Volume 30 Issue 1, Winter 2025

Review by Steve Allen

The wheel, the internal combustion engine, the telephone, penicillin, and the computer.

These would all have been on my list of the most important inventions of all time if you had asked me a few months ago. Refrigeration would not have even made my top 10. In Frostbite, journalist Nicola Twilley makes a compelling case to add mechanical refrigeration to that list.

Humans learned to control heat early on, baking bread on hot stones more than 14,000 years ago. The Romans and other cultures cooked meals on hearths in their homes. Fireplaces have been used for cooking in homes since the mid-11th century, when chimneys were first built to allow smoke to escape up through the roof of the first two-story houses.

Controlling cold took a little longer. The first icehouses were not built until the mid-1700s. These were small, inefficient, and useful only for keeping ice frozen, but not for storing other products.

It was not until the mid-1800s that the first refrigerated railcars were developed. This was the revolutionary breakthrough. Prior to that, almost all the meat in urban markets walked itself to the butcher where it was slaughtered and sold. This placed a limit on the growth of cities, as only so much meat could be produced locally. Refrigerated railcars allowed for the mass production of meat closer to the feeding grounds in the American Midwest. It could then be shipped by rail to the eastern cities, allowing urban populations to grow and industrialization to fully take hold.

As it turns out, solving the meat problem was the simple task. Fruits and vegetables are much more complex, and practically every item in the produce department requires a different system.

Did you ever wonder how fresh, shiny apples, an autumn-ripening fruit, could be in supermarket produce aisles all year long? The answer is refrigeration. A ripe apple picked in the fall is a living, breathing organism. Once plucked from its tree, the apple continues to respire oxygen, but cannot replace it and soon begins to die, softening and turning brown. After years of experimentation, it was discovered that keeping apples chilled to about 45° F in a climate-controlled warehouse and adjusting the atmospheric conditions to reduce the oxygen and carbon dioxide levels to near zero basically acts as an anesthetic, putting the apples into a deep sleep where they can be kept for months until ready to go to market.

Bananas pose a different problem. A green banana harvested in the tropics will ripen in about 10 days. Once a banana is yellow and fully ripe, the transition to brown and mushy is quick and unstoppable, as we all know. Thus, the challenge is to slow or stop that ripening process. The answer, of course, is refrigeration. Green bananas are under continuous refrigeration from the time they are picked, transported by truck, then container ship, then truck or rail to specialized banana warehouses. There, the bananas are allowed to begin ripening at about 60º F. The process is so sophisticated that a customer at the warehouse can select one of seven grades of color from green to yellow depending on how long it will take to get the bananas out for sale to consumers.

The impact of refrigeration on our lives in the last 100 or so years is immense. Three-quarters of all food that reaches plates in the U.S. has been under refrigeration at some point in its existence. Two-thirds of all produce grown worldwide is consumed in a country other than the one where it was grown. Currently there are 5.5 billion cubic feet of refrigerated warehouse space in the U.S., or 16.4 cubic feet per person. (To put this in perspective, this is the equivalent of more than 1,500 Costco warehouses.)

There is no question that refrigeration has improved our health and our lifestyles. By reducing our exposure to pathogenic microbes, food-related gastrointestinal illnesses, which were a leading cause of death at the turn of the 20th century, have been greatly reduced.

Now for the bad news: all of this cooling contributes significantly to global warming. The electrical power needed to run all of this cooling equipment in warehouses and railcars, plus the fuel needed to run all these refrigerated trucks and ships, accounts for about 8 percent of global energy use. Furthermore, all refrigeration systems, from your home refrigerator to a huge warehouse, leak a small amount of chemical refrigerant every year. Some of these, like ammonia, are not troublesome, but others — like now-banned chlorofluorocarbons — have been categorized as super-greenhouse gases.

Frostbite brings a chilling yet fascinating tale of the history of cold, and a tour of the international cold chain. It makes for very cool reading.

The post Book Review: Frostbite by Nicola Twilley appeared first on Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy.