HEFFNER: I am Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

I'm delighted to welcome our guest today, Nicola Twilley.

She's author of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves by Penguin Press.

Thank you so much for joining me today, Nikki.

TWILLEY: Thank you for having me.

HEFFNER: Nikki is also co-host of the award-winning Gastro Pod podcast, which looks at food through the lens of history and science.

A pleasure to be with you today.

What inspired you to write Frostbite?

TWILLEY: You have to cast your mind back a little because I started writing this more than a decade ago, but at the time, farm to table was the trendy thing in food, and there were farm to table restaurants, and people were talking about farm to table food is the right way to eat.

And people like Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser were writing books, looking at the farm, and showing us how our food was raised, really for the first time.

I was jealous of those people.

I wished I'd written those books.

And I also was really intrigued by this view of our food system.

And then I was thinking about the phrase farm to table and thinking, well, there's a word in here for me, the to, so I can research the two.

And so it started just with just curiosity, really.

Where did our food go to live, excuse me, between the farm and the table.

And once I saw those places and saw that there were special tank farms for orange juice and meat lockers and ripening rooms for bananas.

I thought there's more here.

There's a story of how refrigeration changed our food.

This isn't just something that it passes through on its way to us.

It's fundamentally changed what we what we eat, where it's grown, how good it is for us, how good it is for the planet.

And so now it's not just a little article.

It started out actually as an exhibition.

It's a book.

And that's what swallowed the last decade of my life.

HEFFNER: Congratulations on that.

Meanwhile, can you give us some rudimentary history of refrigeration technology?

When in earnest did it begin for commercial, industrial and then ultimately consumer purposes?

TWILLEY: Yeah.

The, the funny thing about refrigeration is it, for something that seems so essential, it's really relatively recent.

The first person to produce cold artificially did it in 1755.

It was a Scottish professor, and he did it kind of as a party trick.

He read a little book about it, published it.

I think no one read it, certainly no one mentioned it or followed up on it.

And it wasn't until the early 1830s that engineers inspired by the success of the natural ice trade thought, wouldn't it be great if we could make ice artificially?

And so they started tinkering.

There were various patents, there were various prototypes.

The first person to build a working refrigeration machine that he sold to a business, specifically a brewery, was an Australian journalist, a guy called Harrison, James Harrison.

And he had gotten into interested in cold because he noticed that when he tried to print the newspaper in Brisbane, he had to rub the type with ether first.

And as it evaporated it off, it cooled the type enough to print in the hot Australian summers.

And saw that thought natural ice was very expensive.

By the time it got to Australia, it melted on the way there.

So he saw an opportunity and he built himself like a skunkwork style cave, where he did these experiments and regularly blew things up, lost his eyebrows, was nearly blinded, but ended up with the first refrigeration machine.

Those early years, they were all prototypes.

They were all extremely dangerous.

They were steam powered, so they were massive.

And it wasn't really until the 1920s that we domesticated cold, ran it off electricity, shrank it to a size that it could be in our homes and a regular part of our lives.

So it's incredibly recent.

HEFFNER: And between those two periods, were there more scientific learnings?

Is that how it evolved to the point in the 19th century when it was adaptable in the way you're describing?

TWILLEY: Honestly, it was more that people saw the point of it.

William Cullen back in 1755 had the basic science.

You were evaporating under a vacuum.

That's how you create cold or rather remove heat.

But the basic science was there.

I think people had not seen the point of refining it into a practical machine.

So a lot of the breakthroughs were more engineering.

How do we making the compressor, the thing that pumps the refrigerant chemical around the machine that hermetically sealing that.

So it was more reliable, shrinking the parts.

Obviously moving to electricity rather than steam power was huge.

Figuring out what's the best and most reliable and least flammable chemical to use as the refrigerant.

All of these things were kind of iterative.

And the thing was that people really hadn't seen the point until the natural ice scale trade was at sufficient scale that people were starting to use it for food.

And suddenly the engineers were like, oh, there's a market here.

It's worth figuring out how to do this.

HEFFNER: Take us through the development of the refrigeration infrastructure.

So once it became accessible technology that was used by either manufacturers companies or lay people, what were kind of the stages of developing that infrastructure?

TWILLEY: The thing that came first was the refrigerated warehouse because obviously a building is much easier to deal with than something that's moving.

And those were ice cooled at first and then mechanically cooled.

And the first people to adopt mechanical refrigeration were, as I say, brewers, which I love because some people have the theory that the reason we took up farming was to make beer and that beer is the reason we're sort of an agricultural species.

It’s certainly the reason we're a refrigerated species.

The brewers were the ones who really, and it came about because of the wave of German immigration and the wish to drink lager rather than traditional British style ales.

And you really can't do those without the resting period where the yeast carries on kind of working in the cold.

So in the summer the breweries in St. Louis, even though they were working underground and using natural ice, they were really limited in what they could do.

And so they were the ones who kind of stepped up to the plate and, as one brewer said, we paid the lesson money that is always needed to bring an invention to commercial use.

Someone has to pay for all of the iterating and the prototyping and the experiments that don't work, and the inefficient version of something so that we can all get the efficient version.

So refrigerated warehouses were first for long time train cars, and then once we had them, trucks were cooled by ice.

And that didn't become mechanically cooled until the late thirties.

An African American engineer called Fred McKinley Jones invented the transport refrigeration unit wasn't really adopted until after the Second World War.

The military used it during the Second World War, parachuted it onto Pacific Islands with the troops.

And so you could have a nice cold Coca-Cola in the steamy tropics, but also store blood, which was essential.

And so that it proved itself during Second World War and was really adopted after the Second World War.

Ships had come earlier because shipping meat between continents was such a pressing need.

And so a big shipboard refrigeration machine that was around before the start of the 20th century.

But yeah, it took a while.

Supermarket chill cabinets took a while.

Freezers didn't roll out when, when Clarence Birdseye froze his first batch of haddock, he had no way to distribute it or know where to sell it from.

And it actually just sat in storage until that infrastructure kind of got in place.

If no one has a freezer at home and the supermarkets don't have freezer cabinets, it doesn't do you much good if you figured out how to freeze haddock really well.

HEFFNER: And the advent of that, the freezer cabinets at supermarkets.

60s?

70s?

TWILLEY: That's before it, the 60s is when it really starts rolling out.

Again, they existed.

The other thing that has to happen for something to really roll out is for people have to see the point of it.

And it was actually the fish stick that made the freezer into a must have.

Well, first the fish stick was important.

I never knew that actually, JFK was a big driver for the invention of the fish stick.

He was the guy who signed off on the bill that gave the fisheries the money to invent this new form of fish product, which was really just a convenience thing because at the time, if you were a fisherman and you had this brand new freezing technology on your boat, you didn't have the ability to freeze fillet separately.

You just froze it all into a giant block.

Things weren't advanced enough yet.

And so the fish stick was a solution to that problem because you could just bansaw it up, and coat it in breadcrumbs and bingo.

But the real, sort of early adopter of a freezer was doing it for the orange juice, and that again was technology invented by the US military during the Second World War, using technology invented by Eastman Kodak to dry photo film, actually, they repurposed it.

The military wanted soldiers to be able to get their Vitamin C from food rather than a pill.

And so they really wanted a way to get the soldiers orange juice, but obviously in a powdered form, because you can't ship around gallons of orange juice to the front lines.

No one can make it work.

But the first step of that process where you kind of concentrate the orange juice down, strip it of its oils and its flavors, and just evaporate out the water, that worked.

And that became the basis of frozen concentrated orange juice.

Those cans that you would just kind of keep in the freezer, plop out into a jug, add water and bingo fresh orange juice for your family all year round.

Bing Crosby sang the jingle.

He invested in the company.

It was a huge hit prior to that.

Orange juice wasn't a breakfast drink.

People had tomato juice if they wanted anything because that could be canned.

But juice wasn't a breakfast staple.

And now you can't find a breakfast buffet in the land without orange juice.

It's sort of synonymous with breakfast, and it really took frozen concentrated orange juice to do that.

HEFFNER: Now let's talk about air conditioning.

The refrigerant that enables us to live arguably more tranquil lives and more well lives, medically, physically well lives.

How does that align with the evolution of the refrigerant for food cooling?

Which accelerated more quickly?

And was there a recognition of the importance of air conditioning one's home before there was a recognition of freezing orange juice?

TWILLEY: At the very beginning, the early people who were tinkering with this, I would say it was split a lit pretty much evenly.

So John Gorrie, a doctor in Florida, he was experimenting with how do you build a machine that that cools things?

But he was doing it for his patients in Florida in the summer.

And he was tinkering around the same time as James Harrison in Australia, who was thinking about beer.

So it was sort of 50-50.

The early refrigeration machines, for example, when the South was cut off from supplies of New England ice during the Civil War, that really helped the adoption of these early refrigeration machines because suddenly they couldn't get any ice.

And so some were smuggled through the blockade into New Orleans and the southern cities, and they were used for primarily in the hospitals for soldiers.

So there was this recognition that creating cold was really useful for our health.

But the place where it really took off first was food.

Brewing first, meat, bananas.

Those were the big ones.

And it wasn't until Willis Carrier then later in the 1800s needed to cool a printing press that he became what he's called the father of air conditioning.

It's the same technology.

It's identical technology.

You're removing heat from a box.

The box is either your fridge or refrigerated warehouse or your factory floor.

The thing was that people didn't see it as necessary for human comfort day to day.

They saw it as necessary for invalids.

They saw it as necessary for industrial processes like printing, but not just for like I'm sitting here at my desk and it's so hot.

I can't think.

No, have a siesta.

HEFFNER: Well, I would not have survived.

I like to sleep at 65 degrees.

The question is this: the impact of this revolution of refrigerant on our climate when new high rises and facilities are popping up, not just in the United States, around the world, to be a fully functional developed nation at this point is dependent upon your capacity to mass produce refrigerant and the systems to support it.

Is that sustainable with what we know about the impact of these technologies on climate change?

TWILLEY: Yeah, this is something that honestly came as a surprise to me as I researched this.

So I started looking into this cold chain and looking into how it had changed what we eat and how it tastes and how good it is for us and where it's grown and all of that.

And I thought, oh, wouldn't it be interesting to go to a place that doesn't have a cold chain yet and see what happens as it builds ones?

And so I traveled to China, which had made building a cold chain part of its 12th five year plan.

And being China, once they decide to do something, they basically do it in like two years flat.

So they were building a cold chain from scratch, and you could see all the same sorts of things that played out in the US over decades playing out in real time, but fast forward in China.

So it was completely fascinating for a refrigeration nerd like me.

But it was there that I realized people were talking about sustainability.

People were talking about the fact that once China built a cold chain the size of the US cold chain that was going to take a lot power to run it.

I mean it's thermodynamics.

You can't escape the fact that moving energy around takes energy.

And that's what you're doing when you're removing the heat from these boxes.

You're using energy to do that.

And so there's the emissions on that basis alone.

And then, and I think this was really flying under the radar at the time, there's the refrigerants.

These are the chemicals that evaporate in the refrigerating machine as they evaporate liquid, cast your mind back to high school physics, when a liquid turns into a gas that takes energy, and it's that energy that is being pulled from the room, you're trying to cool to turn the liquid into a gas.

And so those chemicals turn out, not all of them, but many of them, and actually many of the most common ones, particularly in the developing world, because they're non-toxic and nonflammable and easy to use, those chemicals are super-greenhouse gases, meaning there are many hundreds, sometimes thousands of times more warming than the same amount of carbon dioxide.

So that's just a disaster.

And when I first wrote about this, it was back in 2013, I was looking at the Chinese cold chain.

I said I've been doing this for a while, but people weren't talking about it.

I remember The New York Times Magazine fact checker was like, well, your numbers are all right and the science checks out, but I can't find papers addressing this issue.

It was true, and it wasn't until 2017 that the United Nations got together a sustainable cooling for all committee to tackle this problem.

I was its keynote speaker, and I think refrigeration, it just seems so essential and so important.

And so part of what you have to do to become a developed nation that people hadn't really calculated, oh, right, if we all build a US style cold chain using today's technology, I mean, as one expert put it to me, well, then there won't be a harvest to put in those refrigerated warehouses because climate change will have taken care of that.

So it is this problem and it's a problem that was only recognized really, really recently.

HEFFNER: And like anything related to climate, Nikki, it is the worst-case scenario that is being portended in effect.

But there is the day-to-day of knowing that this technology uplifts the lives and livelihoods of people in third world nations developing countries.

And is the difference between people living with standards of quality and not, is that accurate?

TWILLEY: Oh, absolutely.

And you can't discount its role in food waste too, which is another huge driver of climate change.

The emissions from food waste are gigantic.

If it was a country food waste would be the third most polluting country on earth right after the US or China.

And refrigeration really does make a difference to the amount of food that is wasted between the farm and the market.

Unfortunately, data in the US has shown that actually then we just go ahead and waste that food at the retail and consumer end.

So it sort of shifts where the waste happens rather than removing it from the system.

The food used to rot on its way to the market.

Now it doesn't, but we have these fridges where we buy too much and then forget stuff is there and then throw it out and know we can go and get some more anyway, if it looks a little wilted.

HEFFNER: Right.

So that is excess, in some cases people will be donating that to soup kitchens or folks in need.

I hear what you're saying, but what I'm really getting at is this seeming contradiction between, it's almost like the deployment of social media and countries that have never had it, and they have it and they can feel connected, and then they see the anti-social forces hijacking social media.

I suppose my question to you is this: Has anyone figured out this contradiction in the fact that refrigerant accelerates the quality of lives, maybe not only in developing nations, but also in some developed nations, and in other developed nations, excessive and even obscene misuse of the technology contributes to or can contribute to the unraveling of the planet in our health.

So it's like in some places adopting the refrigerant technology is helpful to our health, but in other places it's not.

TWILLEY: It’s such a good question and it's really why I wrote this book now because a lot of Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia is right now embarking on building a cold chain.

They want to enjoy the benefits it brings economically for small holder farmers for nutrition, for their livelihoods, all of those reasons.

And they're building it now.

And my thought in writing this book is like, well, okay, is there a way to build it that doesn't replicate the mistakes that we have made here in the developed world, if you know that it has these climate implications and also these economic implications because refrigeration equipment is expensive.

Farmers have really had to scale up to make it work.

It doesn't work at the smallest scale.

Here in the US you've then ended up in a system where 4% of people produce all our food, and most people aren't farmers.

Now not everyone should have to be a farmer, but if they want to stay on the land, is there a way to make it so that they can refrigerate and not have to become a gigantic land holder?

There’s a chapter in my book that I think is the most intriguing, that is looking at an experiment that Rwanda is doing.

Rwanda is quite a small country in Sub-Saharan Africa.

It's had a very troubled history.

But it is pioneering this project, it's called ACES, to say can we build a cold chain, but can we do it sustainably?

And can we do it in a way that allows small holders to share in the wealth equally to leave the land if they want to, but stay on the land if they want to.

Can we do it in a way that doesn't just turn us into a nation that exports all our produce so that there's just cheap green beans and blueberries for Europeans while our own people are hungry?

Can we do it in a way that doesn't, um, isn't as unsustainable?

Can we do it in a way that doesn't create the consumer and retail waste we see in the West?

And so it's a huge stakes game because the plan, and this is funded by the United Nations, by Britain's international development department, and by a conglomerate of universities and the Rwandan government.

If they can make it work, then they have a template to roll out across the developing world.

So it's a high stakes project.

It just got going during the pandemic.

I was out in Rwanda two years ago as they were really kicking things off.

So it's too soon to tell.

But I think what's important about it is we're finally opening our eyes to the costs of refrigeration and the dangers of refrigeration as well as its benefits.

And if we can build a cold chain that uses that knowledge, then yeah, that's a huge success.

HEFFNER: Nikki, we only have 30 seconds left.

Very quick question.

For those developed nations, is the best strategy to ultimately mitigate the injury that refrigerant can cause climate Cap and Trade and the ability in a capitalistic system for businesses and individuals to engage in that trade-off so that there's a recognition, not everybody is going to use the maximum amount of air conditioning or refrigeration space, but is that still in your mind, the most effective way to manage the distribution and to keep it at a level that's not going to kill the planet?

TWILLEY: Yeah, I actually think we have to spend the R and D money, which we don't do right now.

Less than 1% of global R and D goes into refrigeration, let alone alternate methods of food preservation.

So I think we need to spend the money to figure out how to do this sustainably.

I don't think it's going to work to try to say, no you have to moderate your use.

HEFFNER: Nikki, super insightful.

Thank you for chronicling the history and contemporary realities of refrigerating technology in this book.

TWILLEY: Thank you.

Thanks for having me to discuss it.

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