In the corner of most kitchens is a tall box that commands little notice. Yet such casual indifference to the fridge would have been unfathomable a few hundred years ago, when the properties of that chilly carton inspired the most existential of comparisons.
Take the example of René Descartes, who in “Meditations on First Philosophy,” published in 1641, invoked a metaphor for the nature of cold to discuss the existence of God. “If it is true that cold is merely the absence of heat,” he argued, “then an idea that represents cold to me as something real and positive will not inappropriately be called false.” Or consider a headline centuries later in a Buffalo, New York newspaper: “There is no death, only cold storage.”
BOOK REVIEW — “Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves,” by Nicola Twilley (Penguin Press, 400 pages).
Death still exists, though one could be forgiven for thinking that the blast of cold that extends the shelf lives of plant matter and animal muscle might also extend our own. (Isn’t that the promise of cryonics?) And “Descartes was right — about cold, if not necessarily God,” as journalist Nicola Twilley recounts in “Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves,” where she also reproduces the declaration from Buffalo. Cold is not a property in itself but merely the absence of heat, and yet the pursuit of this absence has left little untouched at any level.
Twilley takes readers from an ice house in Maine to a bioarchaeology museum in London to the hills of Rwanda. This deeply reported, vividly rendered book lives up to its subtitle and aptly explains why the United Kingdom’s Royal Society called refrigeration the most important invention in the history of food.
She begins the story in the time before this civilization-changing innovation. Dried meat from 12,000 B.C., salted fish from ancient Sumer, cheese, the fermentation that makes possible kimchi — all these rich flavors were byproducts of the desperation to make fresh food last just a little longer. Jump forward to the 1700s, and Scottish doctor William Cullen has created the first contraption for freezing water without ice. Picture two liquid-filled glasses in a vacuum chamber; one holds alcohol and salts that evaporate quickly, cooling the air enough to freeze the water in the other glass. The next century, a cold storage warehouse dubbed the “Greatest Refrigerator on Earth” debuts at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, though that particular building may be best remembered for causing a devastating fire.
“Frostbite” skillfully sketches the history of the refrigeration revolution, introducing us to colorful characters such as the 20th-century scientist Mary Engle Pennington, whose boss had her go by “M.E.,” so that she could get a job studying the challenges of food freshness before anyone discovered she was a woman. The book is stuffed with insights both macro and micro: that being able to keep foods fresh as they traveled the world (along with a change in consumers’ tastes) turned bluefin tuna from a “worthless trash fish” to a prized sushi ingredient. That, at least according to one theory, mechanical cooling quickly let Americans “scrape back” 0.02 inches lost after heights abruptly fell right before the Civil War. (It’s not definitively known what caused this shrinking.) Twilley interviews a portfolio manager who analyzes photos of fridges to figure out “how people would behave once they had some extra money” and consults the world’s only fridge-dating expert, who swears that the contents of the shelves act as a romantic compatibility test.
Cold is not a property in itself but merely the absence of heat, and yet the pursuit of this absence has left little untouched at any level.
But many of the book’s most fascinating bits come not from the history of cold, but from explorations into how we adapt to its consequences today. In one memorable passage, a return-to-the-land enthusiast tries to make a cheeseburger from scratch, then gives up because the critical ingredients (cheese, meat, lettuce, tomatoes) are all seasonal. Without refrigeration, the components couldn’t come together at all. With refrigeration, an international symbol of gluttony is a drive to the grocery store away. But at what cost?
For all the benefits of refrigeration, taste is a major sacrifice. As far back as 1911, some were mourning that the people of the future would become so used to “the taste of cold” that we wouldn’t know what we were missing.
This has indeed come to pass, but some still want to awaken our frozen taste buds. Twilley profiles scientist Harry Klee, who is trying to adapt the tomato so that its flavor can survive the journey to the cheeseburger. Starting in the 2000s, Klee’s team carefully cataloged more than 700 chemicals present in hundreds of tomato varieties, and then asked consumers which they preferred. From this, Klee found what he thinks is the perfect recipe and has begun breeding, though the resulting tomatoes are possibly too small. The fruits are still “the tomato equivalent of Minute Maid and Tropicana orange juice: a carefully designed, scientifically standardized taste profile” — but when Klee sent seeds of his “fridge variety” tomatoes for Twilley to grow, they end up being “so juicy, tart, savory, and flavorful that they never even made it into my fridge.”
Other consequences: food waste and emissions. The fridge provides the psychological safety of food abundance. This also means that people buy more than they need and it rots. To tackle this problem (though marketing often focuses instead on protecting nutrients) engineers have come up with filter cartridges that remove ethylene produced by certain foods before it can make other foods ripen too quickly, hospital-grade filters that kill the slightest sign of spores, and LED-enabled fridges that simulate the sun so that vegetables can “sleep.”
As for zero-emission fridges, the prototypes seemingly reach the realm of science fiction — “a thermoacoustic device that uses sound waves to compress helium and cool an ice cream freezer” — and they also remain prototypes.
As far back as 1911, some were mourning that the people of the future would become so used to “the taste of cold” that we wouldn’t know what we were missing.
In short, refrigeration is not a perfect solution, and the future of preservation may not require cold at all. Produce “breathes” — cold preserves by making it breathe more slowly, but the California-based startup Apeel has created a coating that does the same thing. Farmers can combine a whitish brick (made from food waste itself) with water and then cover their produce with this nanoscale mix to keep it fresh. Though Apeel’s low-energy coating is hardly a default preservation method today, lab results suggest that the technology could equal refrigeration’s powers, making it a viable upstart.
Centuries on, our relationship to refrigeration remains in flux. Recently, The Atlantic criticized the “refrigerate after opening” instruction by pointing out that much of what we reflexively shove in there doesn’t need to be cold at all. This takeaway lines up with the work of designer Jihyun Ryou, who told Twilley that her mission is to “save food from the fridge” and who has created storage units inspired by pre-refrigeration techniques.
In a world increasingly worried about waste and emissions, perhaps the future of food preservation isn’t just coatings and alternative storage, but different ways of thinking about the place of food altogether. “If there’s one thing that the story of refrigeration should teach us,” Twilley writes, “it’s that changing how we relate to something as fundamental as food has ripple effects extending beyond anything the technology’s inventors could have possibly imagined.”
Angela Chen is a science journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and National Geographic, among other publications. She is the author of “Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex.”