How Refrigeration Changed Everything
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Twilley, N. (2024). Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. Penguin Random House. ISBN-13 9780735223288
Review by Jacob Pleasants
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Click here for an interview with the author!
If there’s one thing I enjoy, it’s taking a hard, careful look at the seemingly mundane, ostensibly essential technologies of everyday life. We give a lot of our critical attention to information and communication technologies, especially the latest digital technologies (I’m looking at you, AI). Influential though those technologies may be, the fabric of our everyday reality is really composed of much more “basic” stuff.
Stuff like refrigeration.
What would life be like without refrigeration? Or, to put it more broadly, without technologies that allow us to produce cold? It’s a scary thought in our era of climate change. Extreme heat, it turns out, is actually far more deadly than disasters like flooding or tornadoes. In many places, air conditioning is not a luxury, but a necessity. And without our refrigerators, it’s hard to imagine how we would manage to eat. But as essential as they might be, these are technologies that nevertheless deserve critical examination. Like all technologies, they are not neutral!
What does society give up for the benefits of refrigeration?
What are the unintended or unexpected changes caused by refrigeration?
Why is it difficult to imagine our world without refrigeration?
Nicola Twilley’s Frostbite examines the deeply complex past, present, and future of the technologies of cold. Twilley has written about our food system as a journalist for many years, and she currently co-hosts the podcast Gastropod, which examines the science and history of food. In Frostbite, Twilley builds upon her previous reporting to provide an in-depth look at the profound ways that refrigeration has shaped, and been shaped by, societies over history and around the world. Her point of entry is how refrigeration is a part of our food system, but she also shows the many entanglements that exist between food, economics, politics, labor, culture, and more.
Frostbite gives plenty of details about the technical history of cooling, from ice harvesting to the series of technological innovations that eventually resulted in the modern vapor-compression refrigeration systems that are ubiquitous today. But Frostbite does not tell a simple story of technological progress and triumph. Twilley shows how, at every step, these technologies were inextricably linked to economic, cultural, political, and social forces and actors. Like all technologies, the history of refrigeration is full of contingencies, as were the sweeping sociocultural transformations that ensued.
And make no mistake: the transformations are immense. The food we eat is largely a product of the vast refrigeration networks that allow meat, dairy, and produce to be packed and shipped thousands of miles before landing on the shelves of a supermarket (which is itself an entity that could simply not exist without refrigeration). Refrigeration doesn’t just enable us to more conveniently ship, store, and consume foods we would have eaten anyway. It actively shapes the very foods we are able to access. Those fruits and vegetables you see year-round at the store are the varieties that are best suited to refrigerated supply chains we have constructed. There are countless varieties (many that are no doubt delicious and nutritious) that we never encounter because they are simply incompatible with the technological logics of the food system.
For instance, the Cavendish banana that we see in stores? Yeah, it’s kind of mopey from a flavor perspective, but you can’t beat its supply chain! If you’ve even been to an apple orchard, you’ll see all sorts of amazing varieties that you never knew existed. But can you store them for 12 months in cold storage so that they’re available any time of the year? No? Well, you’ll never see them at the supermarket. And then there’s orange juice - you probably won’t ever look at it the same way again (among other things, did you know that OJ futures have been traded as commodities?). And in case you need just one more mind grenade, think about how refrigeration has warped the meaning of “fresh” in the context of food (is it really “fresh” if it was picked a year ago?).
None of this, of course, comes cheap. Refrigeration requires vast amounts of energy, and as the developing world continues to build out their “cold chains,” the energy expenditures on cooling are only going to get larger. The implications for the climate are profound.
Twilley, of course, is not the first to write about the immense importance of cooling technologies. To give but a few examples of other books I’ve read that address these topics: Steven Johnson’s How We Got to Now dedicates one of its six chapters to refrigeration, refrigeration features prominently in The Secret Life of Groceries, and there are also more academic histories like Refrigeration Nation. So, in this crowded field of books-about-refrigeration, what does Frostbite bring to the table?
First, Twilley brings her journalistic craft to this book to tell some really compelling narratives. She will bring you to all sorts of fascinating nooks and crannies of the global cold chain, opening the book with a harrowing description of what it’s like to work in a freezer warehouse (complete with specialty clothing). The book is deeply researched and full of conversations with experts and academics as well as people deeply embedded in the industries she examines.
Especially valuable is that Twilley’s point of entry into this technological system is her interest in food. Because of that focus, she is sensitive to the social and cultural ramifications and transformations brought about by refrigeration. Food, after all, is part and parcel of culture. And while she doesn’t necessarily set out on a project of technology criticism, she does adopt a critical (one might even say technoskeptical) stance throughout the book - a stance that I think will resonate with our Civics of Technology community. Frostbite is informative and engrossing, and it will also make you take a step back and think differently about the world you encounter every day.
Want to hear more? Read my interview with Nicola Twilley