Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves

4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars | 191 ratings

Price: 17.72

Last update: 12-22-2024


About this item

"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 Stiff

An 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 worse

How 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 listeners 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.


Top reviews from the United States

  • Ian D. Griffin
    5.0 out of 5 stars A superb read!. Well researched. Fascinating detail.
    Reviewed in the United States on July 31, 2024
    Commercial kombucha is just one product piggybacking on a sophisticated ‘cold chain’ that has revolutionized food and beverage distribution via a massive network of distribution centers, refrigerated trucks, shipping containers, supermarket chillers, and home refrigerators. Nicola Twilley’s book describes this' artificial Arctic' in fascinating detail.

    According to Twilley, refrigeration's impact has “changed our height, our health, and our family dynamics; it has reshaped our kitchens, ports, and cities; and it has reconfigured global economics and politics.” She sets out to explore the “pockets of cold … honeycombed throughout the American landscape” and ventures worldwide to report on developments in the UK, India, and Rwanda.

    This all began at the end of the 19th Century with the first compression ice-making machines. Before this, ice houses from winter lakes stored frozen blocks delivered to homes. This was an unreliable, expensive, and limited-scale way of preserving foods.

    Interestingly, the first commercial applications for man-made ice were beer brewers. “Just as the desire for beer is thought to have motivated early hunter-gatherers to take up farming, breweries provided the all-important early investments in mechanical refrigeration: two technologies that remade the world, both fueled by the human desire for intoxication.” Specifically, the production of lager beer requires consistently low temperatures to ferment. German immigrants to New York were now able to produce lager year-round.

    As with beer, so with meats, vegetables, and fruits. Twilley details the opportunities and challenges in the adoption of a farm-to-table cold chain for each product. Solutions that revolutionized our diets include the electric shocking and vacuum packing of “wet-aged” beef before refrigeration (a section of the book best avoided by vegans and vegetarians!). Successful delivery of ripe bananas to the supermarket requires “a complex blend of temperature control and atmospheric manipulation, orchestrated asynchronously across dozens of different ripening rooms.” Lettuce and spinach are packaged in a “differentially permeable membrane” that lets oxygen and carbon monoxide diffuse through the sealed box at specific rates to maintain an ideal microclimate for the chilled produce.

    The result is that nearly two-thirds of all fruits and vegetables produced worldwide are eaten in a different country from the one in which they are grown.

    Twilley’s assessment of the impact of refrigeration of the planet shows two sides to the coin. On the positive side, the advent of mechanical refrigeration has reduced the risk of food poisoning, rotten food that spoils in the heat before it can reach market, and monotonous, seasonally dependent diets. It “freed women from daily shopping and made fresh food both affordable and available year-round."

    The downside is the environmental impact. It takes a lot of energy to remove heat. Small farms lose out to agribusiness. Home refrigerators encourage waste.

    "The perpetual winter of known and steady temperature that underlies the permanent global summertime of the supermarket’s cornucopia has divorced us from food production and severed our synchrony with the seasons."

    Moreover

    "If everyone on Earth were to require as much cold space to eat as an American, millions upon millions of refrigerated warehouses would need to be built, increasing the volume of mechanically c cooled span ten times over."

    The US currently has 4.6 billion cubic feet of refrigerated warehouse space nationwide. From the sixty hertz hum of the home refrigerator compressor (used by the Velvet Underground to tune their instruments – who knew?!) to the giant warehouses, chilled trucks and shipping containers, energy requirements, and refrigerant chemicals (HCFCs and HFCs) leaking into the atmosphere contribute to global warming.

    This book is sure to educate and enlighten anyone curious about the global food and beverage system and the all-but-invisible network of thermal control that underpins it.
  • James fan
    5.0 out of 5 stars very informative and well written
    Reviewed in the United States on August 11, 2024
    So many things I didn’t know and took for granted. Very informative and educational. So many misconceptions in our society that now lay exposed. Also, a great read!
  • Bruce Bender
    4.0 out of 5 stars Great writing but needs graphics
    Reviewed in the United States on September 24, 2024
    The writing style in this book is adventurous, well-researched, thoughtful, packed with information, and full of great personal anecdotes. It brings to light a serious issue of global societal change due to technology that has not previously received the attention it deserves.

    On the other hand, it is a bit like standing in front of an unrelenting firehose of information. Those of us who include visual learning in our learning style would benefit greatly from some photographs of key people, places, facilities, equipment, food items, the bicyclists in Rwanda, and who knows what else. A few maps at key points, showing transportation networks and production zones. Some charts and graphs that summarize the big picture as the story evolves. Graphics would help make the story more alive.
  • Joseph P. Eccleston
    5.0 out of 5 stars Wonky information, but fantastic
    Reviewed in the United States on October 13, 2024
    I run a farm with a large box cooler and have been intrigued about keeping perishables fresh on their way to market. This is a fun and interesting look at the innovations that allow us to eat how we do today. Ice, chemical refrigeration, technology that goes into the bag that holds your salad, natural ethylene, ice cream at the World's Fair. . . . it's all covered in this book and I'm only half finished.
  • Topaz
    5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating with new (to me) info
    Reviewed in the United States on December 1, 2024
    Not really a page turner but kept me interested
  • Cat
    3.0 out of 5 stars If you need a title then put one in
    Reviewed in the United States on September 28, 2024
    Learned more about climate change and the disgusting manner in which our “food” is handled.
  • Steve F
    5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant
    Reviewed in the United States on September 14, 2024
    Can’t say enough good things about this book. Well written well researched the author made the story of how the refrigeration cold chain has changed what and how we eat over the last hundred years. I could go on and on about it, but I’m buying copies for friends and family. A must read.
  • Robert W Miller
    5.0 out of 5 stars Well done
    Reviewed in the United States on September 24, 2024
    Very well written and surprisingly engaging over its full length for a non-fiction work. I learned a great deal both about refrigeration and our worsening food crisis.

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