How Refrigeration Changed Our Palates, Our Plates and Our Planet (a taste of history with Nicola Twilley)

You are listening to Policy Prompt from the Center for International Governance Innovation. I'm Vass Bednar.

And I'm Paul Samson.

Our in-depth interviews find nuances in the conversation with leading thinkers that work at the intersection of technology, society, and public policy.

Listen now wherever you find your podcasts. Today we are talking about a transformative technology that we may take for granted, a crucial element of modern society that also feels sort of invisible. It's something that probably all of us have but may not appreciate the magic of, a fridge and its entire cold chain that links to it. The technology of the fridge isn't quite a hundred years old, and yet it's been at the center of so much change in our lives. The cold turns off the DNA flavor in our food, which is probably why strawberries sometimes taste like waterberries.

I've never really thought about strawberries sometimes tasting like waterberries, but Nicola Twilley is the author of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. She's also the co-host of the award-winning Gastropod podcast, which looks at food through the lens of history and science. Her incredibly rich book is the product of about 15 years of detailed reporting and research and in the world of Farm to table, which is pretty glamorized, her book really focuses on the two part.

So I listened to the audio version of this, the audiobook, and it was cool. I was on the train a lot. I had some time, and it was a neat book to listen to. Nicola has a really nice voice and the stories that wove into this basically 300 year period of history of the early days of cold right through to the fridge, and then what it means now was quite the journey and just super rich.

I feel like I need to give the audio version a try. I really enjoyed reading this and so much stuck with me. I wish we could go chapter by chapter with her. I also wanted to tell you a tiny bit more about Nikki. She's the co-author of what was called the Best Science Book of 2021, and also recognized as one of the best books of that year overall. It's called Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine. Nikki is a contributing writer at the New Yorker and lives in Los Angeles. Nikki, welcome to Policy Prompt.

Thank you for having me.

Okay, my first question, our first question, it's actually going to go to Paul first, but ultimately it's a question for you Nikki. So Paul, I was just curious, we are recording this just before Canadian Thanksgiving, if there are any particular foods in your fridge right now that you are particularly hyped about, either for a future meal or your secret snacks, what's in there? Give us a quick sneak peek.

Yeah, so after reading this book, I would think of our fridge as a bit of a tragedy of the commons because there are a lot of users. There's four or five users with different preferences, and there's all kinds of stuff in there. So it's a bit of a treasure hunt slash grab bag. You'll see what you get. There's stuff in there that is unexpected. We don't yet have the turkey stuff in there yet, so it's not as exciting as it will be in a couple of days. We tend to have a lot of fresh vegetables and things which are in their own containers and own their own bags and that kind of stuff. Lots of drinks and things like that, but it's not a particularly interesting fridge, but it's always full of surprises.

Full of surprises. Okay, we're going to come back to that word fresh I think quite a bit. But Nikki, what does it mean for Paul to be able to be so kind of casual about all the treats that he and his family have there every day?

I mean, just having that many fresh fruits and vegetables on hand able to just be in there without you thinking about them and for you to not think that's exciting, that would've only been possible for a century, a really limited amount of human history would that have been a non-exciting thing. You would've been showing it off to all your friends and neighbors 100 years ago. You'd have been the talk of the town, and even still in many parts of the world, your fridge would be a modern marvel, which it really is still. So I mean, that's part of why I wrote the book, was just to kind of reopen people's eyes to the fact that they have a time machine essentially sitting in their kitchen that is making all seasons and all geographies available at all times, and people just kind of ignore it.

Yeah, and I didn't say, I think the book says somewhere, "Tell me what's in your fridge and I'll tell you who you are." So I'm glad you didn't go there, but I didn't give you enough detail. So I'm intimidated to-

Yeah, you were deliberately concealing. What's the condiment situation? What's-

What drinks?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it is very exposing to reveal the contents of your fridge to someone. It's not as personal maybe as your medicine cabinet in your bathroom, but it's pretty, it gives you some insights.

Yeah, I think it's close. It was a funeral wake actually, but I was talking to some people there and one of them was sort of freaking out because their date the night before had opened their fridge and-

Smart move.

"And then he opened my fridge." And I was like, "Oh my God."

And took a picture.

They were just like, "I can't believe that." And they were like, "It was unavoidable." I was like, "Maybe what if you put a sign, do not open." She's like, "Then it's just more interesting." But you're right, she felt very, very exposed as you said. What does that say?

But her date, maybe he'd read frostbite because obviously-

Probably did.

Nowhere to go now, nowhere to go.

Fridge Dating is one of the sort of hot tips and tricks I share in the book.

So there's so much stuff in this book that is really detailed and beautifully contextualized in terms of the history. And one of the concepts that you come to a lot, and that is so fundamental here is the phrase cold chain and the understanding of what the science of cold is. And people have heard of this term probably without really fully appreciating it. Can you explain a little bit what is the cold chain?

Yeah, I think that's really important because most people see their fridge and they think that's, oh, I know how my food is preserved and what refrigeration means, but that's really just the tip of the iceberg. Between the farm and the table is, for nearly three-quarters of everything on the North American plate, is a cold chain. And so what that is is it takes various forms depending on the food, but it is pre-cooling for fruits and vegetables. So that's removing kind of what's called the field heat. So the sort of sunshine and just heat of when you pick a fresh tomato, for example, you will have felt this, it's warm. You got to remove that heat. It is the refrigerated warehouses in which food is stored along the way for a year, longer, many years in the case of a frozen pizza that doesn't need to go anywhere.

And then it's the refrigerated trucks and trains and shipping containers, which are called reefers with a straight face. And those are moving the perishable food around in between various warehouses. And then of course there's specialized architectures within there. So orange juice is stored in tank farms and meat can be dry-aged in meat lockers and things like that. So there's sort of various specialized architectures in there. Bananas and avocados need ripening rooms, et cetera, but that all is getting it to your supermarket chilled cabinet, and from there you bring it home to your fridge. And I think it's amazing because a lot of people just have no awareness that we have built this huge, I mean, if you add all that, because it's distributed, it's hard to get a sense of the size of it, but we're talking about 5.5 billion cubic feet and sorry to give measurements in that-

A lot of hands, a lot of people and-

A lot of people.

Machines between that.

It's a distributed kind of third pole is how I came to see it. If you could think of it all as once, this is an entire artificial Arctic we have built for our food to live in, and we never really see it. Even the sort of most ardent foodie might have visited the farm where their chicken was raised, but they're not going to have visited the refrigerated warehouse where it was stored So yeah, it's really an invisible distributed winter, and I want just of enormous scope in implications. And so that's how I originally got fascinated by the book is how could this be there and be so integral to our food system and be so invisible to most eaters?

I loved how visible you may get and also you're not just this passive arm's length observer. You are literally in there. And as we sort of keep chilling in this conversation, something early in the book that was really evocative for me was you describing the smell of cold and kind of also what it did to your body. Can you tell us again about what that scent is and does it haunt you?

Yeah, I think I would know it again in a heartbeat if I smelled it. I mean, like a Proustian madeleine moment, because it is so distinctive and it's weird because when you talk to cold storage people, cold chain people, I was just talking to the Global Cold Chain Association folks and they were like, "Yeah, the smell of cold." It's a known thing and yet very hard to describe. I sort of have a fantasy of getting one of those high-end weird perfumeries-

Perfumery, yeah.

To create the smell of cold and bottle it. It's not unpleasant, it's metallic. It's a little, I almost want to say it smells like what I picture outer space smelling like, which is very strange, but there's a sort of... There's obviously a lot of industrial components going on. I mean, you've got the packaging and all the plastic and cardboard and these forklift trucks running around with their engine oil, and so there's obviously some mechanical components, but it's a very interesting thing.

And I think, so what I did for the book is, and this, I get to do these kinds of things, because I'm not an academic, I'm a journalist. I was like, you know what? I'm going to see if I can work in a refrigerated warehouse and see what it actually feels like to spend a shift or several shifts as I did in this environment, what it takes to actually work in this world. And we hear about farm labor and a lot of the invisible labor that goes into slaughterhouse jobs, how the brutal kind of repetitive nature of that work. But I don't think a lot of people have thought about what it takes to work in the cold all day to keep our food safe. And so I was lucky enough to be able to work a few shifts at Americold locations around me in Southern California.

Americold is the second-largest cold storage warehouse company in the world, and they have a variety of different locations around Los Angeles, and you go through the whole safety training. Warehouse work is already one of the most dangerous jobs in America. And then add to that the fact that it's in the cold, and as you pointed out, Vass, the cold has these really interesting effects on your body. And this was interesting to me because there's a lot of hype out there right now around ice baths and cold water immersion and open water swimming and the adrenaline rush.

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It's a huge trend on social media. And luxury wellness clubs like this are offering cold immersion sessions.

And there are scientists-

Do you do any of that stuff as a side note?

I mean, I love-

I was curious about that. I was like, what is her macro relationship with cold? What is happening here?

I do love-

But I don't mean to divert you.

Yeah, yeah, no, I do love open water swimming in general. So yes, I will dip myself in cold water and swim around when I have the opportunity. Although-

We'll invite you up to Canada for some cold as well.

Have you heard of Canada?

Yeah, true. I mean, I live in Southern California. Obviously, I'd rather it wasn't cold in general is my take on things. But yeah, so I think there's a really interesting sort of science around what cold does to your body. And these short-term immersions seem to have some very positive effects, but actually there's an equally compelling body of science that sort of shows how difficult cold is on your body in a longer-term sense and when you're trying to work in that environment, maybe rather than just kind of plunge into it and sort of shock yourself. So there's a lot going around. I mean, it makes it harder for your body to pump blood around. There are elevated levels of stress hormones. One of the main dangers is you're just thinking and moving more slowly in the cold. But this was the thing I found most fascinating, because the reason cold works to preserve our food is because it's slowing things down, but it's doing that for everything.

So it does it for us too. I mean, it does it for fish in the ocean. This is why you find more sharks in colder parts of the ocean, because their prey is slow and stupid when it's cold, so it's easier to catch. It's not like sharks like the cold, they just like an easier dinner. And so humans are also slow and stupid in the cold. It's literally called cold stupid. Doctors call it the umbles, mumble, grumble, fumble, and stumble. And people, the Americold folks who design the work plans for the day, you have to add an increment of time for what this would take in an ambient temperature warehouse for workers in the cold. It just takes longer. And that's part of what makes it so dangerous. I mean, the floor is slippery, it's covered in ice crystals. It's pretty dark because light gives off heat obviously, so you want to keep that down. So it's a challenging environment. Forklift trucks. I don't know if anyone's tried to drive one, but they're very counterintuitive. Literally you move the sort of-

Like, opposites or something?

Yeah, exactly. You move the, what are those called? The gears, the sort of joystick in the other direction from where you want to go.

Oh, no. I don't think I could do that in an ambient temperature, as you said. But kudos to you for getting the umbles and experiencing that because I think it was important to tell it and to read it. And I almost sort of felt it reading your book honestly. Paul listened to the audiobook, so I think he got a particular treat. But Paul, you've worked in the past in the dairy industry. Nikki has a line in the book that working in the cold is like a face tattoo, you have to want it. We're on screen right now, I don't see you with a face tattoo, but I wondered if this was bringing you back a little bit and what you wore to kind of take on some of that work.

Yeah, no, that was a fascinating personal thing. So I worked in a dairy factory one summer as a student, and they were 10 hour shifts actually, or nine and a half, so I was in the fridge. My job was pulling milk off a conveyor belt and putting it onto pallets. But I was underdressed obviously. Clearly, I didn't really know where I was cutting into so I probably thickened the layers a little bit as I went along, but once I came out of there, it took a while to warm up. I was totally chilled. You had to warm up with a bath or something after. But what was interesting was within it, there were layers of the factory and the really interesting people worked in the freezer room, which was a whole different level. This was a full-on fridge or freezer where you had to check on these people fairly regularly to make sure they were okay. It was really cold in there, but everything did slow down. It's exactly as you say, you're going a slower pace. There's a rhythm.

You almost end up with tunnel vision because you start to block out the externals. And at Americold, they had a buddy system, because people can kind of just kind of...

Zone out, sit down on a pallet or something.

Yeah, exactly.

But Vass, no tats. I had maybe the day ones where they wash off after a couple of days, but nothing-

I like those actually.

Nothing too serious

Policy Prompt is produced by the Center for International Governance Innovation, CG is a non-partisan think tank based in Waterloo Canada with an international network of fellows, experts, and contributors, CG tackles the governance challenges and opportunities of data and digital technologies including AI and their impact on the economy, security, democracy, and ultimately our societies. Learn more at cgonline.org.

So Nikki, backing up again into the book about just the fascinating history of the early concept of cold and how it started to be mainstreamed and then the whole phase through hauling big blocks of ice out and things, how did cold become domesticated over time? Can you just kind of walk us through some of the key phases there or key points?

Yeah, and this is again sort of amazing to me because we've had control of heat for so long. People do argue that it is our control of fire that actually made us human, and yet we haven't had control of cold until, cold wasn't actually domesticated until the 1920s and '30s. That's when it made its way into our houses. But it wasn't even something we could produce on demand until the 1850s or '60s. And those early ice making machines were gigantic, steam powered, and deadly. I mean, they blew up all the time. I have a few stories of them blowing up in the book, but they blew up all the time. I mean, the thing that I love is that America the Beautiful, the poem that is sort of the song that Americans, not the National Anthem, but close, actually has a little-known third verse that is inspired by a refrigerator fire.

What?

At the White City Exposition in Chicago, one of the marvels, and there were many marvels on display, the first Ferris wheel, the first cinema, all kinds of marvels on display, but one of the ones that was routinely mentioned in the same breath as all of these others was a gigantic refrigerator to keep things cold at the fair, no more melted butter. And it went up in flames as refrigeration machines tended to do in those days. And it was an immense tragedy actually because the firemen climbed on and then got stuck on the roof and couldn't get off. And Buffalo Bill's cowboys had to come and help with crowd control. Everyone was panicking. It looked like the whole fair was going to go up in flames, but that's commemorated in the poem.

That's cool.

It's kind of a weird moment in history. But anyway, that's a total rabbit hole. What I was trying to-

I'm amazed. I'm just like, how does she even find this out? How does she even find that extra couplet? How do you do it? This is just something else that I really marvel and appreciate.

The layers upon layers.

I will be looking for that verse on YouTube or something later to see if we can clip it in.

Music:

O beautiful for heroes proved.

In liberating strife,

Who more-

Not to distract where you're going with this, so keep going. But one thing if you could weave in to your response is the phase one, the blocks of ice were the thing, of just these giant blocks from ponds and lakes and then brought to barns and other things as the storage. Some of those lasted, you talk about an ice house in Maine up until the 1980s and just transformative technology comes along, but actually some things continue in pockets for quite a while and there's a tradition that's kind of lost and things like that. So if you could mentioned something about that ice house, that would-

It is interesting. So it's not as though early humans didn't have control of cold, and we haven't had control of cold for very long, but we have known the cold preserves things for a long time. And so what that meant was natural cold. And so you have an entire history going back into ancient China of harvesting ice and using that. And some of the earliest writing we have is stone tablets recording ice deliveries in ancient Sumeria. And so ice houses were a feature of regular people harvested ice when it was available and used it. The problem was natural cold's very ephemeral. People hadn't figured out how to store it very well, and it was seen as sort of this thing for luxuries like, make ice cream, have a wine slushy in summer. That's delightful, not as something that was an industrial scale way of moving our food around.

And so because of that, when cities first started to get large enough that feeding them was really a problem, you couldn't just live next to your protein, you had to bring it in. And cities started to struggle with that for the first time really in the early 1800s, it's the first time you start getting cities over more than a million, more than 2 million, London at 3 million. And there's widespread panic. I mean, there's the great minds of the day are concerned with how do we feed these people. Not fruits and vegetables, people don't worry about fruits and vegetables back then, but milk, butter, meat.

None of that was something that you could have living next to you in a city, but also bringing it into the city. I mean, you get these amazing stories of cattle main kept under the Strand in London in basement dairies and milked there and sent North for two weeks a year above ground for their little vacation, and pigs in Central Park, herding turkeys. It was very difficult and no one at that time who was, everyone was trying to figure out, okay, how do we preserve meat? And this is not working, this system. No one is thinking, oh, cold is the solution. Because even though we had, the rich all had ice houses. George Washington had an ice house, Thomas Jefferson had an ice house. They were elite luxuries. They were not a practical solution to getting meat into cities at scale until you get the rise of the frozen water trade, which is this high school dropout, Frederic Tudor. And his whole contribution really was to figure out how do you harvest ice at scale and ship it around at scale?

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You would see the ice block lifted on a ramp or in a pulley system run by horses, and then in the ice house you would see workers feverishly shuffling and pushing ice blocks into different corners of the ice house to get it nice and packed.

But the bigger picture, which he never realized he was doing, is he was showing people, oh, cold is really useful at scale. If we could actually be in control of cold, that would be incredible. So he invented this entire industry around, I mean, at the time North America's frozen water was like Saudi oil. We had so much of this incredible resource, ice, and it was shipped to Mumbai and Sydney and South Africa, and there was no kind of pond or lake left unharvested. But what happened, that industry rose and boomed. But what it also did was trigger engineers and scientists to look back at some experiments that had honestly been looked at as party tricks using vapor and compression to freeze water in a vacuum. A Scottish doctor had done this in 1750. He was the first person to really make ice on demand, and he just wrote a little pamphlet that I don't think anyone read saying, "This is interesting. People should look into this. Here's something I figured out. Cool, huh?"

More research needed.

Yes. No one was like, "Oh, bingo, now we have refrigeration." No, until Fred Tudor's frozen water trade made lots of ice seem like a really useful thing. Then people went back and looked at this science and were like, "Huh, wonder if we could use this to make a machine?" And you start getting the first refrigeration machinery, which was used to make ice to cool things. Actually, specifically first beer. Beer was the refrigeration pioneer. Priorities, priorities.

Priorities, yeah, that's what I was thinking.

Exactly. I mean, that's why I invented farming, right? Beer. So it's always beer. And took a while for people to realize, oh, we don't actually need to make the ice to cool things, we could just pull the heat out of, you cut out the middleman, the ice. But yeah, it was a slow process of figuring out not only the science of how to do this, but that there was a point to doing it and that it would work to preserve food at scale.

And then it was an even longer process to say, well, this is better than natural ice. And a big part of that is actually our water supplies became so polluted. I mean, New York City was still dependent on natural ice in the early 1900s, the early years of the 20th century, and it wasn't until people started getting sick from the fact that there was no EPA and there were no regulations around what people were putting in the water that natural ice started to seem like a really bad idea. So that's largely what led to its decline and not everywhere and not all at once. And natural ice still has its advocates. I mean, it lasts longer. It has fewer air bubbles than the manufactured kind, so fishermen prefer it out on the water because it lasts longer.

Most people take the gentle hum in their fridge for granted. Today we're sitting down with Nicola Twilley, she's the author of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. The book is a tour de force on the artificial cryosphere, namely how the development and adoption of cold storage forever changed the way we eat, cook, and preserve food and a lot of other things. Frostbite is available now from Penguin Press.

I also wanted to bring forward a couple of examples for listeners of just kind of discovering the lifespan of food. So I feel like these examples must feel very old to you just because of your research, but maybe we can make them fresh, fresh like an apple that was picked last year. I didn't know apples were over a year old. Again-

No one does. No one does.

They're so shiny. They're so shiny. What is going on? But maybe you can pick, I mean, there's the juice gambling and what we call orange juice, which I feel like I can never sip again from the store. There's tomatoes, tomatoes and how they've evolved to become kind of tasteless. There's the meat and electrostimulation. And personally, I will not forget about the science and technology of salad bags creating that perfect micro atmosphere inside the bag, but do you maybe want to pick one of those and kind of take us through it a little bit? I think it really helps us appreciate, just again, back to that wonder.

Yeah, I think you're completely right. And it's funny, I think a lot of being an eater in today's world is ignoring inconvenient truths, and part of that is how old our food is. And again, to take the apple as an example, it's really obvious apples are harvested in the fall. If you are eating an apple from say, Washington state in June, where do you think it came from? How old do you think it is?

I never thought about it before. Honestly, I never thought about it. It's your line in the book, "The more you know, the less you can eat." And it's kind of true. Sorry to interrupt you.

I mean, it's an astonishing thing that even people who are quite thoughtful about where their food comes from and quite thoughtful about what goes into it and what they choose to purchase, have not thought about how old it is. And I remember reading this food blogger who was very upset about the novel coating I write about in my book at the end, which is a coating that allows you to store fruit and vegetables at ambient for the same amount of time that you could store them in the refrigerator. She was like, "But this way our fruit or vegetables could be weeks old." And I was like, "Hey, lady."

You're up in the comments.

Yeah.

I have some real exciting news for you, it already is, if not months, if not, yeah, so longer. Such as orange juice. Orange juice is one of my favorite examples because you think, okay, frozen from concentrate orange juice, that's clearly being stored. People know that that's not fresh. But the fresh not from concentrate, the Tropicana you buy in a carton at the store, that seems like that must've been squeezed quite recently. I mean, we all have a sort of organic sense of how long juice might last. It's only a few days, maybe a week. It can't be that old, but actually, and it's a sort of an astonishing process. As it turns out, if you strip all of the oils out of the orange juice and the oxygen and you just de-oil it and de-aerate it, you are able to store it in a tank under a blanket of nitrogen, which sort of looks like the head on a beer.

And the tank is like six Olympic swimming pools full. It's gigantic. When they say juice tank, I mean, these things are monumental. It looks like those gas holders you see, those big cylinders, they're huge. And that juice is able to be stored in there. It's stirred around by a giant ice cream paddle just to keep it in motion so it doesn't settle. It can be stored in there for months, again, years. I mean, you don't want to store these things for long, because you're losing money just by having it sit there, but you can, and so people do. And then just immediately as the orange juice leaves the facility, you add back the things you took out. So de-oiling and de-aerating is really interesting. It sounds like, oh, that's fine. Whatever. Turns out all the flavor is in these oils. I mean, that's all the flavor volatiles.

It's also all the nutrients, things like all that vitamin C that you think you're getting when you drink orange juice, that's all stripped out. So what do you have? You have sugar water, that's what it is. It's orange colored sugar water, and you add that back in as it leaves the plant, but you don't have to add it back in in exactly the same levels it came out as, it's not like a one-to-one thing, this orange had this flavor molecules in it, so we're going to add them back. No, it's an entire tank full. You just add back the right amount and the right amount is a different formula for each company that produces orange juice.

And of course, if you think about it it's like, yes, how does Tropicana stay tasting the same all year round? I mean, I have an orange tree in my back garden, because I live in LA and I know that when I harvest in January, the juice does not taste the same as when I harvest them later in the season. The April oranges are much sweeter, there's much less tartness. There's just a more floral quality to it. You can tell the difference. Again, this is a very Angeleno thing to say because there's a lot of fruit.

Rub it in that you have oranges in your backyard, okay.

I'm sorry. I won't even tell you about the lime and lemon and pomegranate and passion fruit, but it varies across the season. It varies depending on the side of the tree you harvest from. Is the southerly-facing oranges or the north-facing oranges? They all have their own individual variation. That is not something that's happening in a carton of Tropicana. A carton of Tropicana tastes the same every time, and it's because you strip out the flavor and you add it back in. It means you can add it back in a set ratio.

And once you have something that tastes the same every day, well, you have A, a brand that's worth putting advertising money behind because now Tropicana is, it stands for something. It's a flavor that is the same every time the same way a packet of Twizzlers is the same every time, and you have a commodity, a financial instrument. It is something that is stable, storable, and you can start gambling on it. And so ever since watching Trading Places, I've been obsessed with orange juice futures. Surprisingly hard to trick down track down a orange juice futures trader because a lot of them turn out to have either be in jail, have done jail time.

But I did find one, and it is just fascinating to me that the ability to store something and standardize something in that way then turns it from this very perishable ephemeral fruit into a financial instrument that is being, its futures trading, the entire point is you never even own it. You're just gambling on its future price. Nothing changes hands other than what might be. And so it just goes from utterly material and ephemeral to utterly dematerialized and yet stable enough to be generated globally in a utterly abstracted sense

That commodification of so many things like we see out there. But when you break it down that way, it becomes really graphic. It does kind of link to this idea of have we kind of lost touch with everything? And now the way that there's over consumption challenges because it's just available. It's just stuff. You don't even really think about what it is, you just eat it. There's huge amounts of food waste that are off the charts when you see the amounts and especially not far from those in need and certainly not evenly distributed globally.

Paul was sort of scolding me. He was like a few generations ago, everyone was horrified about the idea of food waste and now we just kind of do it. But sorry.

Food waste is really-

It's unsettling to see wasted food.

But it doesn't, and I do really believe this sounds too simplistic, but I do believe that the actual abundance, the seasonless kind of abundance of our grocery stores and of our fridges is what helps make it feel like not a big deal to throw stuff away because there's more. I mean, even fridge designers have told me, we could put in technology that would keep say, leafy greens fresh for longer. And people have told them, "I don't want to pay extra for that, I'd rather just go buy new head of lettuce." Because food is cheap, food is abundant.

We have what the food writer, Joanna Blythman calls permanent global summertime at the supermarket. And so we live in this sort of sense that it doesn't matter. There's always more where it came from. And that is a huge problem. I mean, it's interesting because refrigeration is seen as a solution to food waste, and it definitely has been in the sense of from the farm to the marketplace, there used to be huge losses, huge, huge losses just getting produce from a farm to say, the cities where it was going to be sold. The USDA tracked this in 1916 in the US and fully a third of food was going bad on its way between the farm and the market. You still see that today in the developing world. So I went to Rwanda and just there is no cold chain and food is rotting in between the farmer and the marketplace.

You see that on counters, it's fresh for a few hours, meat, and then that's it.

That's it, then it's gone. And it's a tragedy because this is a country that cannot afford to lose food, and it is rotting before it can get to the people who are going to eat it. So in that sense, refrigeration is a solution. The problem is it just shifts where the waste takes place. So in the US, you, we used to lose a third of food on its way to market, now we throw away a third of food and it's all at the consumer and grocery store and restaurant level. So it's all post-market, and you could see that shift take place in real time in China. This is a country that sort of built a cold chain almost overnight in the early 2000s. It made it part of its 12th, five-year plan and just the way that China does once it's-

And you have a week.

Yeah, it's like we're going to do this and then refrigerate the entire country basically overnight. And it's astonishing to watch where the food waste happens shift just so radically.

And we're trying to find the balance here of the cool things and the really great things and then the downsides. Another waste like thing is the emissions, of course, not just climate change, but other atmospheric emissions that are problematic and the explosion of fridges is just one more thing of this huge drain on the energy grid and pumping more greenhouse gases and other things in the atmosphere like that. That's on a track to continue even if there's energy efficiency in the devices.

This was actually horrifying to me, and I think when it first came up when I was actually writing about China's cold chain, I profiled the country's first frozen dumpling billionaire.

I like how you're like the first.

Well, there have been others since.

Of course, of course.

Frozen dumplings were there like fish sticks. That's the sort of gateway frozen food for them. But writing that story, you run into the fact that most of the world does not have a US style cold chain. And the vast majority. Even China, which has refrigerated, has less than half the amount of cold space per person as the US. Most of sub-Saharan Africa, which is a place which is seeing the biggest population growth, adding a billion people over the next however many years it's supposed to be. There's no cold chain at all, it's being built. So if you already, just in the parts of the world that have a cold chain, Europe, the US, North America, et cetera, the cold chain is responsible for more than 2% of global emissions.

I just saw a paper saying it's 3.6, which is the highest I've seen, but that's more than aviation. We spend a lot of time worrying about aviation and people offsetting their flights. No one looks at their fridge and is like, "Oh, how am I going to offset this?" No. And it comes from two places as you said, it's the energy to run the refrigeration machinery, and it is also the emissions from these refrigerant gases. It turns out that, so initially people used a lot of very explosive gases as refrigerants. Then Thomas Midgley, the man who also gave us leaded petrol, came up with CFCs, which were great, non-toxic, non-explosive, just had the minor downside of destroying the ozone layer. Which I mean, I'm old enough to remember the sort of-

Oh wow, the whole.

The hole in the ozone layer. I did not realize at the time that if there was no ozone layer, the surface of the earth would be sterilized and thus abiotic, there would be no life. So it was actually a major crisis. And the replacement, though unfortunately for CFCs were HCFCs and HFCs, which turn out to be super greenhouse gases, hundreds, thousands of times more warming per ton than CO2. So that's a huge part of the problem too. And they leak from refrigeration machinery up to 30% a year, more if it's not well maintained. There's also end of life issues and they're not captured correctly. So that's a huge part of the problem too. And actually, Project Drawdown listed refrigerant management as the number one bang for the buck thing we need to do to get a handle on climate change. They were surprised at that, but that is how big of a deal it is.

I think the thing that shocked me endlessly was just the non-real realization of society at large. Even someone who cares about climate change like me had no idea how big an issue the cold chain is. And when I wrote that piece for the New York Times magazine about China's cold chain, and I presented all this data about how big of an issue, because the thing to remember is it's already more than 2%, say 3.6 is like this new [inaudible 00:47:13]. If the rest of the world builds a US style cold chain, then that quintuples, at which point, as one expert said to me, "There won't be a harvest to put in all those refrigerated warehouses because climate change will have taken care of that." So it's this huge looming problem.

But when I wrote this and started talking with the New York Times fact-checker, she was like, "Well, all your numbers are right, and the sourcing seems right, but I just can't believe that if this is such a problem, why is no one talking about it?" And it's true, until 2017, the UN didn't even have a committee on it. I keynoted their first meeting, so I know, I remember when it was, but it hasn't been on people's radar.

It's a classic dilemma. I have to say though, that everywhere, so when you need the cold or you need the energy, countries are still desperate enough to get that, that they're willing to use coal in some cases when they don't want to, or there's kind of an unstoppable force here of pushing for the demand of it. So it's going to be a real challenge to slow that down.

It's a huge challenge. And you can't just say to Rwanda, "Hey, you can't have a cold chain." Because that's not going to work. And one of the issues around the cold chain is how to decarbonize it because it is a 24/7 pull on the grid, and that's one of the issues around renewables. So yeah, it's a real challenge.

You are listening to Policy Prompt, a podcast from the Center for International Governance Innovation. Policy Prompt goes deep with extensive interviews with prominent international scholars, writers, policymakers, business leaders, and technologists as we examine what it means for our public policies and society as a whole. Our goal at Policy Prompt is to explore effective policy solutions for pressing global challenges. Tune into Policy Prompt wherever you listen to podcasts.

Well, back to challenges in the US style cold chain. I was surprised to realize how fridges are increasingly political, at least in the US. It feels like there's becoming kind of blue fridges and red fridges. I'm being a little bit facetious, but the Refrigerator Freedom Act seeks to-

Oh, don't even.

Okay, let me just tell you about it for a second. It was my inner policy wonk. I was like, oh, I want another policy connection. I'll tell you about it, okay?

Yeah, no.

It seeks to prohibit the Secretary of Energy from prescribing or enforcing energy efficiency standards for a residential refrigerator that may result in additional cost to the consumer.

Speaker 7:

... 17th, the Biden administration issued a direct final rule to regulate refrigerators and freezers. These regulations only serve to increase prices for these essential home appliances, reduce consumer choices and impair their performance while claiming to fix a problem that does not exist.

We don't have anything similar in Canada. It's not on your radar, which is totally cool. It just strikes me that there's sort of-

Oh no, it's on my radar. Yeah, no, I'm in despair. Yes.

Yeah, you're in despair. Okay. Sorry, I thought you were just like, "Oh God."

On my radar, but I don't want to talk about it.

Well, I mean, freedom is a word that bears a lot of responsibility in the United States.

I just thought it was fascinating to learn that and understand that there is a micro movement to kind of protect consumers from any other kinds of investments or responsibilities around, again, this appliance that is part of this huge scale.

And the Refrigerator Freedom Act, EPA is just trying to say, oh, you can't have something that's I think over 700 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide. You could still have 500 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide. Knock yourself out, have that. I mean, no one's saying, "Hey, by the way, also you need a root cellar and you're no longer going to be able to have a cold beer." That's what you would... But yeah, don't actually, I mean, it's an uphill struggle because most people are already not particularly familiar with how refrigeration works. The fact that there are these refrigerant gases, they think, "Oh, my fridge is being made less powerful or it's going to be made smaller or something." It's hard. There's a lot in there that I think the average person would need to understand and it's a compelling narrative apparently to people that government is trying to take all of this stuff away, which is definitely un-American. So yeah, there you go.

Our meta theme in these podcasts is the idea of a transformative technology that maybe starts small or starts unknown and then has mass adoption. You've already talked a little bit about that. We've talked about some of the trade-offs and dilemmas. There's so many things that are converging right now around electricity demand, energy demand, climate change challenges. Is there some prospect of some of these challenges converging around new cooling technologies that relate to data centers, air conditioning units, fridges? They're kind of unlinked to some degree in terms of the technologies right now, but it's becoming such a big issue. And we go back to nuclear is on the table, it's already happening. There's so many moving pieces here. Do you feel like there's some breakthrough on the cooling side that might help those, technology thing on the horizon?

So it depends whether you catch me on an optimistic day or a day where I've been reading about the Refrigerator Freedom Act. But I do feel like finally there is some focus on this, and it is pretty recent. I feel like cooling only... It's funny, when I initially set out to write this book, and it was more than a decade ago, I went to New York Public Library. I lived in New York at the time, and I looked to see what were the recent books about refrigeration, because if you're going to go pitch a book, you want to make sure there wasn't just a great book about it. And apart from books for HVAC technicians, the last book that had been written was in the 1950s, and it ended with, "Here's this great technology. It's changed a lot of things, it's done a lot of stuff, but the history of food preservation is one of continuous innovation, and I'm sure we'll come up with something else soon."

And I thought to myself, but we haven't. And it's almost like refrigeration is so great in so many ways that we sort of dropped the ball on how we actually, is there a technology that could even, for example, replace this or an entirely different way of creating cooling? And instead people have worked on incremental improvements around efficiency and slightly less polluting refrigerant gases. That's not going to get us there. Where we are now is I think there are finally a couple of different technologies coming online. One that is already happening and able to work is actually just using ice batteries that really allow you to decarbonize your refrigeration. And that's really important That's happening. There are various people working on very clever ways to use that. It both reduces your energy demand, because the ice provides some cooling too, and it allows you to decarbonize, all great.

The really exciting research is around caloric cooling. And so for a long time, this is a form of cooling that basically it is a material, you disorder the molecules in the material, and as they return to order, there's a cooling effect that sucks in energy. So the one that's been around for a while is people using magnets to do that. And that was invented by physicists trying to get down to absolute zero. For a long time, people were like, "Wow, we could just wave a magnet around and create cooling. That would be wild." Unfortunately, there's only one very special metal that it works on, and the heat transfer to actually scale it up just in math does not work out.

And so it's been this thing that for 30 years, people being like, "Oh, it'd be really cool if we could make it work." And it's like, "No, but we actually can't." But it turns out that there are a couple of caloric methods of cooling that are currently finally actually in prototype stage.

Interesting, yeah.

Barocal in the UK, spun out of the University of Cambridge, puts pressure on a material and then takes the pressure away, and that produces a cooling effect. They have a prototype using parts from a diesel engine and a readily available material that's big in the pharma industry. They wouldn't tell me what it was for company secrets, but not something that's expensive or hard to get. And that works at six times the efficiency of a fridge already. So they have a pilot unit. Issue there is that the companies that make a refrigeration machinery, the Daikins and things and such, Emerson, et cetera, the big companies there, they are not the companies that will benefit from having a new cooling technology that doesn't produce emissions and uses less power. They just sell it to AmeriCold and whoever, Americold would benefit.

So it's going to be a real challenge to actually make something that's cost competitive with this. Emerson has a production line that's making millions and millions of refrigeration machines every day. How do you get this new caloric cooling able to be manufactured at a cost competitive rate by the... There's going to need to be some regulatory activity around that and incentives and such like. And that requires political willingness and that's not a given.

Maybe we could end on one other transformative technologies. I mean, I feel like in every question I just revealed more of what I didn't know before, but many people may not know about the global seed vault, the kind of doomsday vault in the Arctic. Do you want to tell us a little bit about why we have this and then we can try to make it an optimistic ending.

And you went there to Svalbard, you went there.

Yes.

Of course she did.

A big part of this book is me being like, "I want to go here." And I have to say, don't feel bad because I had been reporting and writing about food for decades when I started researching this book, and I didn't know any of these things.

Okay, thanks.

I was continually shocked throughout the process too. So I think this is very little known knowledge despite how central it is. So the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a repository of all the world's crop seeds and not just the ones that are actually the key ones that are grown, but all the wild relatives too. And you need those, because if a virus comes along and wipes out your rice harvest, as these things happen on a regular basis, well then breeders go and look at all the wild relatives and all the varieties and they try to find something that will be resistant and they use that genetic information to breed a variety that will be resistant.

So it's essential to have that genetic repository. A lot of it is stored locally, but those seed banks are vulnerable to all kinds of floods, wars, various disasters. I mean, the world wheat seed bank was in Syria, and that seemed great until it wasn't. And that collection was completely destroyed and there's no power there anymore. And it's sort of being started up elsewhere, but using backups from the Global Seed Vault. So the idea of putting this Global Seed Vault in Svalbard is, okay, this is a safe place. This is a neutral country. It's buried in the Arctic permafrost. It's still refrigerated to take it down even colder. And this is the backup vault for humanity.

Speaker 8:

We have 860,000 types of crops. Each probe has 100 to 1,000 corns. So if you look at the number of individual grains in here, it could be close to a billion.

Stuff goes in there, it doesn't come out unless it has to, but it's there. So I went to visit, and it's quite a process. The vault only gets opened a few times a year, because it only gets opened if something is going in. Otherwise, it's just left there. It doesn't get opened. It's not something you go and visit on the regular. No one goes in there. So you have to time your visit with a deposit, so to speak, with the seeds coming in and getting to Svalbard in and of itself as a whole process. And the quantity of people that are allowed in as a whole process. And you go through all of this. And I got there. And then they were like, "You can't come in." I was like, "What?"

You just show up, "Hey, I'm here."

And it was because the refrigerator had broken. So what had happened was Svalbard had had its warmest month ever. This was in October, and the permafrost had melted around the vault and water had seeped in under the door and shorted out the machinery. And so they were like, "You can't come in, because it's just ice and electricity and everything. It is a bad scene." But to me, I was like, "Oh, no." And initially I was just like, "Damn it, am I going to have to come back?" And then I realized, this is actually the perfect sort of slightly terrifying scene. We are so dependent on refrigeration, and yet climate change is making that sort of backup, not the backup we thought it is.

It's sort of like there is no climate haven anymore. And so seeing our dependence on refrigeration and the idea that it's sort of a fail safe even for the world's agricultural system and that even that is imperiled by climate change, I felt like that, that's why I put it at the end of the book. It sort of symbolized the facts that refrigeration is something we have an enormous amount of trust and faith in. We've essentially put our entire food system into its hands, and yet it is extremely imperiled. We cannot rely on it in our climate changed reality.

And it's even a contested space, Svalbard, it's kind of got a unique territorial status and things so that may come into play.

It's a fascinating place and you're not allowed to be born or die there can't-

You're not allowed to die there?

Ship you off.

They put you on a plane.

They take you. They do.

Wow, that sounds tense.

They get you out of there. I mean, yeah, if you're unlucky enough to drop dead on the spot, I guess you can, but no one's allowed to be born there. It's sort of an extraterritorial space. And so it's very weird. You can visit some of the last sort of Soviet era architecture mining towns that were just set up. There are busts of Lenin still. It's a weird place.

Wow, there's so much more we could have talked about, you just made think of people freezing themselves for future and all that. And we didn't even touch on medicine and just the importance of the gold chain there and things. So there are so many things that are important here, and it was great to talk to you about some of them.

Yeah, thank you so much.

Yeah, sorry, my answers is so long-winded, but it's so much fun to talk about, so thank you.

So Vass, we could have done a separate podcast on each chapter of that book. There's so much there. So many examples.

Yes. Let's do it. Let's pivot.

Yeah. Well, she's always writing something new anyway, so there'll be more opportunities. And her stories and the context around everything is so fascinating. And she kind of pokes at everything. There's nothing, she doesn't leave any stone unturned in terms of linkage and inquisitiveness of how she pursues, understanding what's going on.

I mean, even that forgotten couplet from a song, it sort of sticks with you. I am a Twilley head now. I'll be looking out for more of her work. And we were kind of chatting about how fridges are changing and our household appliances are becoming quote, unquote, "smarter" and what that could mean and how they're becoming tools of surveillance and kind of crime solving too. So they are, I think, a site that is, we're maybe more alive to how that technology is starting to shift and evolve. But I think that's the more on the outside of a fridge and not about really thinking about what it means to put food inside it and just kind of open that door and take something out. So as she wrote, I will not look at food the same way again.

Crime-solving fridges will keep those series going for a bit longer. CSI and things like that. They'll have new ways of bringing in, but you can imagine a fridge where it's smart enough to tell you, you don't need that. This only has two days left. And people will like that, but it will also become a bit of a surveillance thing.

Or pre-ordering the food you're out of. You're running low on milk, pre-order it.

Exactly.

And just thinking about how we've been spoiled by the cold and that kind of ubiquitous invisibility, you said it earlier, using that word invisible, I think is really important and sort of brings us back one, I think often when people are thinking about technologies, they're thinking about a technology that has to be inherently digital, or two, you and I are obsessed with transformative technologies. They don't have to be digital or virtual, and they're also part of our everyday lives. They're not necessarily fancy cutting-edge that we're adopting tomorrow. This just really helped me appreciate, again, what it means to have access to that technology and how it's changed so much.

Totally. And Nikki's got a podcast that is broader. It's kind of a foodie podcast.

Oh yeah, its amazing, Gastropod.

That's a thinking foodie podcast. So we'll put a note in the show notes there and check it out.

Policy Prompt is produced by me, Vass Bednar and Paul Samson. Tim Lewis and Mel Wiersma are our technical producers. Background research is contributed by Reanne Cayenne, brand Design by Abhilasha Dewan and Creative Direction from Som Tsoi. The original theme music is by Josh Snethlage, sound mixing by Francois Goudreau. And special thanks to creative consultant Ken Ogasawara. Please subscribe and rate Policy Prompt wherever you listen to podcasts and stay tuned for future episodes.