Frostbite

May 1, 2024
The saga of ""domesticating cold"" and the many methods of food preservation are spryly communicated by Twilley (cohost of Gastropod, a podcast about the science and history of food). She explains how refrigeration, dubbed the ""artificial cryosphere,"" expands even as Earth's temperature rises. Ironically, mechanical cooling significantly adds to the problem of global warming. Twilley focuses on how what we eat and drink are moved from farm and slaughterhouse to plate and cup without spoilage or rot. About 70 percent of the food we consume annually journeys through a ""cold chain"" to reach us. Twilley's research takes her to a banana distributor in New York, refrigerated trucks and warehouse, an ice harvest in Maine, a Bronx facility where beef is butchered, and to China, Norway, and Rwanda. Information about the evolution and design of modern refrigerators, food waste, the control of fruit ripening, and the subterranean Global Seed Vault (""a Noah's ark for seeds"") is noteworthy. This distinctive history tells us not to take our household fridge for granted; it has profoundly affected the composition of our meals and made handy leftovers possible.

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Starred review from June 1, 2024
An oddly fascinating look at the world of refrigeration. A chef may speak knowingly about every piece of food brought from farm and garden to table, writes New Yorker contributor Twilley, but may well draw a blank on details of the supply chain in between. The "missing middle," she writes, is "a black box whose mysterious internal workings allow perishable food to conquer the constraints of both time and space." If you want elucidation on those mysterious innards, Twilley has got you covered. In an account packed with accessibly delivered technical and historical detail, she explains the long quest to discover and develop the physical bases of cooling. Much of the food we eat in the U.S. arrives courtesy of refrigeration, an infrastructure that, Twilley estimates, amounts to 5.5 billion cubic feet of cooled space, "a third polar region of sorts." We've come a long way from the ice caves of our distant ancestors--a long way even from the days of George Washington, who complained that the large haul of ice that he'd stowed away in his icehouse was completely gone by midsummer. Twilley's book is a delightful mine of meaningful trivia: One learns from her pages, for instance, why pizza and ice cream are shipped separately and why baked goods are cooled gradually (because, as a cold storage warehouse manager told her, "bread will crystallize if it's cooled too fast"). Throughout, the author's historical reach traverses seemingly effortlessly from the Roman Empire to 19th-century America, when refrigeration essentially remade the livestock economy by allowing cattle to be raised on distant ranches in the West and their meat to be shipped east--"contributing," she adds, "to the ongoing displacement of Native Americans and the near-extinction of the bison upon which they had depended." A literate treat for tech- and history-inclined foodies.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from July 15, 2024
Twilley (Until Proven Safe), cohost of the podcast, offers a revelatory deep dive into refrigeration’s past and present. She goes well beyond the obvious (“nearly three-quarters of everything on the average American plate” is at some point refrigerated) to explore every aspect of what she dubs the “artificial cryosphere”—a globe-spanning cold zone maintained by massive infrastructures and energy expenditures that, due to its greenhouse gas emissions, has paradoxically played a major role in “the disappearance of its natural counterpart”: ice. She traces refrigeration’s current global dominance back to a chance misunderstanding 200 years ago, when organic chemists’ erroneous conclusion that “protein from flesh foods was the only essential nutrient” led to widespread fears of meat famine and subsequent investment in and adoption of new methods to store meat. Among the many intriguing topics covered are refrigeration’s role in generating food waste (studies blame fridge design—the bigger the fridge, the more likely a household is to overbuy perishables and overlook them till they spoil) and the energy waste associated with the American system of egg distribution (they are industrially washed, removing their naturally bacteria-resistant layer, and thus require refrigeration; in other countries, chickens are vaccinated against salmonella to obviate the need for washing). The result is a brilliant synthesis of a complex system’s many facets, with a useful focus on sustainable solutions.