How fridges transformed the way we get and eat our food – not all of it positive, according to the book Frostbite by Nicola Twilley
- Refrigeration has had numerous benefits but in its ability to ship food through both time and space, it has also robbed us of flavour and nutrients
British author Nicola Twilley, frequent contributor to The New Yorker and co-presenter of the popular Gastropod food history and science podcast, has a beef with refrigeration.
“I love a cold beer and ice cream as much as the next person,” she says from her Los Angeles base. “I would never want to live without my refrigerator.”
But in her tartly named new book, Frostbite, which is as lucid, entertaining and fact-rich as her podcast, she examines the consequences of the development of a third polar region: the man-made winter that is part of what is called the cold chain.
In the United States alone, 156 million cubic metres of refrigerated space stores meat, fruit and vegetables that have been chilled or frozen and are en route to dinner plates far away in both distance and time.
Twilley’s hands-on research takes her to chilled underground caverns and giant surface-level storage facilities for sub-zero shifts as a refrigerated-warehouse worker. She describes food seen in vast bulk and in an artificially inert and almost abstract form: a neutral, tradeable commodity rather than something with which we have an intimate relationship.
Much produce once available only seasonally and locally is now found globally and bought year-round by those who can afford it. The benefits in convenience and overall nutrition are obvious, but they come at a price.
