Episode 86

the Cold Chain: How Refrigeration Changed... well... Everything with Nicola Twilley

Published on: 19th June, 2024

In this episode, Kate sits down with author and co-host of the Gastropod Podcast, Nicola Twilley, to talk about her new book Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. Nicola has written an absolute page-turner exploring the massive and far-reaching impacts of refrigeration on just about every aspect of our lives, not since the dawn of agriculture has something changed our world so radically. In this episode, her and Kate explore the domestication of cold - which, very much unlike fire - is a recent phenomenon. The cold chain is new - not even 150 years old - and its impacts on our health and the environment, on biodiversity and flavor, are big. It’s a technology that can slow time, delay death, and shift our geography. It has led to the marketing of an apple by an astronaut, the reinvention of the tomato many times over, and so much more. We talk about biodiversity loss, death, and also how we might re-imagine the cold chain in light of the global cold rush. This is an episode not to be missed and a book you won’t be able to put down!

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Find Nicola:

Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves (out June 25th)

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Instagram: @nicolatwilley

X: @nicolatwilley


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Transcript
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Howdy. I'm Kate Cavanaugh, and you're listening to the Mind Body and Soil podcast, where we're laying the groundwork for our

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land, ourselves, and for generations to come by looking at the way every thread of life is connected to one another.

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Communities above ground mirror the communities below the soil, which mirror the vast community of the cosmos.

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As the saying goes, as above, so below.

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Join me as we take a curious journey into agriculture, biology, history, spirituality, health, and so much more.

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I can't wait to unearth all of these incredible topics alongside you.

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Hello and welcome to the Groundwork Podcast, formerly the Mind Body and Soil Podcast, where we explore the threads of what

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it means to be humans woven into this earth.

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I am your host, Kate Cavanaugh, and it is always such a pleasure to be here with you.

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This week, I have an incredible guest.

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Her name is Nicola Twilley, and her book, which is out next week on June 25th, is called Frostbite, How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves.

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She also has an incredible podcast called Gastropod, where she explores the history of all kinds of food.

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I especially enjoyed her last couple of episodes on shrimp and on oysters.

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I have been at the heart in some ways of the cold chain for over 12 years.

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And when I say the cold chain, I mean that I have worked as a butcher in the business of something that needs to be refrigerated.

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In fact, one of the things that I've repeated over the years is that many of the things that we love and my job as a butcher

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has really been to just mitigate rot, that the second that an animal has been harvested or killed, it is in this process of

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deteriorating, as is every vegetable as it is pulled out of the field. And refrigeration radically changed our world.

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And I really didn't have a concept of just how radical this shift was until I picked up Nikki's book.

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I couldn't I honestly couldn't believe it.

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I'm still a little jaw on the floor speechless to see just how much this has changed our world.

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And having just interviewed John Valiant and spoken a lot about fire, which humans domesticated around 1,000,000 years ago,

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it was incredibly radical to think about the fact that humans really just domesticated refrigeration less than a 150 years

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ago, really domesticating it just a 100 years ago.

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And so that's our domestication of cold.

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And as I think about the history of how the food system has changed, which we've talked a lot about over the last 100, 150

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years, I feel like I have this huge blind spot in how refrigeration specifically had altered not just our food system, but

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the course of history and how we live our lives.

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And I can't help but go back to the idea that in 18/51 in Chicago, the first futures commodity was traded.

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And somewhere in Australia that same year was a pretty big bid to mechanize refrigeration.

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And what has ensued the the the history of our food system of how it has been created wouldn't have been possible if without refrigeration.

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And prior to this, we really only had means of food preservation that required salt, Shout out to one of the sponsors of this week's episode, Redmond Real Salt. And we also had smoke. We had fire.

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And, I mean, I really I really can't.

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Like, I don't have words for how much this transforms it, how fascinating the history of this is. It is the history of us.

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It is the history of our food system.

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It is a big piece of that question of how did we get here?

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I want to read this one little piece of Nicola's where she says, quote, in short, our food system is frostbitten.

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It has been injured by its exposure to cold.

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Part of the reason for that is that refrigeration was implemented

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for the

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most part in order to optimize markets rather than human and environmental health.

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And in this case, project drawdown attributes a large number, I think it's somewhere around 10% of greenhouse gas emissions

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to both cooling in terms of air conditioning, as well as refrigeration.

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And I think that this is, as we have been guided by this David Graeber quote that the ultimate hidden truth of our world is

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that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently.

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This is an opportunity for us to make it differently.

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And Nikki's book really closes it out with some ideas of how people in Rwanda and all over the world might be reimagining the cold chain a little bit.

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I didn't get a chance to read this quote, but I really wanted to because it kind of kind of boggled my mind. And it's it's

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about a cheeseburger,

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and how maybe this food that we so often consume here in America over the summer, really wouldn't exist prior to refrigeration.

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Nicola says, at this point, Jack Heath gave up.

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It wasn't the prospect of milling wheat or slaughtering cattle that put an end to his homemade cheeseburger plan. It was a scheduling conundrum.

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His tomatoes were in season in late summer.

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His lettuce ready to harvest in spring and fall.

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According to the pre refrigeration agricultural calendar he was trying to follow, Jacquiath would have needed to make cheese

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in the springtime after his dairy cow had given birth, her calf could be slaughtered for the rennet, and the milk intended to feed it repurposed.

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Meanwhile, the steer would have traditionally been slaughtered in the autumn as soon as it started to get cold.

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If he turned the tomatoes into longer lasting ketchup and aged his cheese in a cellar for 6 months until the meat, lettuce,

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and wheat bun were ready, he could maybe possibly make a cheeseburger from scratch.

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But practically speaking, he concluded, the cheeseburger could not have existed until nearly a century ago.

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Nicola adds, as indeed, it did not.

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Though there are a handful of competing origin stories, they all date to the 19 twenties thirties.

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I think that this quote really illustrates how refrigeration has overcome our agricultural calendars and the seasons in which we grow food.

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As all of you will know that have been listening to the podcast, one of my thesis statements that I've been exploring is that

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we used to move our bodies to resources.

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And now we move resources to our bodies.

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And we've been exploring a lot of the infrastructure that underpins that, and refrigeration is a huge one.

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The point being that we could not have moved our bodies or indeed even been in a more sedentary agricultural society and made a cheeseburger.

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We require the advent of refrigeration to store these things.

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And as you'll hear Nikki talk about in this, usually in terms of the global market, their agricultural can't calendars have suppliers.

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And by that, I mean, regions in the world that are 2 or 3 deep for each produce or food product that is going around.

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And so this includes things like blueberries, tomatoes, or bananas, which are, as it turns out, the most widely consumed fruit in the world. This has changed us.

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It has changed us fundamentally in in ways that I think rival or at least compare to the changes that were wrought by the

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advent of agriculture some 12000 years ago.

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That's how big I think this is.

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And Nikki explores it in frostbite with a sense of playfulness and gravity, both.

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She explores stories that are absolutely riveting with characters that will have you absolutely hooked on how refrigeration

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did change our food, our planet, and ourselves, our actual bodies. It is a tour de force.

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And I am telling you right now to pre order this book so that it arrives on your doorstep on June 25th, so that you can gobble it up.

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And then I want to get to work reimagining how we might use a little bit of less of this and tap into where we can and where

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we can afford it are local food systems and local seasonal food, right?

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It's this idea that at the beginning of summer, I always see restaurant menus crop up with 3 sisters plantings, right, corn, beans, and squash.

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And a lot of those things, especially for those of us in more northern climates aren't really available until later in the

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summer in the same way that the best tomatoes that you are going to eat in Colorado or New York or Vermont are probably coming

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to you in late August or early September, and aren't actually the summer staple that we think of them as.

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I think Nikki's work that she is doing both with this book, with her essay writing, and on gastropod is incredible.

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And I know she would love your support.

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She would love your listening ears, and I would love for you to support her.

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It is it is such a pleasure to really explore this, especially because I've joked over the years, you know, over 12 years

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of owning a butcher shop, that I would have to give my firstborn child to my HVAC guy.

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And so a little shout out to Red at able HVAC and to what it has been to to work with Nicola all these years.

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A little bookkeeping, as it were, I want to thank our sponsors Redmond Real Salt, which has such a really fun sort of complimentary

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story with this episode as does sundries farm garlic.

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Because most of our garlic has been in storage for 6 months or more that we buy at the grocery store.

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But Sundry's Farm Garlic is fresh from the farm with shipping beginning in September, and you can find links to those in the show notes.

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And if you enjoyed this episode, if you could just hit that subscribe button.

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And if you have time, leave a rating and review or share this episode with a friend.

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That's a big part of how this podcast finds new listening ears, and it's a free way to support my work.

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So without further ado, here is our episode with Nicola Twilley and her book, frostbite, how refrigeration changed our world,

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our planet and ourselves, which is out on June 25th.

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So you can preorder it today and get it in your cold little pause next week. Here's Nikki. I'm just I'm so excited. Thank you. It's funny.

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I was as as I was thinking about how to intro this, I recorded a an episode with John Valiant on Friday.

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And so I've spent the last 3 months really looking a lot a lot of John's work through the lens of fire weather.

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And so I've spent a lot of time with ethylene oxide in a very different configuration.

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And I've spent a lot of time with fire.

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And so when I really sat down with frostbite, I was struck by something that you said about the domestication of cold.

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And I actually wondered if we might if we might open with that.

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And I have a little quote here from you to open and set this off, because this really struck me, especially in contrast with

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fire weather, where you know, we have the domestication of fire happening, depends on who you ask, but let's call it about

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1,000,000 years ago, So prior to modern Homo Sapiens.

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And you have this fantastic little piece about refrigeration, where you say, it is also a much more recent development.

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Our ancestors learned to control fire before modern humans ever evolved.

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But our ability to command cold at will dates back a little more than a 150 years.

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Mechanical cooling, refrigeration produced by human artifice, as opposed to the natural chill offered by weather dependent

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snow and ice wasn't achieved until the mid 1700.

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It wasn't commercialized until the late 1800, and it wasn't domesticated until the 19 twenties.

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And so I wonder if we might just start there. Yeah.

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It's I mean, I still, and I have been researching and writing about cold and visiting cold storage warehouses, and totally

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immersed in this world for more than a decade now, and I still get brought up short when I think about how recent a transformation

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this is for us, because, you know, I think and this is, you know, this is a theory, but you will find anthropologists who

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argue that it that the control of fire is really what made us human.

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That by being able to cook food, we became the sort of big brained,

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you can definitely question how well we use that brain and how but that we became the the big brained creatures that we are,

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etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, and, you know, the rest is history.

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But if you think about, that's adding heat.

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Adding heat transformed the course of human history.

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Taking heat away, that wasn't within our power, until so recently.

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And as I wrote this book, I realized, oh, it too has transformed everything it's touched.

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So it's sort of a it's the other side of the equation.

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It's incredibly recent, and yet it's equally transformative in a lot of ways.

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I think it's incredibly transformative. And I was struck, you know, I've I've worked in kitchens, and I've spent a lot of

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time in walk in coolers and dry aging meat.

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And so I felt like I had some lens on cold.

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I knew that everything that I love the most in this world is probably in some stage of rot, whether that's dried meat or cheese

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or, or wine or ferments or something like that.

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But I don't think I had considered just how much refrigeration and cooling changed the course of history, that it changed

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the the way that globalization has played out, that it has changed the geography of our cities, and the way that we build

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ourselves, that it has changed our health, just about everything.

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And and and I'm sure you can speak to this better having spent the last 10 years in the cold.

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It was a it it it actually became sort of almost, whack a mole toward the end where I was like, oh, god.

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Not another thing that refrigeration has changed. Now I have to work there.

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Because I'd, you know, I'd be talking to someone.

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This is totally random, but my husband is working on a book, a new book, as well, and we were visiting a guy he was interviewing,

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and the guy's wife was like, well, also an archaeologist was like, well, I'm sure you know that, you know, refrigeration transformed

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the the North York Moors, and this landscape that was, a, it's made famous in the sort of the Bronte's and Wuthering Heights,

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and this kind of very romantic heather covered moor, and, you know, people it it's beautiful landscape.

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Many people visit and hike it to today.

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It's also very close to my heart because I went to university near there.

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But, this landscape is a totally recent creation and a creation of refrigeration.

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And this is just another, the tiniest of examples, but until it became feasible to ship meat, across oceans, a country like

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like Britain had to feed its people on meat that was grown in Britain, and that meant you had to use land that wasn't very

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productive, like the the Moors, but that you grazed sheep there, and then sold them to the people who lived in the cities and worked in the factories.

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And they didn't get very much meat, and it wasn't, you know, and it was quite expensive.

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And being able to open up, you know, the the Australia and New Zealand, and the the, sheep grazing there, the cattle grazing

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lands of South America, and bring that meat to this tiny little island, where most of the people lived in cities, suddenly,

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there was no point, grazing animals on these kinda more marginal lands instead, and what you get is those people going out of business. You actually get mass migration.

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So a lot this is the point at which a lot of, say, Scottish crofters, you know, who are have these tiny little, you know,

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their flocks of sheep in this kind of tough landscape give up for good and and emigrate to the US or the Antipodes.

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And and so that's one out, you know, outcome of this.

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The the other is that, okay, suddenly the North York Moors don't have a grazing purpose anymore, and instead, the the the animals aren't cropping the landscape.

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Instead, the heather grows up and is deliberately encouraged because the the land is now a leisure area for and and heather is where grouse like to nest.

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And so, an aristocrat, a landowner, can go and shoot some grouse on this landscape that becomes celebrated in poetry and literature,

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but used to be a meat growing landscape until we outsourced the meat growing landscape.

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And so it's just that it's a that's a very long story, to illustrate sort of a a small, very tiny ripple of the larger ripple that is refrigeration.

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But it also gives you a sense of I just you know, I'd be having dinner with someone, and I'd say, oh, da da da da. And they'd say, oh, yeah.

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You have the North York, York, Morris.

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And I'd be like, oh, my goodness. Of course, this whole story.

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So it just it became this I mean, I have been working on it for a long time.

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It just became this ever expanding puzzle.

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What do sauerkraut, lox, cured meats, miso, certain cheeses, and pickles have in common other than, of course, being delicious? They've all been cured by salt.

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If you're enjoying this interview with Nicola Twilley and her new book, Frostbite, How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our

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Before their very recent advent of refrigeration just over 100 years ago, we preserved food with smoke and salt.

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Mark Kurlansky in his book Salt writes, quote, we have forgotten that from the beginning of civilization until about 100 years

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ago, salt was one of the most sought after commodities in human history.

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That's because it is what allowed food to survive winter, traveling, and also trade.

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I still cure foods in my kitchen using salt to preserve the abundance of summer, things like herbs mixed with salt and herbs soleil.

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I make sauerkrauts and ferments and cure egg yolks at their peak of flavor to be grated over tasty broths later in the season

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when short days limit the number and flavor of my eggs.

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And and you I I have to say you navigate it beautifully because there are all these small stories that crop up that cover

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every corner of the globe that that this is the 3rd pole, our our quest for cold.

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And so you you navigate it beautifully.

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And you you said a word in there that I actually wanna tease at since you brought it up, which is migration.

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And I was really struck in the book at how much you know, I think about what you just said, and I also think about the industrial

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revolution and the enclosure of the commons in the UK and and sort of how that rebalanced our urban and rural environment,

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which is a big piece of the book.

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But it's also a compression of time and space, right, that these you you talk about the food on its last migration, these

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salmon as they they travel in cold storage, or these fruits and vegetables, as they travel from far corners of the world,

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that that migration is a piece of how cold has changed our geography and the way that our world works.

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I'm so glad you yeah. That resonated with you because, yeah, I refrigeration, I began to see it's it's a time machine on one

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level, so it it delays rot and decay.

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It sort of it it it doesn't stop time, but it slows time enough.

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And so that is that is one sort of time distortion effect, but it also then gives you this, geographic distortion.

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So you're both shifting the seasons, but also allowing food to move across that space, so, like moving within space and time.

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And because I think you're completely right to sort of point out the other side of that is, you know, because our food can

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now move across space and time, well, other things have had to rearrange around that.

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And one of those things is people moving into cities.

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It's a really and and this is another really interesting thing because until the 1800, there really wasn't a city.

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I mean, this is a thing that is hotly debated amongst archaeologists and no one really knows because it's not like anyone

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was doing great censuses of, you know, ancient Chinese cities.

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But the 1800 is where London became the largest city that the world had ever seen.

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And the thing about that is feeding a city is a problem unless you have refrigeration, because you literally just can't get enough.

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And this is something you've talked about the show on the show before, you know, people used to go to the food. Yep.

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Now you're trying to, you you you can't have enough food for the people in the place where the people are, and people, believe me, they tried.

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I mean, that's one of the amazing things in the book too.

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There used to be entire herds of cattle stored underneath this this strand in London. Yeah.

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There used to be flocks of turkeys. Imagine driving a turkey.

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I mean, it sounds like, you know, a ridiculous

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to an extent. I having raised turkeys, I can't do it.

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I mean, going 1 mile per hour for over dozens of miles to get to the city. Unimaginable.

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I mean, it's just the most beautiful description that I quote in the book is this, they're trying to drive a flock of turkeys

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into Philadelphia where the people are, you know, and the food isn't.

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And nightfall comes, the turkeys all are trying to fly up in the trees to roost because they're birds. That's what they do. They don't realize they're meat. And, they still think they're birds.

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And people that the, you know, the workers are chasing them.

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They're moving at, like, absolute like, slower than walking speed, and that is how food had to be brought, meat, especially

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on its own 2 legs or 4 legs, or, you know, there were there were pigs in Central Park.

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There were flocks of pigs in Kensington, which if you know London at all, that's the ritziest part of town.

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There were herds of cattle underneath the strand in London, but people were trying however they could to get the food to where

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the people were, and it wasn't working.

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And so that's really where refrigeration steps in, is at this breaking point where cities have become so large that there's

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no way to not address this problem anymore.

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You also have another thing going on which is that at the time, the field of chemistry was this new thing, and chemists had,

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they thought, figured out that protein was the essential nutrient, that, like, carbohydrate was, you know I guess the frosting on the cake, it did nothing. They hadn't discovered vitamins yet.

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They had, like, the other things were all but protein was it.

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It both, you know, made you strong and gave you the energy to do the work you needed to do in the factories.

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That's what people thought at the time.

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It was a mistake, but so they have all these workers.

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They have this crisis of bringing them protein, and it was seen genuinely as a crisis.

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So there's, you know, committees of the finest minds of the time set up to, you know, what shall we do?

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The great food question of our time.

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And so the and that's a sort of forgotten problem, but that's where this all comes from.

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Yeah. And I believe at the time too, you're seeing a lot of nutrient deficiencies, especially, like, if we look through the

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lens of the enclosure of the commons, people are going from from collectively raising, growing their food from access to some

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of this more nutrient density into the cities, and into impoverished conditions where food was less accessible and nutrients,

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the vitamins that we hadn't yet defined, weren't really flowing.

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And so nutrient deficiency was was an issue as well.

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Yeah. Again, it's almost impossible to reconstruct historic diets. It's really hard.

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But from the best we can see, urbanization was just a gigantic downhill at first for folks.

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It really was bad in every possible way for their health, and you can see why.

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Also, at the time, you have a big influx of, in the 1800, you start getting huge influx of sugar, and people are using that

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for their calories, which you can imagine is not a, super healthy replacement for the maybe limited maybe bland diet they were getting before.

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But, you know, and people say, oh, it was so boring, so bland. Yes.

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There would have been a lot of barley and a lot of, you know, a lot of sturdy grains.

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But one of the things I look at in the book is that our methods of food preservation for a pre refrigeration cuisine, they're the flavor bombs.

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It's all the fermented and dried and smoked and pickled things that have these incredible flavors.

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So even in small quantities, they're what's kind of uplifting your your starchy, you know, beans and grains and so on.

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So there is this flavor of pre refrigeration cuisine that is built on those preservation methods.

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It's just that the chemists at the time were really concerned about meat, and they were right to be.

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People weren't getting a lot of meat, and it's not like they were getting, like, complete proteins and there was a a lentil revolution happening either.

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So they were right to be concerned.

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Their scientific, diagnosis, which is that basically everyone needed a lot more meat, wasn't exactly the ideal solution we now know.

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But but, you know, they were they were they were correct to be concerned.

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Let's get back to our episode with Nicola Twilley talking about refrigeration. Yeah, absolutely.

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I mean, I just the confluence of events that's happening, as this domestication of cold comes online, is it's a really fascinating

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space because globalization is really taking off and industrialization is is happening on a new and different level.

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And I think that this moment where we're it's a new moment of you know, as I was reading the book, I actually thought that

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the the advent of cold storage, of the cold chain, had a lot in common with the advent of agriculture in a lot of ways and

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wrought a lot of the some of the same problems, as I think agriculture sort of introduced 10, 12000 years ago, and even had some of the same players.

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And you you mentioned this in the book that, I mean, agriculturally, maybe at first, we wanted to brew beer, we wanted to

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grow grain to brew beer, and then some people have sort of speculated about this.

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And it's really the lagers that that sort of help fund and push forward some of the cold storage. But there's also I

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was amazed that that, like, beer is always right there at the front. Always beer. Always beer.

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I mean, it's there's something so relatable about humans. It's

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Yeah. I mean, throughout the time too.

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But there's also the need to store stuff closer to us.

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Again, that idea that you mentioned that I keep coming back to in all of this work, which is we used to move our bodies to resources.

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Now we move our resources to our bodies, and there's so many externalities associated with that.

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And in that same way, cold allowed us to be even to move even more to our bodies at an even faster pace.

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And I love this way of thinking about it because it's so interesting to me because you can see why this was picked up as a

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great solution, although interestingly, not at first, and that was also something that I was genuinely fascinated by.

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All these, like, the, you know, I talked about the sort of greatest minds of the era, sort of considering this this pressing

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food question, how to get more protein into the workers in the cities.

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And refrigeration was seen as the least promising solution of all.

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People just were like, obviously, it's not that they didn't know that cold would stop rot or at least delay rot. They they knew. They they were perfectly aware.

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It's just that it didn't seem like a feasible mass solution.

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So they were into, things like injections and fumigation and coatings.

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And, there were various, processes developed to sort of compress meat into these tiny little pellets and biscuits and even

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shreddies that you would sort of rehydrate.

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So vast amounts of ingenuity, you know, thousands of patented processes.

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People really trying to crack this, and all of them thinking that, yeah, there's no there's no point.

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And the reason, there's no point even trying Nicola.

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And the reason they thought that is because we didn't have control of it.

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There the it wasn't something that operated at scale.

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So for, you know, for most of human history, people have noticed Nicola, if if they lived in a place where there was any natural

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cold, they would have noticed its preservative powers.

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It's just that those are you know, you could extend the the the time span that you could hold on to that cold using an ice house, and rich people did.

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But it's not a, a global mass scale solution at all.

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And and the journey and it it wasn't clear to people that it could become that.

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And the first inkling that it it could become that, actually came from natural ice, and a and a high school dropout in Boston

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who managed to turn natural ice into a global industry.

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And this is another thing that blew my mind.

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You know, the way we think about Saudi oil today, like, here's a, you know, this is this is a kingdom that has risen atop

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this resource this subterranean resource that has just made them incredibly rich.

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Well, New England was that because it had so many frozen ponds. So much ice. Yeah.

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So much People were like, oh, you know, America is blessed with this, like, this icy resource, with this richness that you

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wouldn't get, say, even in a even in the UK.

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You know, it's it's too it's too mild a climate.

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And so this this guy who is an amazing character and, again, so relatable in his diaries, I mean, he's he's this weird mix of completely overconfident.

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He writes these kind of snotty letters to people being like, yeah.

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If you don't get on board now, you're gonna regret this.

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We will have riches beyond our dreams. You know? Nothing can stop us.

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And and then being surprised when everyone is like, no thanks.

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See, like, you're going to ship cubes of ice around the globe? I don't think so.

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And he has this ridiculous inability to plan.

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So he, like, brings a boatload of ice to, you know, Cuba and hasn't thought about where to store it or what to do.

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He hasn't even thought about the fact that when the ice is harvested, the Boston Harbor is going to be frozen over. So what's he gonna do?

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Like, he can't sail a ship out of town when he literally I mean, I actually, the whole way through, I was like, yeah, I would have made that mistake too.

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I it was so so relatable, but also just such an idiot. And he keeps writing in it.

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He also he, you know, he's chased by creditors.

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He's writing the word panic and block cap or anxiety and block caps in his journals repeatedly, very relatable, but manages

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to do it and turn a this thing that people thought was just a sort of niche way of keeping food cold for the rich, for luxuries.

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People use that ice, honestly, just for, you know, having a wine slushy in summer as a as a treat, the elite did.

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They didn't use it for storing food.

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You couldn't use it for storing food.

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It just didn't operate at that scale, and he was the one who demonstrated, like, oh, if you can supply a city with ice at

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a big at at this kind of scale, you could transform the food system.

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And that is sort of what sowed the seed of refrigeration, mechanical refrigeration sort of viability in people's mind.

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It's an incredible story. His name was Tudor. Right? Do I have that right?

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Yeah. Frederick Tudor. Yes.

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Frederick Tudor. And it's an incredible story and such a wild one to imagine shipping ice.

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And I know that you got to go see ice being harvested, which is incredible.

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I got to harvest it myself. It is a workout. Oh, absolutely.

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I mean, that's the it's a good workout.

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I was thinking too, you know, in this and I was looking, I was looking for the quote, but you talk about, you know, ultimately,

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a lot of this ended up not being about human health or about anything about the environment, but it ended up being about markets.

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And I think Frederick Tudor story really exemplifies that early capitalization of the of the cold chain too.

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Oh, totally. And the economics of why it succeeded are fascinating.

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I mean, part of it is that no one could figure out how to tax it.

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It wasn't seen as agriculture even though it was sort of harvested, and it wasn't seen as, mining, even though it was sort

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of a sort of resource that was also taken, So no one knew what it wasn't, an article of manufacture because humans hadn't made it.

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So no idea how to tax it, so it was tax free.

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And so, like, these weird economic reasons.

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The other thing is that ships leaving from Boston often didn't have a lot to bring with them.

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It wasn't as a place that was creating a lot of bulk items for export, and so ships would sail using rocks as ballast because

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you have to have something in the hold.

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And so once they could be convinced that this ice wasn't gonna all melt and, you know, set their ship, like, all kind of, you know, heavy duty. I don't think Exactly.

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They once they once they once they believed there were there wasn't gonna be a total disaster, well, then, yeah, sure.

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We'll carry your ice for a discounted rate because we were just gonna be carrying rocks.

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And and meanwhile, you know, the ice itself is free. It's it's a pond. You're just taking off it.

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So actually, the economics of it are weirdly advantageous.

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And so it's, again, it's just one of those weird, and and as you say, that throughout, there's sort of these moments where

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it's it's not maybe something you could have predicted, but then the market makes it happen.

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And I do think that this it's one of the things one of the reasons why I Twilley think this book is important is because refrigeration, it's not good or bad.

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It's just that we have implemented it as a market solution. Yes.

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And we haven't looked at its impacts.

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And some of those impacts are good and some of them are bad.

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And it's within our powers to say, well, we don't like the bad impacts, so we can structure our markets and the economy and

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regulations, so so as to avoid them.

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And so, of course, people who every all the people who innovated in this space were in the market.

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They were, you know, people trying to sell meat, from Chicago in New York.

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They were people, you know, trying to ship ice around for New England to Calcutta.

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They were people who were trying, you know, to ship, lettuce from California to the East Coast, people who wanted to make

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money solved the problems of refrigeration and implemented the solutions, and they did not do it because that was not their job.

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They did not do it in pursuit of health or in pursuit of environmental sustainability, or even in pursuit of deliciousness in the field.

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They did it in pursuit of solving their market problem. Yeah.

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And that's just that that gets you to a different set of problems.

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It does. And I actually I think this is actually a really good place because I wanted to bring up something that that isn't

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in the book, but it kept it kept coming to mind to me.

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So and and I'll define this, but do you know what Jevons paradox is?

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Oh, I have heard that. But define it, yes.

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Let's define it. So when the cost of using a resource decreases due to increased efficiency, it becomes more attractive for consumers and industries to utilize it.

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Consequently, this increased affordability leads to higher consumption neat and tidy way, I kept

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coming neat and tidy way. I kept coming back to this idea, especially as you talk about the comparative advantage of the way

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some some certain certain breeds of vegetables were selected for cold storage, but also the way that food waste begins to

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take off in light of refrigeration and and the way in which refrigeration is used both on an individual scale at a home refrigerator,

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and within a more regional scale and in a refrigerated distribution center.

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And then again, on sort of a global scale as we we ship these bananas and salmon and cherries, hither and yon.

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And so I just kind of wanted to bring that into play because of the economics of this and in the way that it created commodities to in terms of F. CODGE.

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I was just excited to use that. F fcodge indeed. It is so okay.

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So it there's so many, that yeah.

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There's so many sort of moments that fit within that.

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One of the things I think about first is is apples.

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So apples were one of the early kind of pioneers in figuring out how to store fruit, in cold storage.

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It it it the a lot of this work, the pioneering work was carried out at a place called the Low Temperature Research Station

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in Cambridge, in England, and it came out of, actually, the first World War where England, again, tiny, very urbanized nation,

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and the German U boats are shipping are sinking a lot of ships.

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And that thing the UK quickly realizes it's gonna starve, and it doesn't you know, it's dependent on the steady flow of imported

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food, and it doesn't it can't keep that food, flow of imported food, and it doesn't, it can't keep that food, stored.

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And so there's this sort of impetus to to figure out this problem.

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Low temperature research station is set up, and they get to work on the problem of apples, sort of staple fruit in the UK,

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and but difficult to store in the cold.

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Some of them store well for a while, but they're susceptible to a lot of different sort of diseases of of aging, you know,

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and they all have incredible names like brown heart.

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And, and and so they get to work on this.

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One of the things that is interesting about fruit and vegetables and trying to store them is what you're doing is you're slowing

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down how fast they're they're breathing, essentially, how fast they're respiring.

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So every fruit and vegetable has a certain number of breaths it can take until it's gonna kick it once it's off the plant,

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and you are just trying to slow that down.

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And cold does that, but also what what the scientists there found, and I tell this story, I went into the archives, which

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looked like no one had ever touched them.

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There's boxes full of That's that's fun. Nosedive. It was amazing. Yeah.

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But the but what they discovered was that if you, if you, change the blend of gases, oxygen and carbon dioxide, and nitrogen,

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so give them a slightly different atmospheric blend of air to to breathe in, you can slow it down even further.

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And so that led to the development of con what's called controlled atmosphere storage for apples, and that led to a situation

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where I mean, we're recording this in May.

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You can go into any store and there are fresh apples, and there will be fresh apples in June, there will be fresh apples in July.

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Your your apple could happily be a year old, at this point. You know?

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And it will have been stored in controlled atmosphere.

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And what that led to was a huge boom in apple production and Washington state becoming a giant orchard.

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And now they're at the point, you know, so there's this was seen to be a huge economic boon to them. Great. We have this huge harvest. We can store it.

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We can sell it over the course of the year. What farmer is not happy?

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But then you have so many people planting apple trees and getting into this business that now an apple, it's it can hardly

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sell for the price of growing it plus storage, and you the the huge harvest has to be shipped overseas.

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And, as you say, it's become a commodity.

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And once you compete on price, that's all you have.

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And now, it's got to the point where, you know, new apples are being branded, and, there are influences hired to launch them, that the the Apple I

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was talking about it. This.

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Yeah, exactly. They hired astronauts to promote this apple in an attempt to make it not a commodity again. And so it's almost full circle.

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Here's an apple that admittedly stores really well.

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It's been selected, so it can store really well.

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But the only way to make it stand out in the market place is to create a brand around it. Mhmm.

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And it's and use marketing money to do that, and it's just incredible that this solution that was going to, you know, embraced

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by apple growers is this huge boon, economically, has, in the end, just turned an apple into a widget that can that, you know,

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when you have a widget, the only differentiating factor is price. Yeah.

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And so now, they have to spend money on marketing their widgets and giving them a brand.

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And it just it's an it for any economist, I think, okay, it's like, oh, we could have probably seen this coming, but happens

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again and again in, in these stories, and it's sort of, yeah.

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There used to be, as anyone who loves apples and goes to farmers markets knows, there used to be 100 of varieties of apples, 1,000.

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And, you know, some of them were the early ones, and some of them were the ones that stored well.

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And some of them were the ones that were good for pies, and some of them the ones good for eating out of the hand.

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And you would know which apple you wanted for and, I mean, I hate to say it. Those were brands.

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They just didn't have influencers promoting them, but they had their own unique selling point that now people are trying to create artificially around this cosmic crisp.

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It's just, it's a full, yeah, anyway, it's sort of astonishing to me how sort of that promise of refrigeration to, oh, like,

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here's a way we're all gonna make more money by being able to sell our apples year round.

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It didn't deliver because it just over delivered thousands of apples at all times that now the only thing that sets them apart is a different, there is price.

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Yeah. Yeah. And and that it wasn't the boon for farmers either that they expected, and I think that something that you're

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farming really struggle to make money on this now. The the Oh, yeah. It's a huge issue. Yeah.

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Oh, yeah. I mean, you have an United States average margin for a farmer is 2 point 4%.

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And and you talk in the book, you know, there was a piece that I didn't know that, you know, 3% of of the farms in America

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make 97% of the food at 4 times the profit as the other 97% that are struggling.

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And I, I think that this actually falls into what I was gonna tug on next, which is, I think the book speaks to biodiversity

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loss on so many different levels and layers.

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I mean, it is both the biodiversity of the types, the species of these fruits and vegetables that we're eating.

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But it's also kind of a diversity loss of our our own ability to taste flavor.

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I kept coming back to that idea, the shifting baseline of how we perceive flavor, loss of our own microbial diversity inside

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of our gut and other aspects of our health.

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It is also I mean, just the loss of cooking and preserving traditions of that biodiversity that's unique to different regions around the globe.

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And and it's just a homogenizing and monocropping.

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And I kept coming back to you with sort of a standardizing and a flavorification of foods that it's just these single flavors.

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I mean, the orange juice is the perfect example there, actually.

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FCODGE, which we should say is a frozen concentrated orange juice.

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And NFC is the one you'll see most often on shelves these days. That's not from Concentrate.

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So that's things like your Tropicana and Minute Maid. But Fcodge came first.

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And there's a whole section in the book where I get into this, and, like, how that was developed, and, you know, Bing Crosby

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is the guy who sold it to Americans, and so on, but in the, you know, it was a wartime thing, that they were trying to use vacuum technology to dehydrate hamburger. It wasn't going very well. They switched to orange juice. That wasn't going very well.

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Orange juice, you know, anyone who's had it freshly squeezed knows it's very ephemeral. Right?

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I mean, and but and that's another thing that you keep.

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It's just the cognitive dissonance of the fact that we can go to a store and get fresh,

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and put in quote

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orange juice all year round, every day, and yet we know that orange juice isn't like that. We know. Or or maybe we don't anymore.

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But if you think about it for 5 seconds, you do know it.

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Anyway, long story short, the process that is developed to turn, orange juice from this very ephemeral, seasonal, local treat

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into something that all of us can have all year round, at any moment that we so desire is, is a process that involves stripping

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out all the flavor molecules because you can't store them. They oxidize. They turn bad.

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So there's this sort of vacuum technology.

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It it it strips out every single sort of all the volatiles, they're called.

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That's that's the stuff that makes it taste like an orange.

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Otherwise, it's sugar water, and that is what you get at the end of it.

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You get sort of this brownish sugary slush for for, for fcodge.

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They then concentrate it, so they get rid of the water, and then it's very viscous. It's almost like a molasses.

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It has a tendency to crystallize and gunk things up.

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And what you do then is when you're repackaging it for the consumer, you add back the water and you add back the flavor molecules.

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You don't have to say your it has added flavors, because the molecules are all ones that are found in oranges.

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You don't add anything from a raspberry, you say.

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So so they're all found in oranges.

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So you don't have to say it's added flavor.

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You just add it back, but you don't have to add it back in the ratio it came out.

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And so, now you have a situation, I I I'm lucky, I live in Los Angeles and I have a backyard orange tree.

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And so I know the orange juice I make in in February tastes very different from the orange juice I make in April from that

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tree because the oranges have been on the the tree a little longer and they're a little sweeter.

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And and that's I can taste the difference from the oranges in the front side of the tree that gets the sun and the back side of the tree that doesn't.

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And that's just my tree, let alone different trees, different varieties of orange that come in over the course of the seasons, they all taste different. No.

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With this new, f codge, what you do is you add back the flavors, but you add it back in the same ratio every time.

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And the result does taste like orange, but it doesn't even need to taste like it doesn't taste like an orange. It tastes like orange.

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It generically, it's a it it might be an orange that has never been found in nature in that particular ratio, but it is the brand flavor of, say, Minute Maid.

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And now you can build a brand around it because it's gonna taste the same every time.

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And people can be, or they can say, oh, I like Tropicana.

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I don't like Minute Maid because they like the kind of more puckery taste of a Tropicana versus the more kind of floral notes

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of a Minute Maid, more candy type.

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And and that's then it's not surprising that, you know, oh, well, I think it's Coca Cola owns does it Coca Cola owns Tropicana

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or or vice versa, and perhaps Pepsi or other one. Yeah. Yeah.

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Then then it's not surprising because it's like, yeah, they're competing on a branded sugar water with flavors.

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It just that's what that's what that product has become, and it will taste the same every time.

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And it's just this, And that's that's how you do it.

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And it as you sort of said, that loss, it's not like, oh gosh, everyone has an orange tree in their backyard and they were, everyone is missing out on this.

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Most people don't know, and most people wouldn't have been able to have orange juice in the past.

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But it is kind of an astonishing loss, otherwise.

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And there's an amazing moment in the book where there's this, this editorial after there's a cold storage banquet held to

-:

sort of convince people that Nicola stored food is safe, back in 1911 in this amazing moment.

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But the editorial afterwards is like this one newspaper is like, well, fortunately, people in the future probably won't know what they're missing out on.

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I really feel like that's that's true, we don't.

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Well, I mean, I came back to this because then we select different breeds for their ability to withstand refrigeration.

-:

You do a beautiful job of this exploring it through the lens of a tomato.

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I mean, we lose apples, we lose oranges, but we also lose that phytochemical richness.

-:

Come back to are you familiar with the work of, like, Stephan VanVliet or Fred Provenza?

-:

Oh, Fred Provenza. Yeah. Yeah.

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Yeah. Fred's a Fred's a friend of mine.

-:

And and and looking at the way that we select not primary compounds in terms of vitamins or minerals or carbohydrates and

-:

protein, but secondary compounds, which are these phytochemicals that we associate, the anthocyanins and blueberries or the

-:

terpenes in in in hemp and various things or the tannins and wine, and there's a whole dark matter of these secondary compounds.

-:

And they're very responsive to these slight things, how much sun, which side of the tree that orange is on, and they actually

-:

do make up something that I think we're we don't yet fully understand about nutrition and about flavor, and about our draw to certain foods.

-:

And so we're losing we're losing species, and we're also losing our ability to select and to taste these things.

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There's 2 things that I think are really important there. 1 is that when you have a supermarket peach, which tastes like crap,

-:

because it cannot help but taste like that, because all of the, the pathways that produce flavor in a peach are switched off

-:

when it is stored below a certain temperature.

-:

And it just there's just no way it was it's gonna taste of anything.

-:

It's just like you could do your best, but it isn't.

-:

So is it surprising that people don't choose a peach, and they choose a gummy candy instead, because the gummy candy tasted something?

-:

And so I do think there's a huge and and there's a section in the book where I tried to tease out the health impact of refrigeration,

-:

and it's a really hard question to answer.

-:

But that, I think, is a big unanswered one.

-:

It's just how that loss of flavor has made things that should be so appealing.

::

A ripe peach should be the thing you want to eat, and it isn't. You'd rather have an eye. Joyful.

::

Yeah. And I actually have to just add that, like, just the joy I there is nothing more.

::

I grew up in Colorado and Palisade peaches are amazing. There's nothing more joyful than that.

::

It's and and you get this in places where it still happens.

::

I mean, I remember we, I have a podcast called Gastropod, and we made an episode about mangoes, and we interviewed this guy

::

in Delhi, and he said every year at mango season, he just rents a bus for him and his friends, and they go out and they cram

::

their faces full of mangoes, and the juice is running down them.

::

And it is all over their hands.

::

And you, they they, like, stick to each other on the way home because they're so covered in mango.

::

But it's just this incredible, celebration of mango perfection.

::

And it's, there's there's nothing craveable about a supermarket mango.

::

It just isn't doing that for you.

::

You might have it because you think it's a healthy choice, but, like, that requires discipline, and and not sort of unbridled joy, like you say.

::

So that's on the one hand, and then on the other, this is something that astonished me with the tomato research.

::

In the book, I tell the story of this guy who was sort of determined to create a tomato that tasted of something and could be refrigerated.

::

So he's not trying to, you know, say, no, we should only eat backyard tomatoes, which, you know, you can't go wrong with a backyard tomato. But It's true.

::

But he's he's saying, like, this is the world we live in. We have a refrigerated supply chain.

::

Let me breed a tomato that tastes of something that works in that supply chain.

::

And there are a whole series of problems to be overcome to do with, again, the fact that, like, a tomato, the mechanism for

::

for producing flavor just switches off at certain temperatures, and this is the issues around ripening.

::

There's issues around how do you ship, or you can't ship a ripe tomato. It's too squishy.

::

So they have to harvest them while they're green and hard and then gas them with ethylene, which is a plant hormone.

::

That that gas them always sounds bad, so I I'm just, like, it's it's a plant hormone. They're ripening them.

::

That's a different process from ripening on the vine. Yeah. It also impacts the flavor, etcetera.

::

Anyway, he's dedicated his career to this. He's very close to success. I've tasted his tomatoes.

::

They're incredible, and they do stand up to the cold chain.

::

But one of the most fascinating things he discovered along the way is that the the best tasting tomatoes are also the highest in these phytonutrients.

::

And, it implies that the things we like the flavor of are really good for us. Yeah.

::

And we've bred those out of tomatoes, and, that one would assume would have a negative impact on our health.

::

And I and, you know, you said this, we don't know yet the science around phytonutrients.

::

There is no RDA for them because No.

::

No one knows how much we need and how much we should have and what they're you know, all the things they're doing.

::

But to me, we do know that there are health effects.

::

We do know that that is what we prefer.

::

And listen, our, our entire sensory apparatus is set up to help us survive on the planet. That's why we have it.

::

And so, it is not surprising to me that things that taste good would be good for us. And they And it co

::

evolved with

::

those things. Things. Exactly. Yeah. So, so, yeah, so that was amazing to me.

::

He was like, oh, here's a here was an interesting thing we discovered, and I was like, well, of course. Just a little thing. I loved

::

that bit, and I loved how his his career trajectory kind of came came back all the way to to making a more flavorful tomato.

::

And I and I do and I'll I'll say this for listeners, you know, the work that Dan Kittredge is doing at the Bio Nutrient Institute,

::

off of some of Fred's work and Stephane's work is really interesting looking at some of these things. I mean,

::

I agree. For breeding for flavor is so vanishingly rare that it has to be celebrated. And it It must be.

::

And also, I just don't think that people realize, like, that's not what their fruit and vegetables are bred for.

::

They're bred to fit for for yield, yes, and also for supply chain sturdiness.

::

And that that has been a very and, you know, so they're bred for refrigeration, and that has not been a good thing.

::

And I mean, it's and it's the same with animals.

::

We've bred animals into a into a frenzy, which I won't I won't get into.

::

But I did keep coming back to this idea, right?

::

We've we've taken in so many different ways.

::

And I think about this in a lot of different areas.

::

But I think the cold chain exemplifies it, we've taken the sine wave of nature, where you have these peaks and troughs, you have winter and summer.

::

And we've flatlined it, we have created eternal summer and its abundance, eternal winter in the cold chain.

::

And something that you don't, you don't specifically touch on this completely in the book, but I kept thinking about this

::

delay of death that we are participating in.

::

And I think about that a lot in our culture, that growth in perpetuity is this denial of death.

::

And you have this this great little piece here about it's it's with Erwin Goldman.

::

If you wouldn't mind me reading it because I Twilley did like this is so much about denying death.

::

He says, it's amazing any of this stuff works Twilley.

::

Erwin Goldman, a vegetable breeder at the University of Wisconsin Nicola me.

::

He thinks to vegetable should be a verb, one that describes how humans have manipulated their favorite edible plants to become the horticultural equivalent of Dorian Gray.

::

To Goldman, the verb phrase, to vegetable, encompasses the way in which humans 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.

::

I love Erwin. He's so okay. First of all, everyone should know, Erwin is, has bred the best beets on the planet.

::

He's a beet and carrot, specialist, and his badger flame beets, you can buy them through row 7 seeds, are the world's most delicious, beets.

::

Also, he's the nicest man in the world.

::

And the reason we even had this conversation, I wasn't interviewing him, I was asking him to get me academic papers that I

::

didn't have access to, because I don't have university library access, and he was just bundling me all these papers, and we

::

were talking about things because he is a lovely human being.

::

And he said this, and I just had to include it in the book. And I think it's so true.

::

I think the other thing to do that you're saying is it's sort of this perpetual growth, denial of death, also just unwillingness to, sit with change and fluctuation.

::

And one of the things that, actually, an an avocado guy, explained to me was, you know, it's called filling the calendar.

::

They have they have to find sort of these so when the California avocados aren't in season, they have a range of sort of California

::

stand in landscapes that will deliver the same avocado, for the different spots in the in the calendar.

::

And so the the the supermarket shelf looks the same all year round, but it's being filled in by these sort of alternate Californias

::

that are scattered around the globe, and you need to have at least 2 of them, hopefully 3, to avoid any supply chain disruptions

::

that because, God forbid, you go to the store and you can't get the thing you want. And that that's just not acceptable.

::

You can't not be on the shelf, because you don't just lose that sale, you lose, sort of, you know, mind space in the consumer.

::

You know, you're no longer to be trusted.

::

You're no longer sort of a reliable vegetable.

::

And that's that's just a weird way to think about something that's alive and has seasons.

::

And I I think, you know, I this happens a this happened came up a lot in my conversations.

::

You know, growers and vegetable breeders, they're very and and supermarket logistics folks, they are pragmatic people, and

::

they are responding to what people want.

::

But, and they say that all the time.

::

People want this, People people don't, you know, people don't want to eat seasonally.

::

People don't want, their strawberries to change flavor over the course of the season.

::

They want the same thing there all the time at the same price.

::

And I do believe that people do express that desire in their shopping. People are lazy.

::

People want to do the least possible amount of work.

::

I I I count myself amongst people there.

::

But at the same time, I don't think that, I don't think you have to give them that.

::

Maybe you do for for sales reasons, but I think it's an underestimation of what people are capable of Me too. If you push them a little.

::

I just think just because we are all lazy and an easy solution is great and not having to calibrate once you're already at

::

the market because something's out of season, and now you have to buy something else. I get it.

::

But at the same time, I think we're under I mean, we are an ingenious. We are an ingenious species.

::

We could do a little better here.

::

And, you know, I don't even know if I think of it as lazy as much as I think of it as the idea that we've been inculcated

::

in the standard that we show up at the grocery store, and we expect there to be this variety, at least in global north and

::

the western world, depending on how you look at it, probably just the, really, the western world at this point.

::

And so I think that, that that's our expectation.

::

And, and we've been raised that way with with all of these things in abundance and this expectation that it will always be

::

there, but we have an opportunity to sort of reimagine these things and to kind of begin to to wrap up.

::

So respecting your time here, you know, you do start to maybe wonder what it would look like to reimagine it.

::

Because while a cold boom is actually resurging in America, which I thought was interesting, You have what Bill Lawrence calls

::

the infrastructural tsunami that's happening in the global south.

::

And this really includes the cold chain.

::

And, and and I wanna give you 2 pieces to kind of riff off of.

::

And and one is, you know, an exploration of what this might look like elsewhere.

::

And and you really delve into this when you spend some time in Rwanda.

::

And I I loved this because this is to me, and I returned to those listeners will know I returned to this all the time, David

::

Graeber's idea that we have imagined this world, and we could just as well reimagine another one.

::

And I butcher that quote every time.

::

But also that so there's this piece of reimagining and looking at these these sort of externalities, the places in which the cold chain has changed it.

::

And we've looked a lot at that tomorrow.

::

We're releasing an episode that explores a lot of NAFTA, and explores a lot of those sort of labor externalities.

::

But also, and I want to bring this little piece in that we have this connection to this other flesh and you come back to this

::

a lot that this is alive flesh. It's respirating. It is metabolizing.

::

And and this reflection of that, and and you even talk to the designer whose name I meant to write down about what would happen

::

if we could better see our food if it wasn't tucked behind these metal doors and how that might connect. So I'll stop talking.

::

Okay. So first of all, I 100% agree.

::

And then, I love that Graber quote.

::

And one of the things that I loved where you started this conversation, with the idea that this is really recent, because

::

to me, that helps with the reimagining.

::

We haven't lived like this for very long.

::

We don't have to carry on living like this.

::

And I love the fact that the early experts didn't think refrigeration was a solution, because now there's this mantra that

::

the cold chain is is the solution.

::

And I just think, why would we shut ourselves down that way?

::

Maybe it is the best thing for certain foods, and maybe it's not for certain others.

::

And one of the things I sort of say at the end of the book is, you know, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Yeah.

::

Cold can preserve a lot of things.

::

Is it the best at preserving all the things? It is not.

::

And does it have these externalities in terms of the environmental impact, in terms of the, the flavor and health of our foods.

::

And and all of the ways I trace throughout the book, yes, it does.

::

So, it's not we're not locked, we're not wedded eternally to cold.

::

And one of the reasons why I'm so excited this book is coming out now, and that I really feel like it's actually important,

::

is that we are at a moment where people are building Nicola chain like there is no tomorrow.

::

You might think, how is that possible?

::

We already have a cold chain in the US. It is it is the hottest.

::

I mean, I'll tell you, if you're a real estate investor, it's very hot market right now. Fascinating. Yeah.

::

Which is So it is growing rapidly in the US, and let's just look at the, as you the the the developing word world, for one

::

of a better term, where in many places, there is no cold chain, or a very limited one, and the country I visit in the book is Rwanda.

::

And there's this sense that is sort of held up by various UN, World Food Programme, the international philanthropists who

::

fund this kind of thing, World Bank, Bill Gates, all of these people, that Nicola chain is going to solve a lot of the sustainable development goals. It's gonna prevent food waste.

::

It's gonna improve health and prevent malnutrition.

::

It's going to free up women to be in the work force. It's gonna solve all the problems.

::

And I think if we build a cold chain that is the the a mirror of our cold chain here, in the rest of the world, that is a gigantic disaster in climate terms.

::

I mean, just just we haven't really talked about this, but this is Please touch refrigerant message. Important.

::

It's it it is so energy hungry.

::

Cooling already uses 10% of our global energy demand.

::

Assuming that we can build a Nicola chain for 9,000,000,000 people, even assuming that we can have the renewable energy to

::

to run that, which is is is is not there, The energy demand question is not solved, and then the refrigerants themselves.

::

This is the number one solution identified by Project Drawdown to tackling global warming, the biggest impact solution. Yes. And so Because of the high

::

And I I I have to throw one little thing at you, and then I'll let you continue.

::

Project drawdown talks about ammonia being a viable alternative and having a very low climate impact, but being smelly.

::

And I I find this fascinating, especially because I've also been looking at, the way urine can be repurposed as nitrogen fertilizer.

::

And I just think I don't know.

::

I think there's something there, and I think it's really interesting.

::

Well, so the question so refrigerants are I I look at this in the book.

::

It's a really weird and interesting story how we came to what we what we have and actually, Midgley. Midgley, yeah. The one man environmental disaster.

::

This guy who introduced lead and petrol and CFCs, which I, you know, I was a I I was a kid when the ozone layer was, you know,

::

being destroyed and needed to be saved.

::

And so I I definitely don't remember really understanding the gravity of the situation, but it was so CFCs were the were these

::

amazing nontoxic, perfectly safe, non flammable, refrigerants that were Midgley's, you know, gift to the world.

::

And they turned out to be destroying the ozone layer, and it it was far more dicey than I think, I mean, certainly than I realized when I was a kid.

::

The ozone layer was being destroyed at this incredibly rapid rate.

::

It's it's irreplaceable, and without it, the surface of the earth would be sterilized.

::

So, you can imagine what that does. Sterilized means there isn't life.

::

So it was really this and and oftentimes, the agreement, signed to to, the Montreal Protocol signed to sort of phase down

::

CFCs is is cited as this great environmental moment where everyone agreed to do something.

::

I think, because it was such a gigantic disaster in the making.

::

I mean, that was a moment where people were truly afraid.

::

The the Kigali amendment to that, named after the capital of Rwanda where it was signed, is because the refrigerants that

::

were introduced after CFCs as a replacement for CFCs turn out to be, these have this huge global warming potential.

::

So that's how, a, you know, a molecule's greenhouse gas effect is is measured.

::

You know, carbon dioxide is sort of the the baseline, and then, you know, you get to many 1,000 times more global warming potential than carbon dioxide.

::

And that's where these HFCs and HCFCs are.

::

And they need to be phased out, but in in many cases, they are not being phased out.

::

Even in the US, that's a very difficult process, let alone in, other countries with fewer resources.

::

Anyway, this is all a long version of me saying we can't build the same cold chain in Yeah.

::

The rest of the world, or else we're all cooked. And, I mean, literally.

::

And, yet, we are not reimagining it.

::

And the and the and this is where my call to action is at the end of the book is, like, let's have some nuance here.

::

Maybe there are things we need Nicola for, and we can develop some, much more sustainable, climate friendly Nicola technologies,

::

which are being done all the time.

::

I mean, there's there's work being done with ice just to go go back full circle.

::

You know, you can you can freeze sort of pallets at night and use them to keep food cold during the day.

::

I mean, there's just we can just be a lot smarter about how we use Nicola.

::

It's been sort of this unlimited, thing in our Western version of it, and it shouldn't be because it could be.

::

But, also, not everything has to be Twilley, and some of the things that, you know, some of that is understanding how to store our food better. That works on every level.

::

The designer, the South Korean designer I talk about in the book, Ji Eun Ryu, does this amazing work, thinking about, let's

::

it's called save food from the fridge, and it builds on this idea that I mentioned that a lot of produce doesn't actually like the conditions of the fridge.

::

That is not the best conditions to store it in.

::

And so her thing is, like, if we understood these, fruits and vegetables for what they are, these, you know, as you say, respiring, metabolizing, organic, life matter, life. It's life.

::

Then we could build storage that suited it better, and she has these beautiful prototypes that have the side benefit.

::

So they store your food better, in better condition with more of its, nutrients intact. And that's the other thing.

::

People think of the fridge as this sort of like, it's almost like a bank vault.

::

Like, you put something in there and it is safe.

::

It is losing you put a bag of spinach in there, it in a week's time, it will have half the amount of vitamins, in there.

::

And people, you know, so it's not it's it's not like a bank.

::

It's a it it's not keeping your your money for you. You know?

::

You blew my mind. You you had a quote to the extent of we originally and a lot of refrigeration was invented to keep foods

::

fresh, but then refrigeration became what we associate with freshness.

::

And and so that really and that really unlocked something for me.

::

And you illustrate it with soy milk really beautifully.

::

Oh, the soy milk story is nuts.

::

I mean, that's a but just to finish my thought on this, the idea was that we could have if we had these these, her her sort

::

of food storage designs, they also make our food more visible, and we can see it. We see that it's organic matter.

::

We see it literally the way the, you know, the way that, you know, your your head of lettuce will get sort of hidden under

::

something in your fridge, and you won't discover it until it's rotted. That wouldn't happen with her system.

::

And what, you know, that hers hers is a sort of deliberate design provocation, but I think what it points at is if we could

::

think about what actually needs to be cold and what doesn't, and how we might design design a food supply chain that actually

::

preserves food in a way that preserves its nutrients, that, that preserves its flavor, and that only preserves it to the extent

::

that those things can also be preserved, rather than just saying maximum shelf life is best.

::

We might design a food system that both, puts us back in touch with where our food comes from, how it's grown, what it actually

::

is, gives us a tastier food supply, potentially a healthier one, but also reduces food waste, which is the other huge climate change problem.

::

And, you know, everyone is like, oh, gosh, refrigeration reduces food waste.

::

What actually happens is it just changes where it happens.

::

So so prior to, cold chain being introduced, you know, a lot of food gets brought to market.

::

It doesn't get it it it doesn't make it.

::

It doesn't make it all the way there.

::

And, again, it's just to go back to where we started, it's because the people are in the cities, and the food is having to come to them. Yeah.

::

But, that's where the food waste was happening before, and you can see this literally happen in real time as countries refrigerate.

::

So China is a place I visit in the book because China built a cold chain almost overnight.

::

They did it in this very Chinese way, which was like the 11th, 12 year plan, and they decided they were gonna build a cold chain and modernize and did it.

::

And so you can see in a way that, you know, we are now a 100 years forward from, the US building our Nicola chain, so it's harder to see.

::

In China, you can see it happen in real time.

::

And all that happened is where the food was wasted has changed.

::

Now people it gets wasted at the supermarkets, in the restaurants, and in the homes.

::

Before, it got wasted on the farms and on the way to you know, in the the markets on the way to the markets, and the same amount gets wasted. Mhmm.

::

Refrigeration actually hasn't saved any food. 40%. Change with it. Yeah.

::

And that number is 40%. And I think this is some of Jevon's paradox too.

::

I I wonder if more food has been wasted in some ways with the advent of refrigeration trying to save us from wasting more,

::

you know, and that kind of tension there.

::

Well, I think it's, you know, the people who grow it, they don't want to see it wasted, and they've developed ways to not see it wasted.

::

The people in so doing, they have divorced the people who consume it from the value of that food and from an understanding

::

of it as organic matter, and then what that means is that we waste it.

::

And so it's, yeah, it's an unfortunate, even the, there's an amazing post harvest physiologist, so that means she works on

::

the physiology of, she's like a life extension guru for fruits and vegetables, called Natalia Fallagan, who I talk to in the book.

::

She's the one who when I went you know, she's like, they're alive.

::

And and her her her side project, you know, she works on extending the shelf life of blueberries and how do you refrigerate

::

them so that they, you know, they last longer, etcetera.

::

Her side project is one that is about, it's called Reuben Revolution and having people grow fruits and vegetables, And not

::

in that way of like, oh, we're all gonna feed ourselves from our urban gardens, but in a way that says, if we understand what

::

it takes to grow this when it's in season, how it lived when it was in the ground, which remember, once you take it out of

::

the ground, it's you're you're trying to stop it dying.

::

So you're trying to recreate those conditions to the maximum ex extent.

::

You know, she's like, if once the theory her theory, her and her collaborators on this project was if people understood that

::

they would waste less and eat more of these red vegetables,

::

impractical. That's not how we're gonna feed the world. Well, we could feed practical.

::

That's not how we're gonna feed the world.

::

Well, we could feed the world out of our food waste right now.

::

And if urban farming helps us waste less food and change our relationship to that food so that we waste less food, then, hey,

::

maybe urban farming is not so impractical after all.

::

Yes. I mean, I think that so much of this to come down to fostering a connection between our food.

::

Totally. Exactly. Re building that relationship. Yeah. Yeah.

::

Yeah. Yeah. Rebuilding that relationship and having having the having the desire to reimagine it.

::

And so I was so grateful for the way that you brought that piece around.

::

Well, thank you. I mean, it really is like, it's our primary relationship with the earth is feeding ourselves, and yet the

::

way we do it now is not connected to the earth at all.

::

And and I I I I'm not some, you know, hippie dippie, we all have to go back to the land person. I love cities. I live in a city. Yeah.

::

I also say strongly that we have to reimagine our food system, and this lens of of refrigeration has proven a really useful

::

one to see where our current system has sort of been broken.

::

Yes. I mean, I think that's a beautiful place to land at because and longtime listeners know that I think that we have an

::

intimacy with our food, a relationship with our food.

::

And I just think that this was the most illuminating book. It absolutely tickled me. I flew through it.

::

I was I was desperate to get my hands on it.

::

Poor Julie had to endure many of my my emails because I I feel so passionately about this, and you just you just knocked it out of the park.

::

And so I wanna point everybody at the book at frostbite, you find our tagline here, how refrigeration changed our food, our planet and ourselves. And Nikki, it's been a pleasure.

::

I'm sorry, if I talked over you.

::

I was just so excited about this.

::

And so I we didn't even touch on all these different pieces, but I hope people will go to the book to find them.

::

Yeah. I was gonna apologize because I just I'm like, once I start on this topic, it is very hard to stop me.

::

And, and so I thank you for giving me the space to sort of talk about this a lot and for being I mean, you're my dream reader

::

and that you and and your audience too clearly cares about this in a thoughtful and nuanced way.

::

You know, it's, my fear with a book like this is people are like, oh, well, is it good or bad? And it's just like, no. No. We It's complex. It's yeah. Exactly.

::

It's and that is what makes it powerful. Yes. And, so, yeah.

::

I really and yet, at the same time, I think, I hope also as, like, just fascinating.

::

Like, now we understand, this I certainly, writing this, just understood our food system in a completely different way. And so yeah.

::

You know, you do something really beautifully, and I did wanna say this because I was reflecting that I didn't really love

::

history when I was in school, but I love history when it's anchored to something that is I'm passionate about or I'm interested in.

::

And I think what you've done with gastropod as well as frostbite is to find those anchors that open up the doors of curiosity,

::

because you never know how shrimp is gonna dovetail into child labor laws, or that these pieces are gonna be present.

::

So you do such a good job of opening up that curiosity, and frostbite is no different.

::

Well, thank you. I mean, yeah, I'm I'm the same as you.

::

I I can't get into history or science just for the sake of it.

::

I have to be trying to answer a question and trying to understand a thing.

::

And I you know, again, I'm a I'm a I'm a food person, so going in through food is is the way for me. But, but, yeah, thank you.

::

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think we're all food people at heart. And thank you.

::

The book comes out on June 25, which I think is when this podcast will also release.

::

And we'll have everywhere to find you in the show notes, links to gastropod, links to the book, and any social media as well.

::

Absolutely. I'm so excited for people to read it and tell me their thoughts, and I'm I'm sure there are more ways in which

::

refrigeration has transformed things that I haven't thought of.

::

So if people have things they wanna say, my email address is easy to find. Great.

::

I love that. Nikki, I can't thank you enough for writing this book. I'm so excited.

::

I just wanna I'm gonna be screaming up from the mountain top.

::

So thank and thank you for talking to me. It really means a lot.

::

This was a really fun conversation. Thank you. Thank you. Alright.

::

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Mind Body and Soil podcast.

::

If what you found resonated with you, may I ask that you share it with your friends or leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts?

::

This act of reciprocity helps others find mind, body, and soil.

::

If you're looking for more, you can find us at groundworkcollective.comand@kate_

::

kavanaugh. That's kate_kavanaugh

::

on Instagram. I would like to give a very special thank you to China and Seth Kent of the band Alright Alright for the clips

::

from their beautiful song Over the Edge from their album The Crucible.

::

You can find them at Alright Alright on Instagram and wherever you listen to music.

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About the Podcast

Mind, Body, and Soil
Where the health of land and the health of bodies and communities meet.
Welcome to Mind, Body, and Soil. Join me, Kate Kavanaugh, a farmer, entrepreneur, and holistic nutritionist, as I get curious about human nature, health, and consciousness as viewed through the lens of nature. At its heart, this podcast is about finding the threads of what it means to be humans woven into this earth. I'm digging into deep and raw conversations with truly impactful guests that are laying the ground work for themselves and many generations to come. We dive into topics around farming, grief, biohacking, regenerative agriculture, spirituality, nutrition, and beyond. Get curious and get ready with new episodes every Tuesday!

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Kate Kavanaugh