In recent years, the fermentation boom has revolutionized the way we enjoy food in some of the world’s best restaurants. Looking back a century, food trends were already commonplace: refrigeration. In 2012, the Royal Society declared refrigeration the most important invention in the history of food and drink. In her latest book, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves, author, New Yorker contributor, and Gastropod co-host Nicola Twilley explores the cold chain and how keeping food cold has transformed the way we eat.
Evan Kleiman: I’m so glad you’re back. First off, tell me how much of what we consume as Americans is refrigerated.
Nicola Twilley: That’s a hard number to calculate. I had to do some advanced math, and if you know me, you know I’m not very good at it. But of all the food that Americans consume (this is data available from the USDA), if you calculate what goes through what I call the “cold chain” — refrigeration, cold storage, refrigerated trucks, things that are kept refrigerated during transport — that’s almost three-quarters of what we eat. That’s probably an underestimate. The USDA data is about commodities, so it excludes things like wheat, but by the time that wheat is made into a frozen pizza crust, it’s refrigerated. That’s a lot over time.
I understand that the company boasts an estimated 5.5 billion cubic feet of refrigerated space.
Yes, the United States is number one in the world in refrigeration. We have a ton of refrigeration space in the United States. We have more globally. It’s really hard to imagine, but I almost picture it as a third pole. You never really think about it on a real scale because it’s not all connected, but it’s a giant artificial winter. It just happens to be dotted around logistics, parks, and, you know, ports all over the country.
Nicola Twilley’s research took her to a Kraft cheese cave in Missouri and a banana ripening room in New York. Photo by Rebecca Fishman.
You call these hidden spaces the ‘artificial cryosphere.’ What places have you visited in your research that most of us will never see?
Natural cryospheres, of course, are the naturally cold places in the world, like the poles and glaciers. The artificial cryosphere has its wonders too. There are fewer explorers, but just as many wonders, so I went to see some. For example, in the Ozarks, there are huge underground buildings in former mines that are now cold storage warehouses. I visited the one in Missouri. It’s very vast. Kraft stores most of their cheese there. There are cheese caves in Europe. Roquefort and Gruyere are made from there. Actually, there are cheese caves in the United States too. They are cold storage warehouses in former limestone mines, and they’re filled with Kraft cheese.
There are some pretty amazing places. I went to the largest juice tank farm in the United States, it’s in the Port of Wilmington on the East Coast. They ship orange juice from Brazil and store it in giant tanks. [that are] They have cellars many stories high, where all the flavour is removed for storage and then added back in when it’s bottled for sale, and there are some really bizarre places.
That’s insane.
What you have in the tank is basically sugar water. To make something that can be refrigerated, you have to remove all the oils and volatiles, which has a side effect: when you put the oils and volatiles back into the tank, you always get the same ratios. If you’ve ever had freshly squeezed orange juice, you know that it can taste different depending on the season, the location, and the variety of orange. So guess what? Tropicana always tastes the same, that’s just how they make it.
It’s amazing. We now have an infrastructure where, even if we don’t go shopping every day, we can go to a supermarket with a myriad of foods that were not made yesterday, but are stored for our convenience. What industries are helping to create this environment for us?
Thank goodness for beer. The answer is simple. In fact, one of the reasons humans first started farming was to turn grain into beer. That’s arguably why we invested in mechanical refrigeration – specifically, to make lager beer. It’s very hard to make beer in the summer in the US, because lager yeast really hates temperatures above about 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
In the mid-1800s, America experienced a huge influx of German immigrants, and they wanted to drink lager all summer long (and who doesn’t?), but they had a hard time making it, so it was up to them to put in the money.
The story of how this new technology was invented is a mix of explosions and good fortune. Investors were brewers. The first mechanical refrigeration room for beer production was in Brooklyn.
That’s amazing.
Yes, cheers! Originally, people had refrigerators and the ice man came and delivered them. [ice]Later, mechanical refrigeration was developed, but the first machines were the size of a house and very dangerous. They could not be insured and often exploded. However, once electricity became more widespread, [and] Now that they have an electricity grid and are no longer steam-powered, they can be scaled down to residential size.
There were two choices: electric or gas. Gas refrigerators had some advantages: they were much quieter, more reliable, and had fewer moving parts. But electric refrigerators won out. That’s why GE really invested in them. They had a ton of money from Thomas Edison’s patents. They saw the refrigerator as a gold mine. This appliance that you just plug into an outlet and it runs 24/7, forever. Clink! They made a movie about refrigerators visiting the North Pole. They spent a ton of money marketing the electric refrigerator, and it ended up taking off.
Initially, when refrigeration first started to be introduced, people were very skeptical of it. Why were they so afraid?
It’s funny because today, if you don’t put something in the fridge and you leave it on the counter for a couple of hours, people get anxious about, “Is it still edible?” 100 years ago it was the exact opposite. If you think about it, it makes sense. Before, if something was fresh and looked fresh, it had to have been caught or slaughtered recently, if not in front of you then within the last day or two, it couldn’t have come from far away. All of a sudden, technology came along that meant you could buy chicken that looked like it was slaughtered yesterday but could have been slaughtered six months or a year ago. That was really unsettling. Consumers had to adapt to a totally different idea of what freshness meant, even though they knew one thing.
Also, the early warehousemen didn’t know how to use refrigeration, so they were like, “Here’s a magic new tool. I’ll put it up for sale. If it doesn’t sell that day, I’ll put it back in the refrigerator at night, and it’ll be good as new tomorrow.” They didn’t really understand that you wanted to store meat and apples at different temperatures, so they just put everything together, thinking this magic new tool was going to help. It didn’t work often, and people got really sick.
“Frostbite: How Refrigeration Transformed Our Food, the Planet, and Ourselves” details the evolution of cold and how it has affected our diet. Photo courtesy of Penguin Press.
Can you describe the setting and menu of the world’s first refrigerated room banquet, held in Chicago in 1911?
The Refrigerated Banquet was actually a PR campaign. Public skepticism about refrigerated foods was so strong that the National Poultry, Butter and Egg Association decided to hold a Refrigerated Banquet in Chicago in 1911 to prove that you could survive on refrigerated foods. They invited everyone, including members of Congress and city officials. They gathered in the ballroom of the city’s most expensive hotel. The basic premise was that everything served was refrigerated, except for the olives in the Dry Martinis.
The menu was amazing: instead of saying, “This chicken was raised on this farm,” or “This chicken is this breed,” it said, “This chicken was kept in Booth’s cold storage plant for six months.” Imagine what a menu like this would look like today. [info about] Where food was stored. We would never imagine that. It was a five-course meal: turkey, eggs, salmon, apple pie. The apples came out of the fridge, even though apples were in season (it was October). So was the butter. So were the eggs. It was all stored.
Can you give some examples of fundamental American dishes that are made possible by the refrigerated food system and the idea of preserving seasons?
My favorite example here is a food that many people love: the cheeseburger. The cheeseburger is the epitome of refrigerated cooking. The idea of making a patty of meat is ancient, but the fact that it can be served with tomatoes, lettuce, and cheese, in the same season, in the same place, at the same time, is thanks to refrigeration.
The idea came from Waldo Jaquis, an open data activist. He raised his own chickens, grew his own vegetables, and decided to live an off-grid lifestyle. He wanted to start a project, he wanted to make a cheeseburger from scratch and see if he could do it. But he realized that it really wasn’t possible. [be done] Without refrigeration.
Following the traditional agricultural calendar, meat is slaughtered in November when it gets cold, cows give birth, and milk for cheese is collected in the spring, because that’s the traditional calendar, that’s when we make cheese, and tomatoes are harvested in the summer, and without the refrigerated food system, none of this would become the wonderful thing we know as the cheeseburger.
Now, I have to have a cheeseburger for dinner.
Sorry. Wash it down with an ice cold Coca-Cola. This doesn’t work unless it’s refrigerated. Coca-Cola is too sweet. The basic taste receptors for sweet, bitter, sour, etc. are actually very sensitive to temperature. So when your tongue is cooled below 59 degrees by food or drink, these receptors are silenced. The signals sent to your brain are extremely weak. This means that even if Coca-Cola tasted good when it was warm, it won’t be sweet enough when it’s cold. You need a lot of sugar to get the flavor right over ice. Melted ice cream tastes bad too.
Americans are famously fond of iced water and cold drinks. If you go to other parts of the world, you might get tap water without ice. Americans love everything with ice. So, one theory is that there is a lot of sugar in American food, or that this is one of the reasons. Americans have numbed their taste receptors, so the sweet message doesn’t get through unless there is a lot of sugar in it.
