This distributed winter: What Nicola Twilley told us about the cold chain

A couple of weeks ago we hosted a great conversation with Nicola Twilley, the author of September's book of the month, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet and Ourselves. The chat covered everything from our changing consumption habits to the art of writing about science when you're not a scientist.

Thanks to those who came along and those who sent in questions. It was a lot of fun to talk with her and find out more about the book, and I'm happy to share some highlights with you. (Note: they’ve been lightly edited for clarity.)

The West's reliance on the cold chain and refrigerated food is massive... and pretty new. The book documents a long history of using ice and other cooling systems for food, but today's addiction to cold only really started in the last century (and even then, it's not evenly distributed worldwide.)

“That's the weird thing to me, that this is all quite recent innovation. People really had no idea how to make it work for a long time. You take it so for granted now, but these are still open problems: You can go to post-harvest labs and see them trying to create the exact best storage conditions for for a blueberry. That's amazing.”

The history of refrigeration is really a series of accidents and close calls.

“People in the 1700s, the finest minds at the time, were just like, 'cold obviously preserves food, but it's definitely not the solution to feeding cities.’ Really all of this came out of a mistake in understanding the importance of protein, because Justus von Liebig did his experiments badly; it was sloppy science. I love that aspect of it, because once you realize that things could have been different—and that they are quite contingent—then you can see how they can be different [in the future].”

One example: the remarkable banquet held in Chicago in 1911, which forms a major part of the book, where advocates of refrigeration were showing that frozen food could be just as palatable as fresh. It really had its work cut out to convince people that freezing was healthy and safe.

“I love that. To me it's so, so shocking, the idea first of all that it would be newsworthy, that to have a meal where everything's refrigerated, is shocking. Second of all, the idea that this wasn't some celebration of magical new technology that gives us control over nature... that the reason they had this cold storage banquet was because Congress was considering storage time limits on food that would have been like 48 hours, 72 hours. You couldn't have our food system if you were only allowed to keep food in refrigeration for 48 hours. So this was a panicked PR attempt to say 'everything you've heard about refrigeration is wrong, actually it's great.' We've gone such a 180 nowadays, where people think if it's been out of the fridge for two hours, people are like 'Oh my god, is it safe? Should I throw it away? I'll throw it away.'

“I actually started the book with that scene originally, because it captured so much.”

It turns out that refrigeration has been an obsession of Nicky's for a long time (and it doesn't seem like she's done with it) and the book had a long gestation period.

“It goes back a very long way, actually an embarrassingly long way—and I think, if you're my editor or my publisher, a terrifyingly long way. But yes, I started thinking about refrigeration, and that it would be an interesting thing to something, about 15 years ago. Even by the scale of late non-fiction books, that's slow.

“But at first I didn't realize it was a book. I was trying to come up with an idea to work with the Center for Land Use Interpretation... it's an organization based here in LA, a very cool, curious, small-but-mighty institution that describes the American landscape and documents it and reflects it back to us. They'll do exhibitions on American gas stations or golf courses or uranium storage sites: I thought they were really cool and I was keen to work with them, and so I came up with best ideas to impress them—and one that was hit was the idea of this refrigerated landscape. So it really started off just as documenting America's cryosphere, this distributed winter that we built.

“And then I realized that what I wanted to do was tell the stories of how it came to be, and what it was like to work inside those spaces, and how it changed food and where it was grown, and how that affected us all. I wanted to say how the banana went from being this tropical fruit that was so rare that the first banana palm at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia had an armed guard so that no one could take any of the bananas, to being the most commonly consumed fruit in the world—something that you can find even at the most benighted gas station in the land.

“That's when I realized, 'oh, there's more here.' Then I pitched an article about China's race to refrigerate to the New York Times Magazine, and profiled the world's first frozen dumpling billionaire for that. Then I realized I still didn't get to say everything I wanted to, so I started to think this might be a book.”

Even then it took a while... especially since the last few years have been very busy.

“There were very practical blocks, such as the fact that I have a full time job making a podcast [award-winning food show Gastropod, which Nicky has hosted with Cynthia Graber since 2014.] Most podcasts like our have 8-12 people working on them, our has two and a half. So it's very lean, extremely mean, and we're chronically overworked—so that doesn't leave a lot of time to write a book.

“Then there were other issues, including that my husband accidentally sold a book that we were going jointly going to author at the same time I was selling this book, so I had two books on my plate rather than one. [That book was Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine.]

“And I also write for The New Yorker, and I didn't want to let that go, so I had to occasionally file a piece there.”

Frostbite feels extremely comprehensive, but there is lots that it doesn't cover—and Nicky had to make lots of practical choices about what to include and what to leave out.

“It was an endless process of narrowing down, because the tendency is go to down every rabbit hold—if you're me anyway. But you can't write a book that people want to read like that. And it might feel like I did go down every one, but believe me there are a lot of rabbit holes that I went down that are not in the book.

“But I started at the very beginning saying, listen, I'm not going to talk about air conditioning. I'm not going to talk about cooling data centers, or about cooling flowers—my god, that's a fascinating industry, but no it's not going to be in there. I am only going to focus on food. And then it's narrowing it down to whose story do I tell? Who are my central characters for this episode. You can't expect people to remember 20 names in a chapter. And I think it kept getting harder, because the longer I do Gastropod, the more I'm like there are so many terrible non-fiction books out there, and I really didn't want to write one of them. So actually the bar kept kept getting higher and my own efforts kept falling shorter.”

You don't necessarily need to be a scientist to be a science writer. The book contains some great descriptions of how refrigeration works, but those weren't originally in the book.

“It's only in the rewrites that I actually added in the section on building a refrigerator to explain how mechanical refrigeration works. I had a whole book that didn't actually explain that! Part of it is that I actually find that stuff really difficult. I am not a scientist, I am scientifically illiterate, you could say, especially when it comes to physics. So I have to think it through quite carefully myself to even get it on the page.

“It's funny, I once asked my editor at the New Yorker why they kept having me write these really complicated science stories when I didn't understand anything—like, I was given the scoop on the first gravitational wave discovery at LIGO, and I'd never even heard of gravitational waves. So how are you going to write this story when you don't understand anything? The thesis, as my editor explained it to me, was that by the time you get it, you understand what you need to in order to tell other people.

“I think, I hope, that is my guiding principle, because I find that stuff quite boring: I want to know why it matters. Like, how a refrigerator works is an engineering marvel and full respect to the people that came up with that idea, but I am not a person who thinks that the expansion and compression of gasses is inherently interesting. What I think is interesting is all the things that it has made possible, from the invention of the hoodie to Irish independence. So those are the stories I want to write.”

Today, the dangers of the whole world adopting a Western-style cold chain are looming large.

“It's been only quite a recent realization that... if we refrigerate the same way all over the world and to the same extent [as in the West] then, as one expert put it to me, we just won't have a harvest to put in our refrigerated warehouses.

“A lot of people say that it prevents food waste, which we know is a huge climate change problem—and definitely, getting food to cities prior to refrigeration meant an enormous amount was wasted.

“You can see it today in countries that haven't built a cold chain. I travel to Rwanda in the book: this is a country that has really a non-existent cold chain and is thinking about building one. And I traveled to China, a country that sort of built one but is still very patchy and much smaller than the US one. You can see these shifts… the waste just shifts, it goes from being between the farmer and the market to being a consumer level problem.”

But the future of refrigeration could look very different if we work hard and get lucky.

“I'm the kind of person who likes to think about how changing certain aspects of the system has these ripple effects that change our world for better or worse, I hope you could read this book and say, well we could make some changes to our food system, which as everyone knows could use some improvements.

“There are some really exciting future directions for how we preserve food, for how we cool food. There's caloric cooling (and this is where you're going to be like, 'she is not a scientist, she wasn't joking') but there are materials that when you sort of apply a force—whether it be magnetic or pressure or electrochemical or whatever—and you disorder the molecules and then remove the force, they reorder themselves, and that produces cooling because it draws in heat.

“This has been a bit of a lost cause for about 30 years... but there are a couple of more recent caloric coolings, including one that applies pressure to a very common ingredient... They have a prototype installed, like the first sort of working prototype that really does this right now. So it's really interesting. Then the second thing is that I sort of get to in the book, is you don't necessarily need to cool things, right? You want your ice cream to be frozen, you want your beer to be cold. You do not need your meat and vegetables to be cold: you actually only need them to be fresh. And so if there's another way to do that, which, why not?”

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Thanks to Nicky for such a great conversation. Paying members of Curious Reading Club can see the whole video on our YouTube channel, as well as access our library of interviews with authors of each of our chosen books via our new video archive page.

Oh, and before I go, a quick reminder: October's Q&A session is with Nora Krug—the illustrator behind October's pick, On Tyranny Graphic Edition. It's coming up soon, on October 24th at 11am Eastern/8am Pacific. If you want to know more about Nora in advance, you can see more of her work here and here, or read/listen to this CBC interview with her.

We'll send out links and invitations closer to the time, but it would great to have you join us.

Onward!

Bobbie