Back Forty: How the fridge reshaped politics, trade, economics, and transportation
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By Elizabeth Royte
The science of chill, whether produced naturally or mechanically, is fascinating. But in Frostbite, Nicola Twilley expands her purview well beyond the mechanistic to explain, convincingly, how the refrigeration of perishables has changed everything about how and what we eat — “reshaping trade, transportation, politics, and economics in the process.”
The result is an endless stream of contingency. Consider the chemists who, in the 1830s, isolated and named protein. The discovery spurred military generals and bosses in the U.S. and Europe to fret about their workers’ strength. How to get more protein, in good shape, from areas with an overabundance of livestock to cities teeming with weaklings?
Enter the iced railcar, which moved live animals to urban areas for slaughter. But moving hoof stock is expensive. In the U.S., the solution was to slaughter the animals in the West — where labor, land, water, and feed were both readily available and cheaper — then send just the edible bits East.
As meat prices dropped across the nation, people consumed ever more animal protein, with mixed health and environmental impacts. Noting that amino acids needn’t always come from animals, Twilley writes, “If chemists had come down in favor of grains and beans instead, the world might have looked very different.”
Through the beginning of the 20th century, engineers and tinkerers experimented with methods to mechanically cool railcars and ships, a period during which much fresh product was lost to fires, leaks, and other forms of spoilage. Patents were eventually filed, nudging the meatpacking industry toward greater consolidation first in Chicago and later, with the rise of interstate highways, in Colorado, Nebraska, and Kansas, where centralized production and slaughter led to centralized pollution — far from the sight and smell of urban and suburban consumers. Meanwhile, fruit and vegetable production concentrated in California. As usual, these systems favored the largest operators, those who could afford the shipping fees, handle paperwork and quality control, and scale up to meet market demand.
The rearrangement and concentration of production had knock on effects on immigration, labor, political movements, and land use around the globe. As England began importing meat from the U.S. and South America and British meat prices plummeted, tenant farmers were displaced, and farmland became hunting grounds and tourist destinations for the gentry. According to one economist, the meat crash fueled the rise of the Irish independence movement and “changed Irish politics forever.”
Over time, the beef boom would drive Amazonian deforestation and a concomitant crash in biodiversity. Today, the global mass of broiler chickens, enabled by a steady supply of chill, is greater than the mass of all other birds combined, and many species of formerly abundant fish (including bluefin tuna, whose consumption exploded after the invention of the refrigerated tuna coffin) have become critically endangered. Within our first century of domesticating cold, Twilley writes, we have “altered the composition of Earth’s biomass beyond recognition.”
Of course, refrigeration has plenty of upsides. It allows more people to eat animal protein and other perishables — in season and out. It brings ice cream to the masses, not only to the elites. And it allows farmers to overcome harvest gluts, which lower prices, by selling their stored or frozen produce out of season and sometimes — if they have enough product and can afford the shipping — to markets around the world.
But as Twilley notes, “The consequences of any technology are rarely limited to what we hope and imagine they might be when it is first introduced.” Bred to withstand long hauls under refrigeration and to appear ripe at its point of purchase, much of our produce — bananas, apples, tomatoes — has become both less flavorful and less nutritious. To meet jacked up market demand, farmers now devote themselves to monocultures, which are vulnerable to disease.
Does the fridge reduce foodborne illnesses? It’s hard to say because data are scarce, but experts suggest our guts were far healthier in pre-fridge days, when we ate more fermented and pickled foods. And what of food waste? Yes, the refrigerator preserves, but it also enables overbuying and then ignoring what we’ve bought. “The United States has the world’s most developed cold chain,” Twilley writes, “yet it wastes almost as much of its food, by percentage, as Rwanda does for lack of one.”
Frostbite is, ultimately, a call to action. Cold-storage companies are currently the third-highest industrial consumers of energy, and the rest of the world wants a cold chain, too. (Food waste experts believe more refrigeration will massively reduce post-harvest losses and food shortages in developing nations.) The fossil fuel energy and the chemicals — including refrigerants that leak into the atmosphere and contribute to the ozone hole — that refrigeration requires already account for more than 2 percent of global emissions. Keeping even more food cold will make the planet even hotter, Twilley writes, making it harder for many of the things we eat — and us — to survive.
Twilley has a wry and delightfully muscular style, and she’s an indefatigable researcher. She made field trips to Asia, Africa, and Europe, to cold storage facilities, butcher shops, dry-aging rooms, fruit-ripening rooms, and an orange juice tank farm. She has read both Pallet Enterprise magazine and China’s Frozen Food Newspaper.
And the upshot of these investigations? “Our food system is frostbitten: it has been injured by its exposure to cold.” Yes, refrigeration has been a massive boon for markets, which valorize convenience, abundance, and profit, but for human and environmental health, not so much. With these facts in mind, she suggests that refrigeration must be reimagined and redesigned to be more sustainable, and that we must use less of it, overall. The temperate zone may not enjoy seasonless abundance in this scenario, but at least we’ll still have seasons.