The cold, hard truth about refrigeration
In the early 1900s, people didn’t trust refrigerated food. Fruits and vegetables, cuts of meat… these things are supposed to decay, right? As Nicola Twilley writes, “What kind of unnatural technology could deliver a two-year old chicken carcass that still looked as though it was slaughtered yesterday?”
But just a few decades later, Americans have done a full one-eighty. Livestock can be slaughtered thousands of miles away, and taste just as good (or better) by the time it hits your plate. Apples can be stored for over a year without any noticeable change. A network called the “cold-chain” criss-crosses the country, and at home our refrigerators are fooling us into thinking we waste less food than we actually do.
Today, refrigeration has reshaped what we eat, how we cook it, and even warped our very definition of what is and isn’t “fresh.”
Featuring Nicola Twilley.
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Nicola spent several weeks working the floors at Americold — one of the largest cold storage warehouse companies in the country. Here, she celebrates her last shift. (Photo by Geoff Manaugh).
LINKS
You can find Nicola’s new book “Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet and Ourselves,” at your local bookstore or online.
CREDITS
Our host is Nate Hegyi.
Reported and produced by Nate Hegyi and Taylor Quimby.
Mixed by Nate Hegyi.
Editing by Taylor Quimby.
Our staff includes Justine Paradis, Felix Poon, Kate Dario and Marina Henke.
Our executive producer is Taylor Quimby. Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio.
Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.
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Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Nate Hegyi: Hey, you're listening to Outside/In. I'm Nate Hegyi. I am happily married now, but I remember almost a decade ago when I was single. And man, it is hard to find a partner. I mean, you might spend hours at a bar every week, maybe go on a couple of blind dates. Then you spend your nights flipping endlessly through Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, and maybe if you are particularly desperate, you might reach out to a refrigerator dating guide.
Nicola Twilley: His shtick is to match people based on the contents of their fridges.
Nate Hegyi: That's Nicola Twilley. She's co-host of the podcast Gastropod.
Nicola Twilley: You can either submit pictures of the fridges of someone you've just started dating and and say, listen, any red flags? Or if you submit your fridge, he can suggest a match.
Music - Chevy Bolero
Nate Hegyi: Nicola wasn't looking for a partner. She's married. She was actually doing research for a book about refrigeration.
Nate Hegyi: [In tape] So does he give you, like, a score on your fridge?
Nicola Twilley: Well, you don't get a score, but you do get feedback. And I will say the first words out of his mouth were, this chick is awesome when he saw my fridge. So again, you can tell you can tell how hungry I was for this. But yes, he I think was being was being, well, more generous than I would be. I have a lot of Tupperware. Um, a I have, um, an unseemly amount of alcohol. I have a lot of condiments.
Nate Hegyi: This matchmaker, he started his refrigerator dating service as a kind of joke. But the truth is, fridges really do tell you a lot about a person. Our lives revolve around refrigeration. They are a necessary and intimate part of our lives. But it wasn't always this way. Today on the show, a conversation with Nicola Twilley, whose latest book, frostbite, covers the absolutely bonkers history of refrigerated foods. Over 100 years ago, cold storage was considered unnatural.
Nicola Twilley: This is immoral. It's going against the natural progression of like, death and decay, like we're intervening in the natural order of things and it's not right.
Nate Hegyi: But nowadays, refrigeration has reshaped what we eat, how we cook it, and it's warped our very definition of what is and isn't fresh. Stay tuned.
Nate Hegyi: There is a memory that is seared into my brain like no other. It was the summer of 2002. Wisconsin and I had a part time job fixing computers. I had this little desk, and one day I started to notice this stench coming from one of the drawers. When I opened it, I found a month old salami sandwich in a Ziploc bag. And of course, being a teenager, I opened the bag and took a big whiff. I almost threw up. That gag reflex, by the way, is actually a defense mechanism. Our brains are hard wired to protect us from the potentially dangerous germs that live inside spoiled food.
Nicola Twilley: Since humans have been humans, we have been battling microbes and fungi. They want to eat our food. We want to eat our food. It's a sort of ongoing multi-species warfare. And we have developed lots of great weaponry, salt drying, you know, uh, fermentation, uh, pickling. Uh, and lots of those techniques have the side benefit of making things taste absolutely delicious, like real flavor bombs, I mean, cheese. And there's a wonderful quote that a food writer said, “cheese is milk's leap toward immortality." And it's true. But also, cheese is one of nature's greatest inventions. I mean, cheese is. Some days it's a reason for living.
Nate Hegyi: Parmesan, pesto, kimchi, sauerkraut. All very yummy ways of making food last longer. But this kind of preservation also took time. It was labor intensive. Curing agents like salt or sugar were expensive. So unless you were super rich, most of the time, your diet was pretty bland.
Nicola Twilley: The health data that we do have shows that diets pre refrigeration, but post urbanization and industrialization were horrible.
Nate Hegyi: Wouldn't people get like a spring sickness.
Nicola Twilley: Yeah. There's an amazing study by husband and wife couple who were sociologists, and they studied the the city of Muncie, Indiana. Um, they documented, you know, back in the 1890s, there were two distinct diets. People who in the winter would have meat, potatoes, pastry. They would have whatever they had managed to pickle and preserve in the summer. But by the time that, you know, February, March is coming around, you do have what was referred to as spring sickness.
Music - La Toga
Nate Hegyi: And it's not scurvy. But it was in the same way that, you know, you can be pre-diabetic rather than have diabetes. It was pre scorbutic. It was sort of the precursor to scurvy. People were just really short of fresh green food. And you see magazines at the time, women's magazines saying you know, urging people to, to sort of treat spring sickness with, you know, the application of salad in all its forms.
Nate Hegyi: In big cities, it was even worse before refrigeration, huge quantities of crops would rot before they ever got to market. And fresh meat very hard to come by. In ancient Rome, farmers would march their sheep hundreds of miles to get slaughtered by city butchers in colonial America. It wasn't strange to see flocks of turkeys being driven towards Philadelphia. And when cities got really big during the Industrial Revolution, Irish immigrants created pig towns in Central Park. A neighborhood in London had tenement buildings full of hogs living with people.
Nicola Twilley: An entire dairy kept its cows in basements under the Strand in London, and they were given two weeks vacation every summer to go and see, like actual lifted above ground, put on grass for two weeks and brought back, because how else are you going to get enough milk to the city? How else are you going to get enough enough meat to the city?
Nate Hegyi: So much of human history has revolved around our ability to hunt, grow, cook and preserve food. We've been able to create heat on demand for millennia, but producing cold that was out of our reach until the mid-19th century. And even then, the first refrigerators were dangerous as hell.
Nicola Twilley: They were enormous. First of all, because they were steam powered, they were all prototypes, extremely unreliable, failed all the time. You get these endless stories of entire warehouses full of meat having to be thrown away because the machine is broken again. They exploded constantly because the chemicals that were used as the refrigerant that those chemicals were highly explosive.
Nate Hegyi: There was one tragedy in particular that put refrigeration on the map in a very dark way. The Chicago World's Fair in 1893. It was where all the best, newest, coolest technology was being shared with the public. It had the first Ferris wheel, the first cinema, and the quote, greatest refrigerator on Earth. A massive steam powered cold storage warehouse painted white, decorated to look like a Venetian palazzo. But then on July 11th, a spark caught the chemical that was being used as a refrigerant, and a fire ripped up the smokestack.
Music - Driveway at Calisto
Nicola Twilley: The World's Fair crew of firemen gallantly rushed in. They climbed up. They climbed up the chimney, started putting it out. Unfortunately, the, uh, their rope burned. They were left at the top of the chimney with no way down. A crowd was gathering, panicking. One man jumped, but the top of the warehouse was sort of a tar substance, so he was just stuck there. So his screams were ringing out. The firemen are dying in front of people's eyes. The entire building goes up in flames.
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It's a tragedy that's actually immortalized in the lines of America the Beautiful, which I had no idea. It's the third verse. Literally. No one knows it, even if they know the first verse.
Nate Hegyi: I was going to ask you. I was like, going through that song right now. I don't remember a mention of refrigeration.
Nicola Twilley: It's about the White City. Undimmed by human tears.
[music] Alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears!
Nicola Twilley: And the tears are for the tragedy. The White City is what people called the Chicago World's Fair, because everything was done in this gleaming white plaster and undimmed by human tears is because three days after the woman who wrote those lines visited, the entire thing went up in flames.
Nate Hegyi: At the time, refrigeration was seen as a highly risky technology. It was uninsurable, but regular folks weren't as concerned with the tech. They didn't trust the refrigerated food.
Nicola Twilley: People at the time were like, this is immoral. It's going against the natural progression of like, death and decay, like we're intervening in the natural order of things, and it's not right.
Nate Hegyi: Cold storage boosters needed to turn the tide of public opinion, or else refrigeration would go the way of Laserdisc, Segways and Google Glass new tech that just didn't catch on. So in 1911, almost 20 years after that fire at the World's Fair, Chicago's mayor, the city's health commissioner, and some food industry reps hosted a cold storage banquet.
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400 guests at the finest hall in the finest hotel in the city. It was like the opposite of a modern farm to table experience. Instead of saying where each dish was grown, the menu listed, where every dish was held in cold storage. And for how long? That turkey you're eating slaughtered almost a year ago and held at Monarch Cold Storage. That butter you're enjoying, sir? It is nearly four months old.
Nicola Twilley: You know, they give a speech at the start. Everything has been refrigerated except for the olives in your dry martini. You know, go ahead and enjoy. And the chef is like. I don't think I've ever served a finer meal. And the congressman who gives a speech says, gosh, I truly believe refrigerated food is more delicious than fresh food. Which again, sounds weird to modern ears because you're like, wait, what isn't refrigerated food? Fresh food? But of course, at the time it wasn’t.
Music swells and fades
And the astonishing thing about this menu is at first I was like, wow, it's a celebration of refrigeration. But actually when you start reading the context, you realize, oh, it's a panicked PR attempt. At the time, Congress had been sort of besieged by anxious consumers and was considering putting very strict limits on how long food could be stored in refrigerated warehouses. So like 24 hours, 48 hours. I mean, our entire food system would collapse if you were only allowed to store food for that long. It was an Astonishing. It's an astonishing moment. And again, 1911. That's barely over a hundred years ago.
Nate Hegyi: How completely would you say we've turned around on this point? Like it feels like refrigeration didn't just win from a market standpoint. It feels like it's totally changed our psychology around food.
Nicola Twilley: There's an amazing op ed published in a Chicago newspaper after this banquet in 1911, and it says, well, listen, sure, maybe everyone didn't die from eating this refrigerated food, you know, and it's undoubtedly going to take over because it makes so much economic sense. And it just, you know, it makes money for people. So we are going to have a refrigerated food system. But the only silver lining is that soon there'll be a generation of people who don't even realize what unrefrigerated food, what fresh food is supposed to taste like. And when I read that, I got chills because I'm like, that's us. We don't know what what food is supposed to taste like. And and this op ed was correct. You know, refrigeration has won. And as a result, our food is fundamentally different and we don't even realize it.
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Nate Hegyi: Coming up after the break, how a hundred years of refrigeration has completely transformed our diets, our farms and our foods. Stick around.
Nate Hegyi: Hey, this is Nate Hegyi. You're listening to Outside/In. Waldo Jaquith and his family were the ultimate do it yourselfers. They lived in rural Virginia outside of Charlottesville. They had a vegetable garden, kept chickens, solar panels, the whole shebang. Then one day, Waldo got an idea. You know what.
Nicola Twilley: I'm going to do? I'm going to make a cheeseburger from scratch.
Nate Hegyi: That's author Nicola Twilley. And when she says from scratch, she means it.
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Nate Hegyi: He wanted to grow the tomatoes, grow the wheat for the buns, raise a couple of cows for cheese and meat.
Nicola Twilley: And what he really quickly realized was that there was no way to make this work on a pre-industrial, pre refrigerated schedule.
Nate Hegyi: Really?
Like you just couldn't do it. So your tomatoes are in season in late summer, your lettuce is in season in the spring and the fall. Then if you want the burger? The meat. You have to slaughter the animal in the fall to be able to hang it when the temperature is cool enough. But you have to make cheese in the spring, right? Because that's when the dairy cow is given birth. And so you can't get all the pieces together at the same time. The cheese burger is a refrigerated invention. It just didn't exist. It would have. It was so hard as to be utterly impractical before we had a refrigerated food system.
Nate Hegyi: But how has refrigeration completely reshaped trends as well as like, the actual taste of fruits and vegetables? Maybe we can start with the apple.
Nicola Twilley: Oh, yeah. So the apple. Um, we're coming up to Apple season now, but if you have been eating apples this summer and they're American, they're very likely reaching their first birthday.
Nate Hegyi: What? They're a year old.
Nicola Twilley: This is something that is really logical once you think about it, because American apples are harvested from, you know, say, late August through the fall. Um, but they're on sale in the grocery store in June, aren't they?
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Nate Hegyi: Nine out of every ten apples grown in Washington state go into refrigerated storage. And these facilities are massive, airtight, cold cubes holding, no joke, millions of pounds of apples. These payloads are so heavy that the whole building has to be reinforced with giant slabs of concrete flooring. Inside these warehouses, there are machines that control temperature and exactly how much oxygen is in the air. Workers have accidentally suffocated to death in apple storage warehouses.
Nicola Twilley: I mean, these these are wild. You think we have a good anti-aging technology for humans. Apple's it's reached a whole next level. The Apple itself can control the precise atmospheric blend of gases it's breathing in so that it ages as slowly as possible.
Nate Hegyi: It's almost like they're alive.
Nicola Twilley: Yes. When you harvest an apple, it's still alive and it's still breathing. And like us, it has a certain number of breaths it can take before it will die. And the whole game is, how do you make it breathe more slowly so that it lasts longer? And so cold does that. Everything happens more slowly in the cold. That is basically how cold preserves. And so does giving the apple less oxygen. So that's what you're doing. This is the apple by what it's exhaling is telling the machinery of the warehouse exactly how much oxygen it needs and how much carbon dioxide it's breathing out. That's what's happening. You're just basically making it breathe as slowly as possible so that it takes longer to die.
Nate Hegyi: These warehouses are part of what's known as the cold chain. It's every cool truck, cold storage, and refrigerator are perishable food travels through to get from the farm to the table. In the century or so since this cold chain was first invented, it has radically changed not only where we can grow food, but geopolitics itself.
Nicola Twilley: So one example that I really love is that prior to being able to ship refrigerated meat, Ireland's economy was dominated by exporting live cattle to be slaughtered in London to feed the people there.
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Nicola Twilley: Once you have cheap refrigerated meat from Australia and New Zealand shipped frozen and sold. It makes no sense to ship a live cow from Ireland. It's more expensive to raise it there and because you're shipping it live, it's you know, you're only only half of it is edible. The whole system makes no economic sense anymore. And what's fascinating is the bottom falling out of that Irish economy. One historian has actually credited Irish independence to that.
Nate Hegyi: Whenever we talk about the way that big ag has changed the world, remember refrigeration is the technology that has made those changes possible. And it wasn't just Ireland that was transformed. Cold storage allowed bananas to become the world's most popular fruit, ushering in the era of banana republics in Central America. The Amazon is losing tens of thousands of acres of forest a year because folks can grow cattle there, kill them, and then ship them cold all around the world. But this cold chain also means that at the snap of my fingers, I can eat some five month old Brazilian beef in my burger or some frozen Alaskan pollock in my McDonald's Filet-O-Fish topped with cabbage that was grown in Yuma, Arizona six months ago. You might see this as a miracle or a monstrosity, but the truth is, it's probably somewhere in between.
Nicola Twilley: At first, refrigeration was seen as this huge boon that reduced food waste. And it really did. So much food used to get wasted on its way to market. 30% of everything that was grown, was estimated, was thrown away on the way to market. It just didn't make it. What's happened now is that we have a situation. There's a food writer called Joanna Blythman who calls this permanent global summertime. That's what our supermarkets have. We can have anything from, you know, from all the seasons, from around the world, and that abundance seems to have somehow led to an equal amount being thrown away. But at the consumer level, 30% of everything you know, from from the supermarket, from the retail, the consumer end now gets thrown away. And part of it is our fridges as well. The American fridge is notoriously huge and many people have two. Some people even have three. And this is something that, um, people who work in transportation call induced demand. You know, you build a freeway, it gets full. So you think, oh, I'll build an extra lane, I'll expand the freeway. Guess what? You just encourage more people to drive. And so the freeway is just as clogged. This is what happens with our fridges. We fill them and then they're full and we can't find anything. And we want a bigger fridge. And then we get a bigger fridge and we fill it and then we can't find anything. And so on and so forth. So yeah, it's really led to a huge amount of food waste and also this kind of I think people feel a lot of fridge stress and fridge shame.
Nate Hegyi: I get fridge shame with the spinach thing. I will buy a bag of spinach and I'll be like, all right, salads every day. And then without fail within a week, especially when you get it from Costco and it's the huge 5 pound bag of, you know, of lettuce and you're like, ah, spring greens, I'm gonna do this. And then it gets slimy on the bottom after four days and you're just like, what a waste. I'm so wasteful.
Nicola Twilley: And not only so wasteful, it probably has half the nutrients it did when you started out. Dang. Remember, the fridge is not a bank vault. It is just slowing decay. It is not stopping it. And so those salad leaves are still breathing. And when they breathe, they burn through their internal resources. And so yeah, put a put a thing of spinach in in the fridge. And it will have half to three quarters Recorders less vitamin C, for example, than it did when you purchased it.
Nate Hegyi: I did not know that.
Nicola Twilley: People think of it as a bank vault. No, you really shouldn't stockpile. Perishable food should never have been something that we think we can stockpile. That's by its very nature. It isn't that.
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Nate Hegyi: There are also expiration dates, those nagging black numbers on the side of a milk jug warning you that it will only last five more days. So drink up. There is a widespread rumor that Al Capone created expiration dates after a bunch of children in Chicago died while drinking old milk. It's not true. In reality, expiration dates are just a way for supermarkets and big producers to keep track of their inventory.
Nicola Twilley: I now ignore those with a great sense of freedom.
Nate Hegyi: You ignore them? Why do you ignore them?
Nicola Twilley: I mean, they're made up.
Nate Hegyi: Really?
Nicola Twilley: Yes. Um. And completely illogical and vary by state. I mean, milk will or milk and cream will expire a week earlier in Montana than it will in the rest of the country. Is there anything special about Montana when it comes to milk and cream? I don't think so.
Nate Hegyi: I don't think so. I live in Montana and I don't I don't think so, really.
Nicola Twilley: These dates arose from, again, that sort of public sense of like, well, wait, how old is our food? We have no way of knowing anymore. At the time, companies didn't put a sell by or best before on their food, but they did put a series of numbers and letters that were their own inventory control system, just so that they knew what to ship first, etc.. Yeah, and consumer protection bureaus would put out pamphlets allowing consumers to sort of crack those codes. And they were so popular. I mean, this is like, you know, Da Vinci Code style popular. The pamphlet would sell out in 24 hours because everyone was trying to get a copy of it and figure out how old their food was. And again, the food industry sort of wanted to get out ahead of this, and they didn't want to tell you how how old your food was because you would be horrified. So instead they were like, great, we'll do a best before. It doesn't tell you how old the food is. It just tells you how long you can keep it. And honestly, if you throw it out too soon while it's still good, is that bad for us? No, that is not because you will just buy more food. So it's ridiculous. And also, listen, we evolved a perfectly great set of sensory apparatus for telling whether milk is bad or not. We can sniff it.
Nate Hegyi: You smell it.
Nate Hegyi: So is that what you do? Is it just the sniff test?
Nicola Twilleyi: Oh, yeah.
Nate Hegyi: See, I've also been doing the sniff test, and that's another one between me and my wife. She'll look at the milk and she'll be like, well, it's two days old. And I'm like, yeah, but it smells fine. I think we’re. Okay.
Nicola Twilley: It could be a week old. It'll be. It's fine. It is absolutely fine. And listen here. Don't sue me, listeners. You do what makes you feel safe. But I'm here to tell you that those dates are not scientific. So, yeah.
Nate Hegyi: After writing this book, how have your fridge habits changed?
Nicola Twilley: I have become slightly more annoying about my focus on eating seasonal food. Um, primarily because I am now aware of sort of that it's it's not only more delicious, it's actually better for me. I am much more sort of aware of my own tendency to overstock the fridge. I've tried to become much more at peace with a sort of semi empty fridge.
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Nate Hegyi: With everybody fretting over smartphones and I, it's easy to forget that refrigeration is a remarkable piece of technology. But you know what they say about technology. It isn't inherently good or bad. It's all about how you use it. And you can use your fridge to stockpile food to treat your kitchen like an apocalyptic bunker. Or you can take a more modest approach, recognize its limits, and maybe even meet someone special.
Nicola Twilley: Or not. I mean, I don't think many people have said often that I am highly dateable, but this was a this was a career highlight for me. I mean, some of the fridges he showed me, you would definitely run away screaming.
Nate Hegyi: Nicola Twilley's new book is called Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet and Ourselves. We're almost done here. But before we go, I want to know what is your fridge esthetic? Taylor Quimby, our showrunner. He tells me his is sparse. Probably a stained soy sauce bottle in there. Mine is actually a really tiny fridge in a van right now because I am in the middle of moving. Send us a voice memo or an email to Outside In at npr.org. This episode was written and mixed by me, Nate Hegyi. It was edited by Taylor. Our team also includes Justine Paradis, Marina Henke, and Felix Poon. Rebecca Lavoie is the head of podcasts over here at NPR music in this episode from Blue Dot sessions. Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Outside/In is a production of NPR.