have sufficed in an era when most people knew where their food came from and, likely, the person who produced it, for consumers at the end of cold-extended food chains, freshness is a belief system. They crave the guarantee of a printed date.

Her root vegetable unit is a U-shaped shelf made of beeswax-treated maple. A glass panel holds the damp sand in which carrots and leeks are buried, alongside a little funnel to top up moisture levels as needed... Ryou has found that root vegetables last longer and taste better stored upright in slightly damp, loose sand, because it mimics their growing conditions.

he issue begins about an hour before an egg is laid, when a hen’s shell gland squirts on a protective coating made of protein, lipids, phosphorus, and more. Up until that point, the thousands of pores in the eggshell remain open to allow oxygen and carbon dioxide to pass back and forth to the developing embryo. This final layer, which chicken people call either “the bloom” or “the cuticle,” blocks those pores to protect the egg from bacteria it might encounter once it exits its mother’s body. In the US, as well as Japan, Australia, and a few other countries, egg producers wash freshly laid eggs in soap and hot water, which gets rid of bacteria but also removes the protective cuticle, so that the egg has to be refrigerated.

the most important difference between Ryou’s food shelves and the fridge is that her exquisitely designed wall-mounted and countertop units would force us to look at our food. The result of this daily confrontation, she hopes, is that we would eat more healthily, waste less, and—intangible but important—rebuild our relationship with these equally biological and perishable, if slightly less animate, fellow organisms.

* it was a scheduling conundrum. His tomatoes were in season in late summer, his lettuce ready to harvest in spring and fall... Meanwhile, the steer would have traditionally been slaughtered in the autumn, as soon as it started to get cold. If he turned the tomatoes into longer-lasting ketchup and aged his cheese in a cellar for six months until the meat, lettuce, and wheat bun were ready, he could maybe, possibly, make a cheeseburger from scratch. But practically speaking, he concluded, “the cheeseburger couldn’t have existed until nearly a century ago.”

one study found that water-deprived rats, mice, guinea pigs, and hamsters would all lick a cold metal tube repeatedly, instead of a hot or room-temperature one—presumably because the cooling sensation triggered an illusory sense of quenched thirst.) <> Cold may also have made food and drinks sweeter—particularly in the ice-obsessed United States. At least three of our basic taste receptors—sweet, bitter, and umami, or savory—are extremely temperature sensitive... Everything simply has to be a little sweeter to taste right if your tongue is cold.

Many of the most peculiar recipes of the 1920s and ’30s—“Peanut Butter Salad” stands out for its combination of green peppers, celery, whipped cream, and the titular ingredient—are perhaps best understood as status signifiers. In other words, jellied foods were popular less because they were especially delicious and more because they demonstrated refrigerator ownership.

refrigeration could make leftovers taste better—at least in some cases... Heavily spiced dishes, like curries, fare well in the fridge, because the flavor molecules in many spices are soluble in fat, and the more time they have to disperse, the more evenly they’ll be distributed through the dish, creating a well-balanced whole.

Few of us today can taste the difference between wet-aged and dry-aged beef; even fewer would know to miss the taste of different pastures and seasons in milk fresh from the cow... Among many Alaskan Natives, whale and walrus meat tastes as it should only if kept in naturally cooled underground ice cellars. As the permafrost warms, meat stored in the walk-in freezers that are being imported as substitutes for failing cellars just isn’t the same.

* China: A small, bespectacled man in a white coat told me, very quietly, how he uses refrigeration to send fish to sleep... In this sluggish state, a fish can be rolled up, popped in a clear plastic poster tube, and mailed to anywhere in China. As long as it arrives at its destination within three days,... this extended nap apparently helps wind down the stress chemicals released when the fish is first caught.

“I think we’re going to have to back-cross it a little more,” he said. “The problem is that sugar is a direct trade-off with fruit size—the bigger the fruit, the less sugar it has, and vice versa.”

The problem is that it’s tricky for pickers to judge maturity visually in the field, which means that up to 40 percent of tomatoes are harvested at the “immature green” stage

Stassopoulos told me that a middle-class fridge in China is not much help in predicting the future contents of Indian fridges; instead, he looks to middle-class fridges in India and affluent fridges in China to see where the future of each country’s consumption lies. Based on Indian fridgenomics, he decided to invest in dairy processors:.. Beyond food, he’s found that fridge acquisition is a reliable herald of growth in a country’s insurance and private-tutoring markets. “With a fridge, women can work outside the home, and that’s when they get a say in the household finances,” he told me. “Women tend to think more long-term than men—they think about education for their kids,

Their conclusion was that “for the most part, the industrialization of the city has been a grotesque assault on the health of Londoners.”... Bekvalac and Western’s research confirms that, contrary to conventional belief, the benefits of modern civilization came with a substantial price tag. “It’s called the antebellum puzzle,”... during these decades in the United States and Western Europe, “biological measures of the standard of living erode, even though the standard economic measures seem to be going up.”... he speculated was caused by a delay in agricultural productivity catching up to population growth. Others have tied it to a rise in infectious disease as people crowded together in cities.. In fact, Craig calculated that by 1900 mechanical cooling allowed Americans to scrape back at least 0.02 inches in height, and likely more.

food historian Lizzie Collingham has concluded that, by spring, most pre-refrigeration northern Europeans “were pre-scorbutic,.. each May, Indiana housewives were urged by physicians, recipe books, and newspaper advice columns to treat spring sickness with the urgent and generous application of “salads of all sorts.”

Scientists suspect that, in developing varieties with higher yields and the sturdiness to be shipped and stored under refrigeration, breeders may have accidentally lost not only flavor but also essential vitamins and minerals.

In 2007, after China had urbanized but before the country added building a cold chain to its Five-Year Plan, the average Chinese person experienced some kind of digestive upset twice a week. When I visited Shanghai in 2014, the pork processor that supplied a fifth of the city’s demand still managed without mechanical cooling.

* researchers have begun to link these kinds of diseases to chronic inflammation. That, in turn, has been connected to the depleted state of the Western gut microbiome—which may be due, at least in part, to refrigeration. “This might be the microbial bargain that we’ve unknowingly struck,” ... In general, Sonnenburg concluded, our refrigerated, hygienic lifestyles seem to be lacking in the kind of low-grade microbial exposure that we evolved alongside—and without that background stimulation, our immune system can end up spiraling into an inflammatory state.

“There is no cold chain in Rwanda,” he said. “It just doesn’t exist.” Preventing food loss requires more than a functioning refrigerated warehouse or truck: food has to get cold and remain that way all the way along the chain. <> Today in the United States, a green bean grown in, say, Wisconsin will likely have spent no more than two hours, and often much less, at temperatures above forty-five degrees on its way to your fork.

(HCFCs and HFCs) that are popular in the developing world and that Kipp Bradford and I used to build our own fridge, are known as super-greenhouse gases because they are thousands of times more warming than CO2. Project Drawdown, the climate change mitigation project founded by environmentalist Paul Hawken, lists “refrigerant management” as the number one solution to global warming, in terms of potential impact.

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, had recently discovered that if they coated two panels with a paint that was capable of harvesting solar energy, then covered one so that the paint dried more slowly, the slow-drying panel would be twice as efficient as the faster-drying one.

On a more abstract level, Apeel could redefine freshness once again. “To me, freshness means higher concentrations of the molecules that the fruit produced when it was on the plant,” Rogers said. Where once freshness had temporal and spatial constraints—it meant something that was harvested recently and nearby—it might one day become a physiological status that can be defined according to levels of specific chemicals.

living a fridge-free lifestyle in the developed world is little more than a gesture, albeit an instructive one: you’re still being sustained by the cold chain, even if you’ve banished its frosty fetters from your home.

Meanwhile, if you bear in mind that refrigeration tends toward scale, you can put in place measures to mitigate unwanted effects, from French regulations on supermarket size to the ACES approach of creating community cooling hubs in order to empower Rwandan smallholders to remain independent. “You have to aggregate at some point in the system,” explained Toby Peters. “But if you do it with a community-owned packhouse, you can do it without throwing farmers off their land

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