Preface. This is a book review of Twilley’s 2024 book Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. It is a really great book, highly recommended.
Refrigeration plays a much larger role in our lives than people realize. Much of the cold chain is invisible, especially the gigantic chilled warehouses. Food spoils quickly if it isn’t chilled after harvest or slaughter all the way to the grocery store or restaurant.
Refrigeration, air-conditioning and heat pump (RACHP) equipment and systems are widely used throughout the economy, from small domestic equipment (refrigerators, air-conditioners) to very large commercial and industrial systems (warehouses, food processing). According to current estimates, RACHP equipment represents between 25% and 30% of the global consumption of electricity (UNEP 2018). Or less: IIR (2015) estimates the refrigeration sector consumes about 17% of the overall electricity used worldwide.
Lack of refrigeration also causes tremendous food wastage, from 9% in developed countries and about 22% in developing nations.
Refrigeration depends on mining, transportation, manufacturing, and agricultural equipment which all depend on diesel vehicles, equipment, and often diesel powered generators, which all need to be completely replaced and running on Something Else before petroleum declines to the point where it is rationed for essential needs. World peak oil production was in 2018, USA oil production is likely to peak in 2027.
Food production and storage will also decline as refrigeration shrinks from energy decline.
Below is the fraction of the book I was most interested in, a hard choice, it’s all good and there is a lot more to know.
(IIR (2015) The role of refrigeration in the global economy. International Institute of Refrigeration).
UNEP 2018 The Importance of Energy Efficiency in the Refrigeration, Air-conditioning and Heat Pump Sectors. United Nations Environmental Programme).
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, UCSC, Financial Sense, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts
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Twilley N (2024) Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. Penguin Press.
Introduction
The cold chain—as the network of warehouses, shipping containers, trucks, display cases, and domestic fridges that keep meat, milk, and more chilled on their journeys from farm to fork is technically known—has become such an essential part of our food system that it is taken for granted.
What we eat, what it tastes like, where it’s grown, and how it affects both our health and that of our planet: these things shape our daily lives as well as our continued existence as a species, and they’ve been entirely transformed by manufactured cold.
In 2012, the Royal Society—the UK’s national academy of science—declared refrigeration the most important invention in the history of food and drink. Judged in terms of its impact on a range of criteria, including productivity and health, refrigeration was deemed more significant than the knife, the oven, the plow, and even the millennia of selective breeding that gave us the livestock, fruits, and vegetables we recognize today.
You may be familiar with the full range of lettuce varietals in the bag of supermarket spring mix sitting in your crisper drawer, but I’d be willing to bet you have no idea that the bag itself is a highly engineered respiratory apparatus, designed in layers of differentially semipermeable films to slow spinach, arugula, and endive metabolism and extend their shelf lives.
It is also a much more recent development: our ancestors learned to control fire before modern humans even evolved, but our ability to command cold at will dates back little more than 150 years.
Mechanical cooling—refrigeration produced by human artifice, as opposed to the natural chill offered by weather-dependent snow and ice—wasn’t achieved until the mid-1700s, it wasn’t commercialized until the late 1800s, and it wasn’t domesticated until the 1920s.
Nearly three-quarters of everything on the average American plate is processed, packaged, shipped, stored, and/or sold under refrigeration. The United States already boasts an estimated 5.5 billion cubic feet of refrigerated space—a third polar region of sorts. Equal to what 244,444,444 domestic refrigerators (at 22.5 cubic feet on average) could hold. This is an almost unimaginably large volume: the tallest mountain on Earth, Everest, occupies only roughly two-thirds that amount of space from base to peak.
According to the most recent statistics from the Global Cold Chain Alliance, the world’s chilled and frozen warehouse space increased by nearly 20% between 2018 and 2020.
Humanity’s mastery of cold has been turned to many other fascinating uses over the past century, from data centers to medicine, air-conditioning to ice rinks
Nearly two-thirds of all fruit and vegetables produced in the world are eaten in a different country from the one in which they were grown.
Refrigeration has changed our height, our health, and our family dynamics; it has reshaped our kitchens, ports, and cities; and it has reconfigured global economics and politics. It spawned Tupperware and the TV dinner, it served as midwife to the shopping trolley and the hoodie, and it sounded the death knell for several species.
The dark side of refrigeration
There are approximately 22.7 billion broiler chickens living out their five-to-seven-week spans on Earth at any moment, compared with just half a billion house sparrows or a quarter of a billion pigeons. Those chickens are also double the size and five times the weight of their preindustrial ancestors, giving them a combined mass that exceeds that of all other birds on Earth. The team of researchers behind these calculations used them to suggest that the layer of chicken bones currently piling up in landfills around the world is, in fact, an ideal marker of the Anthropocene.
Chickens may be a signal to future geologists, but environmental scientist Vaclav Smil suggests that cows might perform that role for aliens. Meat and dairy animals so vastly outweigh all other vertebrates that “if sapient extraterrestrial visitors could get an instant census of mammalian biomass on the Earth in order to judge the importance of organisms simply by their abundance, they would conclude that life on the third solar planet is dominated by cattle.” In aggregate, livestock make up 62% of all mammals on Earth; humans, at 34%, account for most of the rest. Everything else—dogs, cats, deer, rabbits, whales, elephants, bats, and even rats—only adds up to the remaining 4%.
Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land; cattle ranching is responsible for the deforestation of an area more than double the size of California in the Amazonian rainforest alone.
Fish are notoriously hard to count, but according to the best estimates, their numbers have decreased by half over the past fifty years.
As best he could, Lugg made salad blends that combined leaves in a ratio that was pleasing to consumers but, just as important, balanced out the leaves’ individual respiration rates.
Refrigeration enabled vast amounts of food production in places where labor, land, water, or sunlight is cheap and readily available. This is a large part of the reason why American farmers are so productive and American food is so cheap. It’s also to blame for many of the catastrophic consequences of the American food system: the underpaid workers in dangerous and inhumane working conditions;
the drained aquifers under the Great Plains and California’s Central Valley; the enormous feedlots in which animals circulate pathogenic and, increasingly, antibiotic-resistant bacteria; and the huge manure lagoons that turn what was once an essential soil nutrient into both poisonous aerosolized particulate ad fuel for toxic algal blooms—to name just a few.
Cost-benefit analyses of transporting food becomes even more challenging once you take into account local collapses in water availability or biodiversity, as well as socioeconomic outcomes such as land grabbing and population displacement. Peruvian asparagus has the highest per-acre yield globally, but those bright-green spears are grown using water pumped up from one of the fastest-depleting aquifers in the world.
In 2010, China’s powerful National Development and Reform Commission made expanding the country’s refrigerated and frozen capacity one of the central priorities in its 12th Five-Year National Plan. China’s pork industry has gone from a handful of pigs on a family farm to 26-story hog hotels housing tens of thousands of animals. Pigs produce three and a half times as much shit as a human every day, so it’s perhaps not surprising that the resulting manure lagoons have already become one of the country’s largest sources of pollution, ahead of even heavy industry.
My comment: According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Sustainable Food and Agriculture (2020), humans are using five billion hectares, 38 percent of the global land surface for agriculture. About one-third is used as cropland, the remaining two-thirds for grazing livestock. Refrigeration enabled livestock and humans to replace all but 1% of wild mammals. Without refrigeration and 8+ billion humans, this biodiversity loss/extinction would not have happened to this extent. Refrigeration also led to (rain)forest destruction to grow more profitable fruit crops.
Climate Change
Mechanical cooling makes a growing and significant contribution to global warming, based on the power required to run it as well as the super-greenhouse gases that circulate within many cooling systems. With unfortunate irony, the spread of the artificial cryosphere turns out to be one of the leading culprits in the disappearance of its natural counterpart.
Cold chains present a double bind; both their absence and their presence have huge ecological costs. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that if global food waste were a country, its greenhouse gas emissions would be the third largest in the world, right behind China and the US. This figure is calculated by adding up the emissions accrued while growing the food (clearing land, applying fertilizer, methane released by rice paddies or cattle, and so on) and doesn’t even take into account the increase in greenhouse gas emissions that result when forests are cut down to make way for fields, let alone the vast quantities of water used to irrigate these doomed crops, which, globally, is estimated at nearly a quarter of all freshwater consumption.
Meanwhile, the chemicals and the fossil fuel energy used to refrigerate food already account for more than 2 percent of global emissions (more if air-conditioning is included, which will increase as population and climate change heat grow.
Refrigeration contributes to rising greenhouse gas levels in two main ways. Generating the power to run cooling equipment, whether it be electricity for warehouses or diesel fuel for trucks, already accounts for more than 8 percent of global electricity usage. (Cold-storage companies are currently the third highest industrial consumers of energy.)
The other problem is the refrigerants themselves: the chemicals that are evaporated and condensed by compressors in order to remove heat and thus produce cold. Some of that refrigerant leaks into the atmosphere as a gas—either a little (roughly 2% a year from the most up-to-date domestic refrigerators) or a lot (a third, on average, from small delivery trucks). Different refrigeration systems use different refrigerants, some of which, like ammonia, have a negligible global-warming impact. Others, like the hydrochlorofluorocarbons and hydrofluorocarbons (HCFCs and HFCs) that are popular in the developing world and that Kipp Bradford and I used to build our own fridge, are known as super-greenhouse gases because they are thousands of times more warming than CO2 and I added deplete ozone
Project Drawdown, the climate change mitigation project founded by environmentalist Paul Hawken, lists “refrigerant management” as the number one solution to global warming, in terms of potential impact. Ironically, HCFCs and HFCs were supposed to be the planet-saving replacement for their predecessors, CFCs, or chlorofluorocarbons. By the time the world’s nations came together to agree to eliminate their use in the 1987 Montreal Protocol, CFCs had created a hole in the ozone layer that is still decades away from healing. With CFCs banned, refrigerator manufacturers turned to their chemical cousins, HCFCs and HFCs, which had different but equally disastrous long-term consequences.
Today’s replacement refrigerants are usually more expensive, sometimes less efficient, and, because they’re often both flammable and toxic, require advanced training to use. Some can’t be substituted directly, because they have different operating parameters that require differently designed components. Capturing and safely incinerating the retired HFCs is also expensive and complicated—California’s Air Resources Board estimates that when a household fridge reaches the end of its life, more than three-quarters of its refrigerant is lost to the atmosphere, in spite of EPA regulations.
Inside the icebox warehouses
Americold’s warehouse in Ontario, California, was just three degrees in the coolers and between 36 to 38 degrees on the dock. “It’s minus ten in the freezer. My expedition into the artificial cryosphere—the vast synthetic winter we’ve built to preserve our food—began here, with a week of shift work in the refrigerated warehouses of Southern California.
Americold is one of the largest providers of temperature-controlled warehouse space, not only in the United States but around the world. Globally, the company maintains 1.5 billion cubic feet of cold, storing everything from ground beef destined for school lunch programs to frozen lobsters on their way to upscale restaurant chains like McCormick & Schmick’s. In Ontario, most of the 100,000-square-foot warehouse is given over to Danone products: pallet after pallet of Horizon chocolate milk, Land O’Lakes creamer, Silk soy milk, and Greek yogurt.
The average frozen food warehouse is held between five and twenty degrees below zero, although specialist facilities for storage of particularly delicate foods such as tuna can go as low as minus 80; the South Pole averages minus 74 during its chilliest months; while the mean temperature at the summit of Mount Everest in winter is a comparatively balmy minus 31 degrees. A black box whose mysterious internal workings allow perishable food to conquer the constraints of both time and space.
Dozens of new recruits leave after only a couple of hours. Warehouse work is one of the most dangerous jobs in the United States, and many of those risks can be traced back to the forklift. They are surprisingly tricky to operate. Tweaking the angle of the fork so that the truck doesn’t tip over when reaching for a heavy pallet load depends on experience and intuition. Steering is done using two levers, both of which are incredibly sensitive; on one of them, the controls are also inverted, so that a left turn will take you to the right. If you crash into the racking hard enough to knock it over, you get a domino effect and the entire roof will come down.
In a frozen warehouse, the floor glitters with ice crystals, leading to slips and falls. The ammonia used in the refrigeration system is deadly.
An ammonia leak after a pipe was accidentally ruptured by an out-of-control forklift, filled the area in a deadly white cloud within three minutes. Ammonia seeks moisture, your eyeballs and your crevices.
The microbes and enzymes that would normally be spoiling the yogurt and curdling the milk become sluggish in the chilled air, but so do the humans charged with loading and unloading those dairy products. Even computers cease to function in the deep freeze, so companies like Honeywell produce a special range of barcode sensors and laptops equipped with internal heaters and screen defrosters.
At minus 20 and below, tape doesn’t stick properly, rubber becomes brittle, cardboard is stiffer—and all those minor obstacles seem more like insurmountable challenges to a cold-slowed brain.
The underdressed or overexposed individual starts to grumble, mumble, fumble, and stumble. “Cold stupid” is mountaineering slang for the way that thought processes congeal after spending too long at a low temperature. As early as 1895, the cold-storage industry’s first trade journal, Ice and Refrigeration, pointed out that “extreme cold, as is well known, exerts a benumbing influence upon the mental faculties.” In account of retreat of Napoleon and his troops from Moscow a doctor noted that, at 5 degrees, many of the soldiers forgot the names of the most ordinary things about them.
As polar explorers and mountaineers know all too well, long before amnesia sets in—let alone hypothermia or frostbite—human performance slips when the mercury drops. The energy needed for fast and focused exertion is siphoned off to help maintain body heat.
The persistent background discomfort of being cold—numb fingers and toes, runny noses, and teary eyes—is distracting. Cold also inhibits peripheral vision, reaction times, and coordination, a phenomenon researchers blame in part on slowed neural connectivity but mostly on the fact that, when the brain is focused on bodily discomfort, it can’t really concentrate on anything else. Compared side by side, employees in a refrigerated warehouse will move and think more slowly, and are more likely to punch the wrong buttons on their forklift trucks and touch screens, than their counterparts in a dry-goods facility
This effect seems to hold true throughout the natural world: speed, agility, and mental acuity are directly correlated, via metabolic rates, with body temperature. Colder almost always means slower and dumber. One recent study showed that warm-blooded marine predators such as seals and whales tend to cluster in the coolest parts of the ocean, not because they find the chill congenial but rather because, under those conditions, their piscine prey is “slow, stupid, and cold”—and thus easier to catch.
Ambrosi yelled as I gazed up into a series of narrow slot canyons whose walls were made of Stonyfield Farm, Dannon Light + Fit, COCOYO nondairy, and Oikos Greek yogurts. “Just under 7,000 pallet positions and we’re 95% full, with maybe a hundred million dollars’ worth of product in here now,” he calculated. There were thousands upon thousands of cartons, all packed into chunky cardboard cubes on wooden pallets, each cube swathed in plastic wrap and stacked on steel racking, reaching three stories up to the ceiling’s girder skeleton and receding into the distance as far as the eye could see.
Lighting uses energy and emits heat, so a perpetual blue-gray gloom prevailed inside the windowless cooler and freezer rooms. Pools of deeper blue light traveled along the icy concrete floor, projected from the LED spotlights mounted on each forklift truck, in order to forewarn others of its emergence from the canyon depths. Each time a forklift reversed, a chorus of beeps pierced the unending roar of enormous fans. Everything seemed dimmed and muffled—even the air felt dense. It also smelled funny: a distinctive, slightly metallic base note that I grew to recognize as the underlying smell of the artificial cryosphere. Everyone who works in cold storage knows it, even if they struggle to describe it.
At Americold, new hires are assigned to stocking—moving freshly delivered perishables into the cooler or freezer—and picking, or getting them out again. The racks store pallets three deep and six high, and product has to go out in the date order it came in. To make this daily game even more challenging, certain products can’t go next to each other. In the cooler, you have to make sure foods containing allergens—soy, nuts, dairy, wheat—aren’t touching; in the freezer, that’s okay. Organic products shouldn’t sit underneath conventional ones; raw foods mustn’t be stacked above cooked.
Pizza sauce and pepperoni are very pungent: a few hours spent picking Schwan’s Big Daddy’s Pepperoni and Freschetta Supreme sausage frozen pizzas made my woolen beanie and furry coat collar stink for days. Like natural fibers, bread and cheese have a tendency to absorb the odors to which they’re exposed, as does ice cream, which can’t even be stored in the same room as the pizzas.
Ice is mostly air, so you can’t stack it because it will compress.] Making sure food at the bottom of the pallet doesn’t get squashed by the weight of the food above is another requirement for successful stocking, as is ensuring that the finished cube is evenly weighted, so as not to risk tipping the forklift.
After less than half an hour in the freezer, the chill had crept in. My fingers and toes were numb; my nose wouldn’t stop running. Men with facial hair grew miniature icicles in their mustaches and beards; the one guy wearing glasses had to stop and wipe off the condensation from his breath every few minutes. Everyone gets sick in their first few months on the job, I was told; colds, coughs, and “freezer flu” are a year-round phenomenon in the cold-storage industry.
Although the idea that working in the cold would lead to catching cold makes intuitive sense, scientists have only just discovered why. Respiratory illness in the winter was blamed on people spending more time indoors together, swapping viruses. That’s a factor, but cold is also directly responsible for making us sick, thanks to a previously unknown immune mechanism: cells in our nostrils that are capable of detecting incoming microbes and releasing a swarm of tiny little antiviral bubbles to surround and neutralize them. According to the Boston-based team behind the breakthrough, at 40 degrees, nostril cells release significantly fewer and less potent defensive bubbles than they do at 75 degrees, making it easier for viruses to stage a successful infection
Researchers studying Arctic explorers, lumberjacks, miners, and refrigerated warehouse employees have consistently found that exposure to cold results in a rapid pulse rate as well as higher blood pressure, as the heart works harder to pump cold-thickened blood around cold-constricted blood vessels. Cold stress can be measured in the blood of forklift truck operators: scientists found that plasma levels of the fight-or-flight hormone noradrenaline were significantly higher after a shift in the freezer, as opposed to the same amount of time in an ambient warehouse.
Muscles contract and tendons tighten in the cold, making them more prone to strains and tears; inhaling cold air can trigger bronchial spasms, inducing asthma. There’s even evidence low temperatures wreak psychological harm by increasing feelings of loneliness, rejection, and exclusion. After 15 years in the Siberian gulag, including solitary confinement in ice, Russian writer Shalamov concluded the main means for depraving the soul is the cold.
Dozens of studies seem to show that, after repeated exposure to freezing temperatures, Quebecois postmen and Japanese pearl divers alike have trained their bodies to work better in the cold. Other researchers have argued that the fact that they shiver less and feel warmer isn’t due to some kind of physiological adaptation but rather that frequent exposure to the pain of cold has muted its warning signal in their brains, in the same way you might eventually tune out the itch of a mosquito bite.
As the days went on, I did not get used to the cold at all. In fact, the discomfort seemed cumulative: the longer I spent inside an Americold warehouse, the more I wanted to get out. The main way Americold tried to protect me against the cold’s discomfort and dangers was by equipping me with specially designed clothing. I lumbered through the warehouse clad in heavy-duty boots, padded bib overalls, a hat, gloves, and an enormous jacket, made by a company named RefrigiWear, which invented the concept of a cold storage–specific wardrobe and still dominates this category today.
Arriving at a temperature rating for a jacket is relatively simple: the chamber is refrigerated while the manikin is programmed to remain at 95 degrees, despite constantly losing heat to the cooler air all around it. Depending on the test, the manikin can also be programmed to simulate walking, with a sort of stiff-legged march. The sensors allow Deaton to see what parts of the manikin’s body are losing the most heat, which helps garment designers fix problem areas, but they also let him calculate just how much energy is needed to keep its skin surface at 95 degrees. The difference between how hard it is for Vader to stay warm nude and while wearing a RefrigiWear jacket is the insulation rating of the garment. RefrigiWear products are also worn by Iditarod dogsled racers, New Mexican molybdenum miners, and the men who built the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, but the company’s core market remains refrigerated-warehouse workers.
Each of us has our own metabolic rate, as well as varying degrees and forms of internal padding, surface area, and body hair, and even a particular ratio of slow- to fast-twitch muscle fibers, all of which add up to make an individual more or less cold tolerant.
In the cooler, food often came in one day and went out the next; in the freezer, pallets might sit for a year or even two.