Jacob Pleasants: Let’s start with the origins of this book. You’ve been writing and podcasting about food for a long time now, so why write a book about refrigeration? What got you onto this particular technological theme?

Nicola Twilley: We’ll have to go back a long way because that's how long I've been working on this book. Think back to the 2010s and the moment when “farm to table” was becoming very fashionable. Michael Pollan had just come out with Omnivore’s Dilemma and Eric Schlosser had Fast Food Nation and there was the White House vegetable garden with Alice Waters and so on. I loved those books. I was excited to get this visibility into how our food was produced at industrial scale. I wished I had written them myself!

As I was reading them, I started wondering about the “to” in “farm to table.” My exploration started initially with an exhibition at the Center for Land Use Interpretation. The aim of that organization is to document the American landscape as a way of making sense of it. I thought, let's document this artificial winter we’ve built for our food to live in. I did that project with them and realized that I’m not just interested in where this artificial cryosphere is. I'm interested in how it came to be and how it changed our food: where it's grown, what we eat, what it tastes like. And that's a bigger story.

In the course of my research, I realized there are places that don’t yet have a cold chain and are building one, and I thought that it would be amazing to see what happens when you build a cold chain, and what changes when you do. So, I pitched a story about China building a cold chain. I actually got support from Michael Pollan, who was running a food and farming fellowship at UC Berkeley. And I applied for that to report this story on China and what was happening there. I wrote it for The New York Times Magazine, as a profile of the world's first frozen dumpling billionaire, which was fascinating.

On that fellowship, Michael and my fellow food writers all told me that this is a book. They convinced me, and then I spent the next—well, near close to a decade to write it, because that fellowship was back in 2013.  

JP: Clearly, this really drew you in because you went deep. And I get it, I love this kind of stuff. I love looking at these infrastructural technologies. But I’m thinking about the broader swath of humanity who maybe is less excited about infrastructure. These days, lots of people are thinking about more high-tech stuff like digital media and AI. If you had to make your pitch, why should we all be pay more attention to something as mundane as refrigeration?

NT: I came to see it as the missing half of the farm to table conversation. If you care at all about how your food is grown, and a lot of people have made a very compelling case for why you should care about that, then you have to also care about how your food is moved around because it also has had an equally huge impact on what your food is, what your choices are, its costs, what it tastes like, its nutritional profile. And it has an equally huge environmental impact. So on all levels it is equally important and significant as how food is grown, yet totally invisible to most people. I think most people would say, yes, food is grown on a farm. I think most people have no idea about the cold chain, the fact that there's this vast artificial winter that we built, and how long our foods spend in it.

When this book came out, I would say to people, “Where are the apples in the store from?” Oh, they're from Washington State. Okay, so how old are they? Oh, I don't know, like a couple of weeks. I said, you know, you could sing happy birthday to this apple! If you buy an apple from Washingston State in July, it’s coming up on its first birthday. That concept is just completely alien to people. They think of their own fridge, so they think they understand how long food lasts in the fridge. And I am here to sort of say, no, the industrial cold chain is a very, very different operation, and you should understand it.

Just one small part of our food infrastructure: bins of cranberries at Maritime International in New Bedford, MA. Image by Nicola Twilley.

NT: Over the past decade or so, people have really raised the curtain on how our food is grown and why that matters. And what I wanted to do with this book is say, “Hey, it's time to think about how we preserve our food, in terms of how it affects what we eat and our food system, and its greater environmental consequences.” For all the same reasons you care about how your food was grown, you need to care about how your food was stored and shipped.

JP: One of the things I really appreciate about the way that you approached this topic in the book is that I think it's easy to tell a story of technological progress here, where in the past, we weren't able to preserve food. We had all these limitations and got foodborne illnesses and now we have all this wonderful technology and that’s that. But you don't tell that story. You recognize the innovations, of course, but you're not trying to valorize this system that we have constructed. When you first got into this project, did you go into it with that more critical stance or was that something that emerged over time?

NT: I think I realized early on the climate change issue that wasn't being addressed, and how big a contribution cooling makes to emissions and how much of a problem that is as the rest of the world builds a cold chain. So, I had this sense that if we carry on business as usual and have the rest of the world, like Sub-Saharan Africa or Southeast Asia, build a US-style coal chain, we can’t expect to hit any kind of global climate change targets.

What I hadn't thought about so much are all the other implications, both good and bad. I think it's really interesting when people ask me if I’m against refrigeration. I’m like, “No, you can pry my own fridge out of my cold dead hands!” It doesn't matter anyway, even if you get rid of a fridge, which people might do if they experiment with off-grid living, you're still connected to a global cold chain, so it really doesn't make a difference. And in many ways, that cold chain is a good thing. I just came to realize, oh, it's not just an environmental kind of accounting that we need to have here.

I think everyone can agree that our food system is not perfect and that it could be better. I think of the cold chain as a huge lever to change that, especially in places where it hasn't been built yet. What does a better version of a cold chain look like? You can't think of that if you haven't done a full accounting of its costs and benefits.

But this all came on gradually. When I came across the cold storage banquet of 1911, for example, I originally thought of it as celebrating this new technology and mastery over nature. I saw it as a sort of triumphal moment. Then as I read more about it in these old ice and refrigeration trade journals, I realized, no, this is panic PR because people were afraid of the cold chain. There’s an amazing response to the cold storage banquet in the Chicago Inter Ocean saying that the cold chain is probably going to win and that we're all going to eat refrigerated food from now on, and the only consolation is that future generations won't know to miss the taste of actually fresh food. I would come across nuggets like that and think, “So, does refrigeration change what foods taste like?” And it turns out that it does, and there are people who have done that research and you can talk to them and tease it out.

Other people have written histories of the technology that I relied upon and that are great, but they are very much about the technology. And I care about food. For the book I learned how vapor compression refrigeration works and I'm very impressed with the people who figured it out, but it sort of disappears from my head as soon as it goes in because it's not the thing that I'm truly interested in. I'm interested in how this technology of preservation changed what we eat, and where it's grown, and what we think of as fresh, but also how it’s connected to the invention of the shopping trolley and Tupperware and even Irish independence. It's all of those ripple effects. I think that’s part of why this took so long to write, because as I went down every rabbit hole I started to see these odd ripple effects and I would try to turn them into a story about what this technology has enabled and its costs as well as its benefits.

JP: Other people have written about the technologies of refrigeration and cooling more generally. As you looked at what other people had written about it, did you feel like that sensitivity to the transformations in the social and cultural spheres was missing? Was that the story that you were feeling needed to be told?

NT: This is interesting because I've been working on this for so long. When I started, all of it needed to be told. When I first thought I was going to write this book, I went to the library to see what books existed about refrigeration that weren't textbooks for HVAC technicians, and the last one had been published in the 1950s. Jonathan Rees hadn't published Refrigeration Nation yet, for instance. So I didn't come into it with a sense that there’s a world of writing about this technology, but here's an angle that hasn't been covered. I thought there wasn't a world of writing about this technology at all.

During the process, I got slightly panicked every time I saw someone else come out with a book. But I also kept realizing they were not doing the same thing. Because my interest turn out to not be about the particular technological innovations. Not that they're not fascinating. They're just not where I am. I think other people are much better at understanding thermodynamics for starters. I mean, every time I'm asked to explain that, I have a slight mental breakdown. Whereas I’m thinking about the interconnected, rippling implications of what it means that we have large fridges, that we do a weekly shop rather than a daily shop. Or what it means to rely on a technology that has a fundamental impulse to scale built into it. I mean, I hate to attribute sort of agency to a technology, but there's no getting around the fact that because of the fixed costs of refrigeration, it pushes toward scale at some point in the system.

I have always been interested in how food structures how we live. And so I went into this thinking that refrigeration changed things about food in an important way. It gives you this ability to move it across space and time. And then how in turn does that restructure our food supply? What are its restructuring effects?

JP: So, the lens you've taken here actually aligns really well with some of the fundamental things our Civics of Technology community talk about a lot, which is that the technologies in our world are not just additive, but transformative. They have wide reaching and often unexpected changes, and your book is just full of these things. As you think back on this long-term project, which of those unexpected or unanticipated changes stick out in your mind as especially important or surprising?

NT: The one I come back to is the protein panic in the early 1800s. For the first time, cities were getting too big to feed in the traditional ways, and people were just living too far away from their food sources. Historically, cities had not really been over 1 million people, and in the 1800s they were reaching 2 or 3 million and there were dairy cows being kept in basements under the Strand and pigs in Central Park and turkeys being herded along the streets to get them to market.

This was happening at the same time as advances in chemistry that were actually mistaken in their conclusions. They were isolating macronutrients for the first time, and they mistakenly concluded that protein was the only essential nutrient while also failing to note that you could get that from lentils too. The Royal Society in England was saying this issue of how to get perishable protein into cities was the key question of the era. There was a wave of patents from people trying to figure out how to preserve meat and fish—people shredding it, coating it, fumigating it, compressing it, injecting it with stuff and distilling it (this is actually where you get the ancestor of the bouillon cube). This panic around how to get meat to workers in cities was a sort of triggering event for what became a refrigerated food system, and that was really shocking to me. I hadn't known about that, and I hadn't realized the sort of frenzy of intellectual and engineering ingenuity to try to preserve meat in some way. I hadn't realized how pressing a concern it was.

I was also super surprised to discover that all of those people thought cold was going to be no use. It wasn't until the global ice trade emerged that people realized that if you could scale this, you could have a useful technology. That actually made people think, maybe there's something in this business of vapor compression. Until then, it was essentially a party trick. The solution that we have come to embrace was absolutely overlooked.

Seeing those paths come together in the 1800s was really surprising. From today's perspective, it's like, “Of course, and then we discovered refrigeration and that was great. And then we refrigerated everything.” But it did not seem inevitable coming from the other direction. I think that was my biggest surprise.

But there were millions of other moments where I was just, like, “No way!” My husband was interviewing an archaeologist in Yorkshire and I was explaining the book, and his wife, who was also an academic, said, “Well, of course, you're going to write about the North York Moors, right?” Wait, what? It turns out, the moors were grazing land. They were not those beautiful heather-covered moors that the Brontes would write about and that would be the inspiration for romantic poets. They were grazing land, and that entire industry collapsed because of refrigerated meat from the colonies. The remaining farmers who didn't emigrate (because many of them did) had to figure some other way to make money off this marginal land and so they started maintaining it as grouse-shooting land for aristocrats, hence the heather. It's a landscape that is a product of refrigeration, just as much as a CAFO [Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation] is a product of refrigeration. It’s just rarely seen that way

So people would tell me these stories and that part of it was really fun. Learning the most random ripple effect you can think of.

JP: One of the stories I really loved was about orange juice. You tell these jaw dropping technological details of what’s going on in that stuff that says “not from concentrate” on it in the store. Where does that come from? Holy cow. But then there are the economic elements of all of this where people are trading futures contracts on frozen orange juice. I would never have expected that sort of stuff. For me, I definitely will never look at orange juice the same way. Is it that way for you? Can you still enjoy a glass of orange juice or is it just over?

NT: People say knowledge is power. I see knowledge as responsibility. There are downsides to learning, in that now you should act on that knowledge! Obviously, it's important to know these things. It's good to know these things. And if you love orange juice, you can carry on loving it in the knowledge that it spends months in a giant tank. Whether these things are good or bad wasn't my interest. It was more, “What does it mean?” It means that orange juice can taste the same every single day of the year. That's incredible. You can have a brand because it has a reliable flavor, so that changes the economics of the business. And then, once it's a commodity, it can become a financial instrument.

I don't want to harsh anyone's orange juice mellow. But if I lead you to appreciate the flavor nuances of freshly squeezed juice, that’s great. The other thing is that orange juice has been so heavily marketed as a healthy thing to have at the start of your day. If you're having it because you love it, I am not here to stop you. But if you're just having it because you have this sense that this is the right way to start the day—well, it’s not necessarily. And here's why those companies have the marketing money to convince you of that. 

In pretty much every single episode of Gastropod [the podcast co-hosted by Twilley along with Cynthia Graber], this happens to us—we learn something new and we feel compelled to change our behavior as a result. But I think this is why food is so powerful. It has such a huge impact on our own health and on planetary health, in terms of climate change and biodiversity. It has such a huge impact on labor and equality and economic issues. I think it's our primary relationship with our planet, short of breathing. And I feel as though that's a very powerful relationship and we should pay as much attention to it as we can. And let’s get it right. Let's work on this relationship.

JP: You opened the book with this description of the cold warehouse and sort of the labor that the people who work in that space and just sort of what that experience is like. It's vivid. It's fascinating. I'm curious to know why you chose to open the book with that particular scene?

Entrance to a cold storage room in LA. Image by Nicola Twilley.

NT: Here I have to give credit to the incredible writer and editor Helen Thorpe, whose most recent book is Soldier Girls. She's a friend and I called her in a panic and said, will you help me with my book. She very kindly agreed to read it and at that time, the book actually started with the cold storage banquet. She said, “Listen, the cold storage banquet is great. I understand why you love it as a scene. The problem is if you start there, your book seems like a history book. There’s nothing wrong with history books, but that is not exactly what your book is. It's a book that uses history to inform a discussion that is very much about the present and future. And if you don't want people to think they're going into a straight history book, you should start in the present.” And she was the one who suggested starting in the cold storage warehouse, which I had a couple chapters later.

And she was right. I did it. It was painful to make the change, but it conveyed why I was originally so excited about this chance to peek behind the scenes into a part of the food system you haven't seen, you never see. A dedicated food person might visit the farm where their chicken was raised, but they don't go see the cold storage warehouse where it was stored. This is the truly behind the scenes, the truly invisible part of our food system, and I'm going to take you inside it. And this is happening right now. How do you think the food on the supermarket shelf gets there? This is how and you didn't know.

JP: One thing that struck me about the scene is the hidden labor. We all know that there are farm workers and I think there is a sense that the working conditions of farm labor is quite poor. We all live with that. But you've revealed a whole other layer of our food system where labor is involved and the conditions in that cold warehouse were not great.

NT: It's a tough job. It’s not like the companies are not giving people water breaks or not giving them equipment, the way you hear about for farm laborers who are not given protective equipment when they're spraying pesticides or not given enough water breaks on hot days. You hear about terrible things in farm labor. I haven’t seen that in cold storage warehouses. There's the equipment, safety training, the work plans take into account that you have these slowed reaction times and reduced ability to work in the cold. So it's not this oppressive or inhumane system, but it is still a very tough job. I wanted to make that labor visible. Throughout the book, I was interested in this idea of sort of the unsung heroes of refrigeration who are not celebrated. You know, no one goes around saying, “Wow, that Jim Lugg—he came up with an amazing salad bag.” Or even every time they see a ThermoKing refrigerated truck, they’re not thinking, “That Fred McKinley Jones, he was something.” Obviously, individual stories are fun for a book and keep people excited, but I also think by starting with the cold storage warehouse scene, in the present day, I could help people see this invisible labor that's happening all around you. It's not like, oh, gosh, children are picking my coffee or something. But I think that when we have this seeming abundance around us and we waste so much food, just thinking about what it takes to get it to you is worth it.

JP: In our high-tech culture, we tend to assume that much of what goes on is completely mechanized as opposed to assemblages of material technologies and people. A lot of human labor goes into all of this stuff every step of the way. And thinking about those people seems like an important thing to do.

NT: Exactly. For example, think about the truck drivers who move food around the country. Shane Hamilton  has looked into that world, and that's a group of people who spend their lives on another very tough job. A job that asks a lot of them and requires sacrifices and without which our food system would not function. The logistics and the warehouses are invisible to most people, and the labor is, too.

JP: In our civics of tech community, most of us are educators in one form or another. To the extent that we teach about technology in school, it's usually this story about technological innovation and progress. We don't usually teach students more complex stories about our current systems, and certainly I don't think anybody gets taught a complex story about refrigeration. Short of having students read your book (which I think they should, by the way), what are some things that you think students ought to learn about refrigeration?

NT: I don't want to tell teachers what to do. They already have enough on their plates. But I do think that I am endlessly fascinated by discovering what's actually behind what I see around me, and I think a lot of people are. So, following the story of the carton of orange juice on a grocery store shelf and what it takes to get it there—that’s the kind of thing that’s interesting to learn about. I think a problem is that our education system doesn't work in a multidisciplinary way. To tell that story, you're talking about thermodynamics, but you're also talking about economics, and you're also talking about history, colonial history. You could design a semester long class around that that went into all of those topics, yet it wouldn't be in any one discipline, so it's hard to see how it would work. I feel like multidisciplinary thinking is the only interesting kind of thinking for me. I just never encountered it in a formal education system, and I don't really know how one would do that

Our entire world is multidisciplinary. It's one of the reasons I love food as a topic because you're immediately going down the route of science, history, culture, anthropology, economics, archaeology…. You can go in all these directions. I admire the ingenuity of teachers who manage to do that. I did not have those teachers. I would love an education system that could give people those kinds of experiences. I also think there's so much room there to let curiosity be a force in learning. Ask how the orange juice gets there. Well, now you need to understand how you keep things cold so what is cold? It leads you down a path. I would not have bothered learning how vapor compression works without the need to understand how our food gets to us. That’s the way I love to discover things, and I feel that curiosity is a very effective motivator for me. I think it's just very hard to figure out how you make that work in a siloed discipline-based system.

JP: It sounds to me like your hope is that even if young people don't get it in their formal education, your hope is that they have enough curiosity towards the foods that they eat and that they encounter all the time, that they have enough curiosity to and to follow those little threads.

NT: Absolutely. I think Gastropod is a really fun way for us to do that because we end up showing that for every topic, the threads lead you in all of these different directions, and you can do that for why we have calories as a system of measurement and what’s going on with the deli meat in your sandwich. I hope that when people listen to that they get the sense that there's a story to unravel behind all of this, and you can ask questions and be curious. And that does happen. We currently have asked listeners to write in and let us know how the show affects them, because we have to write some reports for funders. And primarily, they're writing back and saying, “Yeah, it’s made me curious. I didn't know to think about this stuff, and now I do.” So, you can model it a little.

Wondering about the world is a great orientation to have toward it. That's what I hope to do with Gastropod. That's what I hope to do with this book. Modeling that here’s a way to do this and it's actually fun and enjoyable and interesting.

It's less that I want to motivate people to act on an individual level, because so much of what we need to change is at the systems level. Some people are like, “Oh, this is a call to action? What should we do? Should we unplug our fridge?” That isn’t really going to make a difference, big picture. That said, yesterday I was talking to some ThermoKing employees —they have an in-company book club, and their book was Frostbite. I was talking to them about it, and I love that there could be real change that comes out of this research. But it’s also just really fun to figure out how things work and why they are the way they are. Let's all do that.

JP: So, what's the next ten-year project?

NT: I am never ever going to take that long to write! Part of it was I didn't really know how to write a book. And part of it was that I was writing another book [Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine], and that I was making Gastropod all the while. I have a nonfiction idea that I'm beginning to look at. I'm working on a couple of New Yorker stories, and Gastropod keeps going. We're making episodes about all sorts of things this fall. Like dishwashing— fascinating science and history there!

JP: I'm excited.

NT: Someone was like, “Oh, are you going to do air conditioning next?” And I was like, “Absolutely not.” But I think whatever I will do will be something that ends up being very multi-disciplinary and requires me to learn a lot about things that I know nothing about because that's what's interesting to me.