Speaker 1: Pushkin the late twentieth and early twenty first century. This
Speaker 1: era we've just been living through has obviously been this
Speaker 1: period of incredible technological change. But in terms of technology
Speaker 1: transforming everyday life, our era is not unprecedented, which is
Speaker 1: to say our era is precedented, I would argue, In fact,
Speaker 1: I have argued that in terms of everyday life, there
Speaker 1: was an even bigger technology driven transformation in the period
Speaker 1: one hundred years earlier, in the period of the late
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds. That period saw the
Speaker 1: coming of cars and planes, the spread of telephones and
Speaker 1: the electric grid, and the spread of refrigeration. Refrigeration allowed
Speaker 1: us to preserve and transport food like never before, and
Speaker 1: in fact wound up really completely transforming the way people
Speaker 1: eat the food we eat every day. I recently interviewed
Speaker 1: a journalist named Nikola Twilly who just wrote a book
Speaker 1: on refrigeration and how it changed us. The book is
Speaker 1: called Frostbite, and one of the things the book really
Speaker 1: made clear is how refrigeration changed daily life in this
Speaker 1: really profound way. Niki describes this transformation in microcosm via
Speaker 1: the work of this husband and wife sociologist team, The
Speaker 1: husband and wife visited a town in Indiana, first in
Speaker 1: eighteen ninety and then again in nineteen twenty five, and
Speaker 1: they talk about the different ways life has changed in
Speaker 1: this town, and Niki focuses on the way refrigeration changed
Speaker 1: the way people eat.
Speaker 2: In eighteen ninety, what they found is that the city
Speaker 2: had two diets. It had a winter and a summer diet,
Speaker 2: and then the winter diet was just really meet start carbs, pastry, potatoes,
Speaker 2: things like that, and the only sort of vegetables to
Speaker 2: enliven it were either root vegetables, turnips, cabbages, apples you
Speaker 2: could store in the root cellars, or things you had
Speaker 2: pickled or preserved from summer. But fresh fruit, green vegetables, leaves, berries,
Speaker 2: none of that.
Speaker 1: And you talk about how people would be sick essentially,
Speaker 1: like everybody in town would get sick by the end
Speaker 1: of winter.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they called it spring sickness. Today we'd call it
Speaker 2: sort of a prescore buttic syndrome.
Speaker 3: So like about to have scurvy, like about.
Speaker 2: To have scarvy, not full blown scurvy, but yeah.
Speaker 1: The mild scurvy that everybody got every winter exactly. And
Speaker 1: so then these academics, these sociologists come back in the
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties once, you know, refrigeration is clearly not ubiquitous
Speaker 1: by that point, but it's in the world. And what
Speaker 1: do they find, how do they find? The diet in
Speaker 1: this town has changed.
Speaker 2: It has changed utterly. They can buy oranges and lettuce
Speaker 2: shipped from California, and bananas shipped all the way from
Speaker 2: Central America.
Speaker 3: All but the very, very poorest.
Speaker 2: Are beginning to be able to enjoy some of the
Speaker 2: sort of what I call the supermarket in the US today,
Speaker 2: permanent global summertime. You know, you can have anything you
Speaker 2: want at any time. Spring sickness has been alleviated. No
Speaker 2: one speaks of spring sickness anymore. And it's totally a
Speaker 2: you know, the older generation remember it, the younger don't.
Speaker 1: I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is what's your problem. My
Speaker 1: guest today is Nikki Twilly. Her new book, Frostbite is
Speaker 1: full of useful insights into science and markets and technological change. Also,
Speaker 1: the book has just a bunch of good stories, including
Speaker 1: but not limited to the central role of beer in
Speaker 1: human history, the shockingly complex technology that goes into the
Speaker 1: bags of salad greens on the shelf at the grocery store,
Speaker 1: and why the technological frontier and refrigeration may mean that
Speaker 1: we don't need to keep so much stuff so cold.
Speaker 1: My conversation with Nikki started more or less at the beginning.
Speaker 2: Humans have been able to control fire since before we
Speaker 2: were even modern humans. That goes way back heat.
Speaker 1: Heat we got, heat came early all.
Speaker 2: Over it, and some people argue that's what made us human,
Speaker 2: you know, the ability to cook and then feed our
Speaker 2: big brains, et cetera.
Speaker 3: Cold much trickier.
Speaker 2: All the great minds you know, Newton, Galileo, Robert Boyle,
Speaker 2: all of the scientists that you've heard of. Leonardo da
Speaker 2: Vinci tried to figure out where on Earth cold came from.
Speaker 2: But yeah, seventeen fifty five, a Scottish doctor, almost as
Speaker 2: a party trick, figured out how to freeze water. His
Speaker 2: A pupil of his had noticed that if you put
Speaker 2: a thermometer in ether, which evaporates very quickly, and when
Speaker 2: something evaporates it pulls heat away. The energy of turning
Speaker 2: that thing that liquid into gas pulls heat away, so
Speaker 2: you get a cooling sensation. He used a bunch of
Speaker 2: different liquids to try and make this work. He used
Speaker 2: chili oil, he used brandy, he used menthol he you know,
Speaker 2: he was going for all the sort of ones that
Speaker 2: give you a tingly sensation logic. But in the end
Speaker 2: he did manage to create a setup that froze water
Speaker 2: for the first time. First it was this was the
Speaker 2: first time seventeen fifty five that humans were able to
Speaker 2: make cold on demand. And he was just like, well,
Speaker 2: this seems kind of interesting, but I don't really know
Speaker 2: what to do with it, so others should investigate. And
Speaker 2: no one did anything for one hundred years because it
Speaker 2: was like, what are we going to do with this?
Speaker 2: It's a party trick.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that part is wild, right, It's like, here's this
Speaker 1: giant breakthrough, We're ready, and then crickets.
Speaker 2: It's you know, there's I quote a line from Robert
Speaker 2: Browning in the book, humanity's reach had exceeded its grasp.
Speaker 2: We could we had figured out how to do something,
Speaker 2: but we didn't know what to do with it. You know.
Speaker 2: It just that, yes, the picture of what you could
Speaker 2: do with cold wasn't there yet, right.
Speaker 1: And and you write about that, right. You point out
Speaker 1: that in the eighteen hundreds, the first kind of industrialization
Speaker 1: of cold that emerges is not from this new technology
Speaker 1: but from a guy just selling ice, just like cutting
Speaker 1: ice out of frozen lakes and putting it on ships
Speaker 1: and sending that around the world and selling that. And
Speaker 1: it's not until like one hundred years after that Scottish
Speaker 1: doctor inventing refrigeration that this guy in Australia, James Harrison,
Speaker 1: who you write about, He's like, oh, maybe refrigeration could
Speaker 1: be you know, a business, So tell me about that
Speaker 1: piece of it. Tell me about James Harrison.
Speaker 2: So, as with many things with technology, a few different
Speaker 2: people are fiddling about with us at the same time
Speaker 2: and making prototypes, and it's to do with who actually
Speaker 2: gets it going. But James Harrison, son of a Scottish
Speaker 2: salmon farmer, went to emigrated to Australia, as many British
Speaker 2: people did at the time, worked as a printer. He
Speaker 2: was actually a journalist, wrote and printed the local newspaper
Speaker 2: near Brisbane, and he printing in Australia's summer heat. He
Speaker 2: noticed that if he wiped ether over the type, then
Speaker 2: the ink didn't smudge because of that cooling effect. Again,
Speaker 2: it would evaporate off and at the time natural ice
Speaker 2: was reaching Australia, but it was expensive, the amount that
Speaker 2: had melted by the time it had got to Australia
Speaker 2: in the distance, etc. It was expensive and it was rare.
Speaker 2: It was like, I bet I could use this either
Speaker 2: thing and build a refrigeration machine. I mean, he blew
Speaker 2: himself up several times. There was many sets of eyebrows
Speaker 2: were lost, but he ended up with a functioning machine.
Speaker 2: And he was the first one to sell a refrigeration machine,
Speaker 2: something that was capable at first, not of cooling things,
Speaker 2: but of cooling water, of making ice. This is another
Speaker 2: funny thing, like humans didn't think, oh, we could just
Speaker 2: cool a room. They thought they were only used to
Speaker 2: natural cold.
Speaker 1: Ice is cold. If we want something to be cold,
Speaker 1: let's freeze water and make it ice. Right, That's like
Speaker 1: step one exactly. And who is his who is his market?
Speaker 1: Who's he selling ice to brewers?
Speaker 2: One hundred percent brewers? You know some people credit beer
Speaker 2: with being you know why humans got into agriculture and
Speaker 2: domesticating grain and settling down forming civilization because we wanted
Speaker 2: to drink.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you mentioned that in passing in the book. That's
Speaker 1: like one sentence in the book. And I read it
Speaker 1: and I thought, is it true? I mean, nobody knows
Speaker 1: if it's true, but like, how plausible is that theory?
Speaker 3: It's a pretty plausible theory.
Speaker 2: Like this is a theory that is subscribed to by
Speaker 2: many archaeologists and reasonably backed up by residue in pots.
Speaker 2: People were definitely making alcohol almost the first thing they
Speaker 2: did with their grains.
Speaker 1: What is the Homer Simpson line? Beer the cause of
Speaker 1: and solution to all of our problems? Pretty much but
Speaker 1: perhaps historically true, right if you think of the rise
Speaker 1: of agriculture, as you know, the creation of many many
Speaker 1: problems and then the solution to many many problems exactly.
Speaker 3: And ditto refrigeration.
Speaker 1: So yeah, so why are brewers the first market for
Speaker 1: artificial refrigeration?
Speaker 2: So you can make beer without refrigeration, it's just and
Speaker 2: if you can drink it warm. I grew up in
Speaker 2: England and people do still it's not my taste, but you.
Speaker 1: Know, technology, one hundred years of technology notwithstanding.
Speaker 2: Notwithstanding it, did you know why? It's actually a flavor thing.
Speaker 2: Things taste more bitter when they're warmer, and if you
Speaker 2: are looking for that taste in your beer, as British
Speaker 2: people are, like oh, I'll have a pint of bitter.
Speaker 2: They say, well, then warmer is better. But the point
Speaker 2: is that lager was having a boom in popularity, in
Speaker 2: particular because Germans were emigrating everywhere and bringing with them
Speaker 2: their love for lagger and lagger yeast doesn't really function
Speaker 2: particularly well above fifty degrees and so in the Laggering
Speaker 2: caves in Saint Louis and Brooklyn it was getting too
Speaker 2: hot in summer to make beer. And I mean summer
Speaker 2: is when beer tastes best. So this was a crisis.
Speaker 2: And the brewers were huge consumers of natural ice. But
Speaker 2: then you know, there would be natural ice famines. If
Speaker 2: there was a warm winter, there wouldn't be enough natural
Speaker 2: ice to go around. The price would go up, and
Speaker 2: also increasingly as cities got bigger, and in an era
Speaker 2: before you know sanitation, the natural ice was getting polluted
Speaker 2: and really dirty.
Speaker 3: So yes, it.
Speaker 1: Seeing of ice in a cave in a basement in
Speaker 1: Brooklyn in eighteen seventy like that is nasty.
Speaker 2: There was a certain in the summer, certain funkiness, certain funkiness,
Speaker 2: let's put it that way. So they were the early
Speaker 2: adopters of this, this refrigeration technology. The first refrigerating machines
Speaker 2: ever sold were both to breweries, one in London, one
Speaker 2: in Australia, and they are the ones who also pioneered
Speaker 2: the whole idea of like, wait, we don't have to
Speaker 2: make ice, we could just cool the cellar. And that
Speaker 2: was actually a brewer in Brooklyn figured that out.
Speaker 1: Sort of cutting out the middleman. Right, there's this moment
Speaker 1: which is kind of beautiful in a like history of
Speaker 1: technology way, where they're like, we want the room to
Speaker 1: be cool. We know ice is cold. We've got this machine,
Speaker 1: and it just takes what years? How long does it
Speaker 1: take before anybody figures out that you don't actually need
Speaker 1: to melt water into ice put the ice in the room,
Speaker 1: you can just cool the room.
Speaker 3: About five years?
Speaker 1: Wow? Yeah, like a generation. Yeah, the technology is right there.
Speaker 1: It's just like an insight problem exactly.
Speaker 2: They did just I mean, if you're used to thinking
Speaker 2: of cold as a property of ice, yea, then seeing
Speaker 2: it as not is sort.
Speaker 1: Of a leap. Yeah. No one in history has ever
Speaker 1: used a machine to cool air exactly until somebody.
Speaker 2: Yeah, until until you know, this brewer in Brooklyn came
Speaker 2: along and did that. And it was a huge improvement.
Speaker 2: You can imagine like ice melts, it's funky, it's disgusting.
Speaker 2: Now you have this clean, dry refrigeration machine just cooling
Speaker 2: the room. The only problem was these were all prototypes.
Speaker 2: They're massive, they use very explosive chemicals, and they're steam powered,
Speaker 2: so they're constantly blowing up. They're unensurable, they're unreliable. Every
Speaker 2: single one is unique because they're all prototypes. So it
Speaker 2: just took Whenever I sort of look back at this history,
Speaker 2: I have to remind myself it took a long time
Speaker 2: because there was a lot to figure out. It was
Speaker 2: a French monk who eventually figured, oh, if we put
Speaker 2: the compressor, the thing that sort of compresses the refrigerant
Speaker 2: so that it can evaporate again, if we put that
Speaker 2: in an enclosed container, that's going to work much better
Speaker 2: because then it won't you know, keep breaking down. And
Speaker 2: he did that because he wanted, you know, to chill
Speaker 2: the communion wine in the south of front, so you're adjacent.
Speaker 2: It's all alcohol in the end.
Speaker 1: And by the way that you know, that insight that
Speaker 1: the monk had of using a hermetically sealed compressor, like
Speaker 1: that's basically the way referreerators work today, right, Like, that's
Speaker 1: the basic idea.
Speaker 2: Still, everything about the early refrigerator is basically the same
Speaker 2: as the refrigerator we use today, except we're using electricity
Speaker 2: rather than steam, and the chemicals we use are you know,
Speaker 2: we're not using ether anymore. We're using various things with
Speaker 2: extremely long names, but otherwise the principle, the mechanics identical.
Speaker 1: So you're right about the way people take this technology
Speaker 1: and extend it so that you can keep trucks cold
Speaker 1: and you can keep ships cold. Right, and then we
Speaker 1: get this world, this thing that becomes called the cold chain,
Speaker 1: which is a world where we can keep food cold
Speaker 1: from the moment you know, a vegetable is picked or
Speaker 1: an animal is slaughtered, basically until the time I pull
Speaker 1: it out of my fridge or my freezer to cook it.
Speaker 1: And once we have this cold chain, people start to
Speaker 1: kind of rethink food in a bigger way. And there's
Speaker 1: a few pieces of that of that kind of rethinking
Speaker 1: that I want to talk about from the book. So
Speaker 1: tell me about this thing called the low temperature research station.
Speaker 2: No one had any clue what temperature things should be
Speaker 2: at to last the longest, but not freeze and not
Speaker 2: you know, or not turned brown or whatever. No one
Speaker 2: had any clue like what should be stored with what
Speaker 2: and for how long. All of that had to be
Speaker 2: figured out, and so the Low Temperature Research Station was
Speaker 2: really the first attempt to do that. It was set
Speaker 2: up by the British government post World War One. Britain
Speaker 2: is a very small little island filled with a lot
Speaker 2: of people, and even back then it imported most of
Speaker 2: its food and as German you boats were sinking ships
Speaker 2: bringing food from the colonies. The British government were like, huh,
Speaker 2: we should figure out how to keep a supply on hand,
Speaker 2: sort of a reserve. This is a matter of national security.
Speaker 2: We can't just do a just in time system, you know.
Speaker 2: And so they set up this Low Temperature Research Station
Speaker 2: where a bunch of scientists tackled everything. I mean, they
Speaker 2: looked into meat. In the book, I spend most of
Speaker 2: my time looking at how they studied apples. Apples were
Speaker 2: a huge fruit at the time. This is before the
Speaker 2: rise of the banana, so to speak, and the apple
Speaker 2: was kind of it and apples would come from the
Speaker 2: colonies and need to be stored, and there was you know,
Speaker 2: a whole set of research going on into how do
Speaker 2: you store apples, And it's not just a matter of temperature,
Speaker 2: as it turns out, it's also a matter of what
Speaker 2: the apple is breathing. And this was the thing I
Speaker 2: didn't really realize until I wrote this book. But when
Speaker 2: you harvest produce, it's still alive, it's still metabolizing, it's
Speaker 2: still breathing, and like us, it has a certain number
Speaker 2: of breaths left until it dies.
Speaker 1: When you say breathing, it's taking in what it's not
Speaker 1: is it oxygen? It's so, it's not the usual.
Speaker 3: It's not it's not so distance No, huh.
Speaker 1: So what what is it taking in? And what is
Speaker 1: it putting out?
Speaker 2: It's taking an oxygen and putting out carbon dioxide, just
Speaker 2: like us.
Speaker 3: Just like us.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just they're just like us, and just like us,
Speaker 2: they have a certain number of breaths before they die.
Speaker 2: We know this about ourselves so that we don't tend
Speaker 2: to think about.
Speaker 1: It very much a lot, to be honest. But whatever.
Speaker 1: So what do they figure out about apples at the
Speaker 1: at the Low Temperature Research Station.
Speaker 2: Well, they figure out that you can make an apple
Speaker 2: breathe much more slowly if you reduce the oxygen levels.
Speaker 2: And they figure this out by putting apples in a
Speaker 2: in a vasoline lined coffin, they call it sitting them
Speaker 2: in there. You suck out the oxygen, and there's this,
Speaker 2: there's this sort of it's a finely tuned thing. You
Speaker 2: can't remove all the oxygen because then the apples will
Speaker 2: just ferment, and that is then it's all over your cider. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so you need to get it low enough so that
Speaker 2: they're still breathing, just breathing as slowly as possible. And
Speaker 2: that actually varies by apple species. So you might be
Speaker 2: able to take a Pink Lady down to you know,
Speaker 2: zero point five percent oxygen, but a Red Delicious only
Speaker 2: down to two percent. But the point is you're sort
Speaker 2: of putting the apple into almost suspended animation. It's just
Speaker 2: breathing as slowly as possible, and it's it's sort of
Speaker 2: like if you play the podcast on like half speed,
Speaker 2: it takes twice as long, while the apple that is
Speaker 2: breathing at you know, half speed, lives twice as long.
Speaker 2: And so they figured this out, put it into commercial practice,
Speaker 2: and this is how apples are stored today. This is
Speaker 2: why you can go to the store right now, which
Speaker 2: is before the apple season starts, and by a Washington
Speaker 2: State apple and it will be juicy and fresh and
Speaker 2: also nearly a year old.
Speaker 1: And is temperature also a part of that formula to
Speaker 1: sort of induce this hibernation.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, you have to bring the temperature down. And
Speaker 2: again that varies based on the species. But cold's main
Speaker 2: method of preserving things is to slow things down. We
Speaker 2: know this, like we are slower in the cold. Bacteria
Speaker 2: and fungi are slower in the cold. Apples are slower
Speaker 2: in the cold. You're just adding the atmospheric effect to
Speaker 2: it as a sort of additive, so it slowed down
Speaker 2: even more.
Speaker 1: Still to come on the show the technological marvel that
Speaker 1: is a plastic bag full of lettuce. So apples are
Speaker 1: a good one. I mean, there's a lot of specific
Speaker 1: innovations for different foods. But another one I want to
Speaker 1: talk about is lettuce. Tell me the lettuce story.
Speaker 2: For a long time, lettuce had to be grown near
Speaker 2: where it was consumed. And then once ice you know,
Speaker 2: ice making machines came along, well that's when California got
Speaker 2: into the lettuce business and the Salinas Valley became the
Speaker 2: largest ice producing uh you know area of the world,
Speaker 2: second only to New York City, and the amount of
Speaker 2: ice they made there because they were icing down all
Speaker 2: the lettuce, and that meant the lettuce itself had to
Speaker 2: change because you know, the soft Boston bib type they
Speaker 2: don't do so well when they're ice. You need something sturdy,
Speaker 2: like oh, an iceberg, which gets its name supposedly from
Speaker 2: the fact that when these crisped lettuces were jammed into
Speaker 2: railcars and topped with the load of ice and retopped,
Speaker 2: you know, every couple hundred miles along the railway, it
Speaker 2: would look like icebergs were coming, you know, like a
Speaker 2: train car set of icebergs was coming towards you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you wrote that. Before this time, the kind of
Speaker 1: lettuce that we call iceberg was called Los Angeles right,
Speaker 1: Los Angeles lettuce and like kind of I mean, I
Speaker 1: guess people like it, but like not a real lettuce
Speaker 1: lettuce right if you want your like green vegetables, icebery
Speaker 1: lettuce is notably not that green. And I mean, as
Speaker 1: I read the book, it just takes off as lettuce
Speaker 1: because it's the lettuce that you could send across the country.
Speaker 1: In a railcar full of ice one.
Speaker 2: And that happens again and again with the refrigeration. It
Speaker 2: happens with apples too. The apples we have on our
Speaker 2: grocery store shelves are the apples you can store in
Speaker 2: controlled storage. Lots of very tasty heirloom varieties do not
Speaker 2: do well in controlled storage. They can't be kept that long,
Speaker 2: and so we don't see them on supermarket shelves. It's
Speaker 2: just a it's sort of an ecological filter where things
Speaker 2: that cannot be stored in this mass market industrial refrigerated
Speaker 2: way no longer make it onto the grocery store shelves.
Speaker 1: But people are figuring out ways to store more things
Speaker 1: in this mass market industrialized way, which is what happens
Speaker 1: with lettuce right, which is why we can get so
Speaker 1: much lettuce now. So like any in particular bagged lettuce,
Speaker 1: to my surprise, turns out to be like a wild
Speaker 1: technological breakthrough.
Speaker 2: I know, this is a thing where you just think, oh,
Speaker 2: it's convenient, whatever, it's plastic bag, that's nice, maybe they
Speaker 2: washed it, big whoop. And actually it turns out that
Speaker 2: that bag that you just kind of crumple up and
Speaker 2: throw away is this super high tech respiratory apparatus for
Speaker 2: the lettuce leaves, and it all came about surprisingly recently,
Speaker 2: and what it really is is that the bag is
Speaker 2: essentially a miniature plastic version of a big controlled atmosphere
Speaker 2: Apple warehouse. It's the same idea. The plastic is actually
Speaker 2: not just plastic. It's several layers of what is called
Speaker 2: differentially permeable membrane, which is basically just plastic with different
Speaker 2: kinds of holes in it to let different gases through
Speaker 2: at different rates that you have designed when you specified
Speaker 2: the plastic and manufactured the plastic, and you glue all
Speaker 2: that together minimum kind of seven layers, as many as
Speaker 2: twelve to get exactly the atmospheric blend you want in
Speaker 2: that bag of lettuce. So at first it was just
Speaker 2: chopped lettuce, and it was the idea was just keeping
Speaker 2: that in a controlled atmosphere. Then it was like, you know, what,
Speaker 2: people want a salad, not just one kind of lettuce,
Speaker 2: So we need to throw some arugula in there and
Speaker 2: some baby spinach. And to do that you have to
Speaker 2: calculate how fast each of those leaves are breathing, and
Speaker 2: they breathe at a different rate, so baby spinach. Because
Speaker 2: it's so young, it's breathing very very fast. En dive
Speaker 2: is like kind of sturdier, more chill breathing more slowly.
Speaker 2: You have to mix your leaves in the correct ratio
Speaker 2: to get an even kind of breathing pattern. So the
Speaker 2: spinach breathing super fast. You put enough and dive in
Speaker 2: to kind of chill things down and take the overall
Speaker 2: bags metabolism down. So it's this entirely. You think, oh,
Speaker 2: they put in too much and dive. I don't like that. No,
Speaker 2: it's all engineered to.
Speaker 1: And when they're like different. You know, you can buy
Speaker 1: a bag of baby spinach. Is the plastic bag for
Speaker 1: the baby spinach like different than the plastic bag for whatever,
Speaker 1: the pre mixed Koleslaw or whatever.
Speaker 2: Yes, one hundred percent, because they're delivering a different atmospheric ratio.
Speaker 2: I mean, this is the most high. It's using Cold
Speaker 2: War era submarine technology, which is when people started spending
Speaker 2: so long under the water that you know, people had
Speaker 2: to figure out how to deliver controlled atmospheres.
Speaker 1: It's like a submarine. It's like a submarine for greens
Speaker 1: basically exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they and the guy who invented it who's still alive.
Speaker 3: Has anyone heard of this man?
Speaker 1: No, you know J's name, We haven't even said it.
Speaker 1: Say the name.
Speaker 2: Jim Lug, James Lug. It's like this bold step forward
Speaker 2: for salad that has been completely forgotten. And I'm guilty
Speaker 2: of this as anyone else. Like you bring a bag
Speaker 2: of salad home, if it doesn't fit in your crisper drawer,
Speaker 2: you kind of open it to squish out some of
Speaker 2: the air and put it in there. Now that I
Speaker 2: know the effort that has gone into creating that little
Speaker 2: atmospheric bubble, I'm like, I'm so sorry.
Speaker 1: Sorry, Jim. What about the so that the soft play
Speaker 1: bag is what we're talking about, They also sell salid
Speaker 1: now in the like hard plastic clamshell. Is that some
Speaker 1: crazy technology that I don't even know about.
Speaker 3: No, that's been that's been.
Speaker 2: There's actually less effective, but it's been flushed with more
Speaker 2: of an inert gas to the best of my knowledge.
Speaker 2: But it's but actually not as high tech. The bags
Speaker 2: are more high tech.
Speaker 1: Huh. And do the bags work better? Do the bags
Speaker 1: preserve the greens longer than the hard shell?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Huh, not intuitive?
Speaker 3: I know now you know, so one of the things.
Speaker 1: That's interesting to me in the book is you seem
Speaker 1: ambivalent about refrigeration. You spent ten years on the book,
Speaker 1: and like, clearly you admire a lot of the people
Speaker 1: who figured things out, but you seem, yeah, you seem
Speaker 1: ambivalent about the effects of refrigeration on humanity in the world. Like,
Speaker 1: how do you weigh how do you weigh the effects
Speaker 1: of refuge?
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, so, first of all, I think the important
Speaker 2: thing is to weigh it. And here's one thing I
Speaker 2: came to realize as I worked on this book is
Speaker 2: that refrigeration is just so taken for granted as a
Speaker 2: central sort of you know.
Speaker 3: This is how we eat.
Speaker 2: It doesn't get evaluated for its costs or benefits. It
Speaker 2: just is you know, it's one of those things like
Speaker 2: air where it's like is air good or bad?
Speaker 3: You know, we need it.
Speaker 2: So I actually thought it was important to say, well,
Speaker 2: you know what, it's a very recent technology, extremely recent.
Speaker 2: Wasn't commercialized till you know, just over one hundred and
Speaker 2: fifty years ago, wasn't commonplace till a century ago.
Speaker 3: If that, like, this is a very.
Speaker 2: Recent transformation of our food system, why are we assuming
Speaker 2: that it has to be that it is, you know, inevitable.
Speaker 2: When you're starting to write a book, you go and
Speaker 2: look at see has anyone else written about this? And
Speaker 2: I went I went to the New York Public Library
Speaker 2: and I looked at the most recent book on refrigeration,
Speaker 2: and it was from the nineteen fifties, and it said, well, like,
Speaker 2: refrigeration's great, and you know, human progress continues, and no
Speaker 2: doubt the next food preservation thing will be along shortly.
Speaker 2: No one at the time thought refrigeration.
Speaker 3: Was the end, uh huh, and yet it has sort
Speaker 3: of become the end.
Speaker 1: It's interesting because I feel like mid century was that
Speaker 1: with a number of things, right, like with air travel
Speaker 1: comes to mind famously. Right if the fifty years from whatever,
Speaker 1: nineteen hundred to nineteen fifty, nineteen ten to nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: were like this incredible thing, and then we basically got
Speaker 1: the same thing now that we had then.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a little better, but you know, like moderate iterations,
Speaker 2: but the same thing. And the reason, h I think
Speaker 2: it's important to look at. I mean, there are a
Speaker 2: few different reasons. One is the super pressing one, which
Speaker 2: is refrigeration actually turns out to have a huge climate
Speaker 2: change impact. The refrigerants themselves are super greenhouse gases. A
Speaker 2: lot of the time the power to make things cold,
Speaker 2: you know, the energy required to make things cold is
Speaker 2: a huge burden. And if the rest of the world
Speaker 2: refrigerates like America does, which it doesn't right now. You know,
Speaker 2: the US is sort of Europe as well, but unique
Speaker 2: in having a cold chain of the scale we have.
Speaker 1: It's sort of a microcosm of the broader like, oh,
Speaker 1: there is a developing world. Reasonably everybody wants to have
Speaker 1: the same standard of living we do. But if that happens,
Speaker 1: we're screwed in terms of climate change, among.
Speaker 3: Other things, completely screwed in.
Speaker 1: The absence of other innovations, at least exactly.
Speaker 2: And whereas people sort of seem to recognize that with like, oh, hey,
Speaker 2: if everyone has a car in Africa, we're screwed, they
Speaker 2: aren't talking about it when it comes to well, if
Speaker 2: the entire food system is refrigerating.
Speaker 1: World, if the cold chain that we have in the
Speaker 1: developed world becomes global.
Speaker 3: Yeah exactly.
Speaker 1: Okay, Well let's do this way. You wrote a book,
Speaker 1: you spent ten years. What has happened has happened? On balance,
Speaker 1: you think we're better off or worse off for refrigeration.
Speaker 2: I think better off as long as we figure out
Speaker 2: what to do about the climate change aspect of it.
Speaker 1: So let's let's talk about what comes next. Yeah, what
Speaker 1: people are trying to figure out. It is an excellent
Speaker 1: point that seventy years ago, everybody's like, surely the next
Speaker 1: cold making, surely the next refrigeration breakthrough is imminent, and
Speaker 1: nothing right, So what are people working on? What is
Speaker 1: the frontier of refrigeration.
Speaker 2: It's very underfunded. And that's also before you think about
Speaker 2: you know, there's cooling things more sustainably, or there's preserving food. Differently,
Speaker 2: when refrigeration was first, you know, introduced, people were thinking
Speaker 2: that the big preservation breakthrough that people needed to feed
Speaker 2: cities was not going to be cold cold was you know,
Speaker 2: this fleeting natural ephemeral ice thing. There was no way
Speaker 2: it would work at scale, so they were looking into
Speaker 2: all sorts of you know, fumigation, coatings, shredding things and
Speaker 2: drying them. You get the invention of the bullion cube
Speaker 2: as a way to say, oh, how do we kind
Speaker 2: of extract the nutritional value of meat and at least
Speaker 2: preserve that. So it's at the time people were aware
Speaker 2: that you know, preservation could take many forms, and I
Speaker 2: think that's one of the things I look at in
Speaker 2: the book is like, what if the future of you know,
Speaker 2: some things have to be cold. Ice cream has to
Speaker 2: be cold, beer has to be cold in my book,
Speaker 2: but you know, an apple doesn't actually have to be cold,
Speaker 2: it just has to be preserved.
Speaker 1: Most of refrigeration is not keeping things cold so that
Speaker 1: we can eat them cold. It's so that they don't
Speaker 1: spoil exactly.
Speaker 2: So if there are other ways for them not to spoil, well,
Speaker 2: then you could have a vastly slimmed down cold chain.
Speaker 2: Or listen, we've built our system in the US, it
Speaker 2: is what it is. You could say, well, hey, in
Speaker 2: countries that haven't built their cold chain yet, maybe they
Speaker 2: could build this leaner, meaner model in the same way
Speaker 2: that you know, they didn't get checkbooks, they went straight
Speaker 2: to digital banking on their phones, and they didn't get landlines,
Speaker 2: they went straight to cell phones, et cetera. So could
Speaker 2: we find better preservation solutions if what we're trying to
Speaker 2: do is keep food fresh that don't require cold chain
Speaker 2: where possible.
Speaker 1: What are people working on in terms of preserving food
Speaker 1: without cold so.
Speaker 2: Some people are working on high pressure process. So if
Speaker 2: you can just apply enough pressure, you can sort of
Speaker 2: squeeze out the bacteria and fungi. This works with meat
Speaker 2: apparently quite well. It's expensive right now. It's very much
Speaker 2: at the experimental stage. This is not something that is
Speaker 2: done like commercially right now. Where is the one that
Speaker 2: I went to see is done commercially right now, which
Speaker 2: is a coating. And so it's funny, it's like what
Speaker 2: goes around comes around. All of these you know, pressure, coating, fumigation, like,
Speaker 2: all of these things were things that were thought of
Speaker 2: in the seventeen fifties and now are being tried again,
Speaker 2: and coatings is one of them.
Speaker 3: Really, the trick.
Speaker 2: With this one coating company appeal is they're taking the
Speaker 2: same logic of the apple warehouse and the salad bag.
Speaker 2: They're just putting it on to the produce item as
Speaker 2: a nanoscale coating that is made out of food particles.
Speaker 2: It is exactly the semi permeable membrane. But your salad
Speaker 2: bag is it's just not plastic. It's just sprayed directly
Speaker 2: onto your cucumber and it's controlling the cucumbers breathing that way.
Speaker 1: I mean it seems cool, but as you describe it,
Speaker 1: it sounds like a thing one does not want to eat.
Speaker 2: That's where you're wrong. Licked, I licked the produce with
Speaker 2: this on. I'm here to tell the tale.
Speaker 1: So, like, what is actually going on? What are they doing?
Speaker 2: It's a different formulation for each fruit and vegetable because
Speaker 2: you're trying to create a different modified atmosphere.
Speaker 3: And you.
Speaker 2: Create this formulation, there's a lot of trial and era
Speaker 2: you spray it on. It's nanoscale. Part of how it
Speaker 2: works is people think of it as like wax or
Speaker 2: something like it's a thick layer that's blocking things. No,
Speaker 2: it came out of research into solar panels that was
Speaker 2: all about how if they dry at different rates, they
Speaker 2: like assemble slightly different at the nanoscale, have different You know,
Speaker 2: a solar panel can be like twice as efficient if
Speaker 2: you'll let it dry two times more slowly. So this
Speaker 2: is a similar It's out of this same thin film
Speaker 2: polymer physics, and you just have to spread it on
Speaker 2: and dry it a certain way. It assembles with these properties.
Speaker 2: It's nanoscale, so like undetectable made out of food waste
Speaker 2: and what it's doing. Is this exact same thing that
Speaker 2: the salad bag is doing, which is slowing down how
Speaker 2: fast that piece of produce breaths so that it takes
Speaker 2: its allotted number of breaths over a longer time. And
Speaker 2: it's kind of astonishing. I like, I, you know, I
Speaker 2: was went in as a skeptical journalist and then I
Speaker 2: saw the bell peppers that had been sitting out for
Speaker 2: eight weeks at room temperature, and I feel, we all
Speaker 2: know that after eight weeks at room temperature, a bell
Speaker 2: pepper is not in great shape. It's you know, it's
Speaker 2: no longer something you want to eat. These bell peppers
Speaker 2: with the you know, the nanoscale coating, they weren't crude
Speaker 2: to tabared ready, but they were definitely stir fry, were
Speaker 2: they They were. They were a little sad looking, but
Speaker 2: they hadn't gone And eight weeks, yeah.
Speaker 1: Two months a long time for a bell pepper to
Speaker 1: sit on the counter.
Speaker 3: No killing.
Speaker 1: So are they are they in out in the world now? Like,
Speaker 1: are there fruits that you can buy that have this
Speaker 1: coating on them?
Speaker 3: There are?
Speaker 2: In fact, Walmart just announced that it's ditching plastic on
Speaker 2: its English cucumbers in favor of appeal.
Speaker 1: This coating Okay, yeah, the English cucumber they sell that,
Speaker 1: that's the like the hothouse, the long the long one
Speaker 1: and far more tasty cucumber that it is like shrink wrapped, right,
Speaker 1: it has like, yeah, it's basically shrink wrapped when you
Speaker 1: buy it. And so Walmart's going to start selling it
Speaker 1: with this lipid coating instead of plastic exactly.
Speaker 3: And it works better. It like keeps the product fresher.
Speaker 2: And this is one of the fascinating things about it
Speaker 2: because over time, refrigeration has totally changed our understanding of
Speaker 2: what freshness means. It used to mean something that had
Speaker 2: been harvested or slowtered really recently and really nearby. It
Speaker 2: was something to do with time and distance. Then refrigeration
Speaker 2: changed all of that because suddenly it could have been
Speaker 2: slowtered six months ago and looked like it was slowdered yesterday.
Speaker 2: So the definition of fresh changed, and what appeal does
Speaker 2: is sort of say it could change again. It could
Speaker 2: be fresh doesn't have to mean refrigerated. It could just
Speaker 2: mean with more of the nutrients and the flavor that
Speaker 2: it had when it was on the plant. It could
Speaker 2: be a chemical definition, not a you know, not something
Speaker 2: that we at the moment. The definition of fresh is
Speaker 2: it needs to go in the fridge, right, I mean
Speaker 2: that's or it comes from the fridge. That's how people
Speaker 2: think of freshness. It could be. It could be to
Speaker 2: do with the actual youth relative of the fruit and
Speaker 2: vegetable itself, how few breaths it's taken.
Speaker 1: We'll be back in a minute with the lighting round.
Speaker 1: Let's finish with the lightning round.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 1: In the book, you cite a number of publications with
Speaker 1: amazing names, including, but not limited to, Food Engineering Magazine,
Speaker 1: Container Management Magazine, Palette Enterprise Magazine, and Food Technology Magazine.
Speaker 1: If I am going to read one trade publication, any
Speaker 1: trade publication, which one should it be?
Speaker 2: Does it have to be one that's still in print?
Speaker 2: Because the old school ice in refrigeration, which was imprint
Speaker 2: from like the eighteen eighties to the nineteen, I want
Speaker 2: to say, twenties thirties, is I could spend all day
Speaker 2: reading that. It's incredible.
Speaker 1: Tell me more, what with the John McPhee of ice
Speaker 1: in refrigeration.
Speaker 2: None of the articles assigned, all of them are delightful.
Speaker 2: They are entire articles about how cold affected Napoleon's Army,
Speaker 2: for example. It's just a much more wide ranging look
Speaker 2: at you know, cold is this sort of phenomenon.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I love.
Speaker 1: It's the magazine for people who are into cold exactly.
Speaker 3: So I'd say start there.
Speaker 1: What's your favorite thing that you can eat because of refrigeration?
Speaker 2: Oh well, I mean this is a hard call between.
Speaker 2: I mean, if it's eat ice cream obviously, although you know,
Speaker 2: if it's drink, then think of all the world of
Speaker 2: cocktails that previously didn't have ice in them and are
Speaker 2: now so so good.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's even things that like aren't cold, but
Speaker 1: like mangoes. Like I live in New York and like,
Speaker 1: theoretically in the world I could eat a mango without refrigeration.
Speaker 1: But the idea that a mango could be like a
Speaker 1: quasi stable fruit in my house is amazing and great.
Speaker 1: I think, like, yes, I know they are costs, but
Speaker 1: like I love mangoes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think.
Speaker 2: One of the sad things that's happened to me as
Speaker 2: I've researched this book and made my podcast is I've
Speaker 2: realized how much worse things taste when they are refrigerated.
Speaker 1: I mean, but it's not worse than no mango. I'm
Speaker 1: sure the best mango in the world is amazing, but
Speaker 1: I love the mangoes that I get.
Speaker 3: It depends if you've had the really good mangoes.
Speaker 1: Once you've got, then I'm glad that I haven't.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 1: What's the most surprising detail you learned working on the book?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 2: Man, I mean, just because it's the most recent thing
Speaker 2: we were talking. Came about ice cream. The non premium
Speaker 2: brands are fifty percent air, and you can't truck them
Speaker 2: across the country because they'll explode as you go over
Speaker 2: the rockies. Really, yeah, so the companies have to come
Speaker 2: up with different formulations for you know, the higher altitude
Speaker 2: parts of the country, and you can't bring you know,
Speaker 2: you can't truck your ice cream from your factory in
Speaker 2: Georgia to sell and Denver is not going to work.
Speaker 1: So basically, the as you go up in altitude, the
Speaker 1: atmospheric pressure declines and the air inside the container expands
Speaker 1: and blows the lid off.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 1: And so when you say non premium, it's like the
Speaker 1: old school, like pre Hogendaws, pre Ben and Jerry's where
Speaker 1: you get the big half gallon, not the little pint,
Speaker 1: Yes exactly. So like hogandaws and Ben and Jerry's are
Speaker 1: dense enough that you can take those over the rockies.
Speaker 2: Yeap, they are less air by you know, volume, and
Speaker 2: thus you know, yes, they still expand a little, but
Speaker 2: not enough to blow their lids off, so.
Speaker 1: They're not as much more expensive than the cheaper kind
Speaker 1: once you account for the fact that the cheaper kind
Speaker 1: has more air.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, but some people like the air, you know,
Speaker 2: it gives a different texture.
Speaker 3: Fair.
Speaker 1: What's one thing that people refrigerate that they should not
Speaker 1: refrigerate so much?
Speaker 2: I mean, for example, never put stone fruit in your refrigerator.
Speaker 2: It is the stone fruit killing zone. It literally disables
Speaker 2: the genetic machinery that makes that the fruit uses to
Speaker 2: make flavor.
Speaker 3: So just don't do it.
Speaker 2: Eat the peach or make the peach into a pie.
Speaker 2: Do not put the peach in the fridge. There's a
Speaker 2: ton onions and potatoes. Actually, I mean potatoes actually become
Speaker 2: toxic in the fridge.
Speaker 3: Never do that. A lot of people have.
Speaker 2: This idea that the fridge is just this miraculous box
Speaker 2: that keeps everything safe, and that is not the case.
Speaker 2: It's not the ideal environment for a lot of things things.
Speaker 1: What's something that people don't refrigerate that they should h.
Speaker 3: Nuts? Us, Yeah, I see as news I can use
Speaker 3: if you have.
Speaker 2: If you don't go through nuts that you're going to
Speaker 2: go through on a relatively quick basis, Like if you
Speaker 2: just grab a handful of almonds every day and you
Speaker 2: go through the bag pretty quickly. Fine, doesn't need to
Speaker 2: be in the fridge. But if you have, say some
Speaker 2: pine nuts or some Macadamian nuts that you only use
Speaker 2: in certain recipes, they will go rancid out of the
Speaker 2: fridge and they will last longer. I actually keep my
Speaker 2: Macadamius in the freezer.
Speaker 1: Nikki Twilly is the author of the book Frostbite and
Speaker 1: the host of the podcast Gastropod. Thanks for listening to
Speaker 1: the show. You can email us at problem at pushkin
Speaker 1: dot fm. We're going to take a couple weeks off
Speaker 1: for a summer break, but we'll be back soon. Today's
Speaker 1: show was edited by Lydia Jane Kott. It was produced
Speaker 1: by Gabriel Hunter Chang and engineered by Sarah Bruguer. I'm
Speaker 1: Jacob Goldstein.