Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, there's Chuck
Speaker 2: and Jerry. Chilly Willy Rowland is here. Do you in
Speaker 2: the recording? Wearing a little red beanie. It's been all
Speaker 2: cute and this is stuff as shit. You can see
Speaker 2: Jerry in my mind's eye.
Speaker 3: Oh look, I don't see Jerry. She has a setting
Speaker 3: on her on her setup where it's like show camera
Speaker 3: only to Josh m hm and not Chuck.
Speaker 2: And she's wearing a little red beanie and looks like
Speaker 2: a mini penguin.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but she has you can't smell her. She has
Speaker 3: a button to allow me to smell her even though
Speaker 3: she's in la and you know what, it smells like miso? Yep,
Speaker 3: but she may have gotten at miso from the fridge.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, all right, I see what you're doing. Nice work, Chuck.
Speaker 2: That was a good old stuff you should know, segue
Speaker 2: and in full stuff you should know fashion. I stepped
Speaker 2: all over it, so it didn't actually work that well, No.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 2: Yes, we are talking about refrigeration, which is why you
Speaker 2: brought that up. And again, nice work. This is one
Speaker 2: of those I guess topics that has popped up myriad
Speaker 2: ways in myriad episodes, So I mean literally thirty thousand
Speaker 2: ways and thirty thousand episodes, and this is one of
Speaker 2: those stuff you should know things where we're just gonna
Speaker 2: bring it all together and finally talk about the main topic.
Speaker 3: Yeah, big thanks to Olivia for her help with this.
Speaker 3: And this was a me idea because I think after
Speaker 3: our history of dentistry, I just sort of got turned
Speaker 3: on by the idea of the history of like certain
Speaker 3: just commonplace practices and things these days. And maybe it
Speaker 3: got something out of the fridge one day and it
Speaker 3: was like, oh, man, refrigerators, you really changed the game.
Speaker 2: Did you wonder to yourself out loud or were you
Speaker 2: just thinking this?
Speaker 3: I think I did, and Emily said, what the heck
Speaker 3: are you talking about? And then of course they did.
Speaker 3: But I was kind of curious, like, I bet it's
Speaker 3: changed the game in more ways than I think. And
Speaker 3: that was sort of Libya's charge, and uh, here we
Speaker 3: go with that, because I think it did change in
Speaker 3: more ways than I thought it might have.
Speaker 2: Oh, I was gonna ask that I had a follow
Speaker 2: up question, and then you just answered it.
Speaker 3: Yes, it was satisfying. The result was for me.
Speaker 2: So the I think initially you were thinking like refrigerators,
Speaker 2: like home refrigeration. Yeah, she'd be like warehouse refrigeration, fairly
Speaker 2: recent refrigeration. But Olivia, like you said, who helped us
Speaker 2: with this one? No? No, and wag your finger. And
Speaker 2: so this stuff goes way back beyond this chalk and
Speaker 2: you said, how did you get in my kitchen? Right?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so we're going to start early, way way before
Speaker 3: mechanical refrigeration. Uh, there was still refrigeration, which just means
Speaker 3: keeping something cold. Yeah, a refrigerator is mechanical version of that.
Speaker 3: But in olden times, one might even say ancient times,
Speaker 3: people were still trying to keep things cold. Like, since
Speaker 3: we figured out that cold things lasted longer, people have
Speaker 3: been trying to keep things cold in various ways.
Speaker 2: Yeah, cold keeps the flies away, yeah exactly. Ites don't
Speaker 2: like cold. So one of the things that people have
Speaker 2: long loved to do is cool down their drinks, right,
Speaker 2: m m. It's just something you can take for granted
Speaker 2: these days. But that's one of the first uses people
Speaker 2: put cold storage or refrigeration to, which was the store
Speaker 2: ice so that they could chop it off with an
Speaker 2: ancient ice pick, probably made out of a bone or
Speaker 2: tusk or something like that, and put it in their drinks.
Speaker 2: And as we'll see, like that, that's just long been
Speaker 2: a desire of people. But whenever someone has access to
Speaker 2: ice in places you normally can't get ice, that's one
Speaker 2: of the first things they do to it. And it's
Speaker 2: also almost always a sign of wealth to start off,
Speaker 2: for sure.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I find it interesting that. And now you know,
Speaker 3: I've traveled my fair share around Europe and I was
Speaker 3: shocked early on in my twenties when a lot of
Speaker 3: the drinks came without ice. Yeah, and they said, you know,
Speaker 3: that's sort of the European way, because in Italy and
Speaker 3: ancient Greece and ancient Rome, the people that had the
Speaker 3: dough they were putting ice in those drinks. And that's
Speaker 3: because iced drinks are better.
Speaker 2: Yeah, across the board, to me, they are.
Speaker 3: I know, everyone has their own things. Some people have
Speaker 3: sensitivities teeth wise and things like that, so I get that.
Speaker 3: But I've always been a super icy drink guy. I
Speaker 3: love them cold, cold, cold.
Speaker 2: And even if you're like into cocktails, like you might
Speaker 2: not want ice in your drink. But I'll bet you
Speaker 2: used ice to chill that drink.
Speaker 3: Hey, unless you just like a straight up warm room
Speaker 3: temperature neat whiskey, which is yourative. Sure of course you
Speaker 3: need to be cool in those drinks down really well,
Speaker 3: Like a cool drink isn't great, you gotta have it cold.
Speaker 2: I remember there's one of the lamest mixology trends that
Speaker 2: somebody tried to start, and there was it was around
Speaker 2: long enough for there to be some press on it,
Speaker 2: and it just went away inevitably. It was home temperature cocktails.
Speaker 2: Ah yeah, Like, why would you do that? You might
Speaker 2: as well make sure that every single one of them
Speaker 2: has to have celery bidders in it too.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I know we're going to get people that say, like,
Speaker 3: I don't like things that cold, so even if they
Speaker 3: don't have teeth sensitivity. So again, people like what they like.
Speaker 3: But uh, I'm an ice since I was a kid.
Speaker 3: A tall glass of the iciest ice water is the
Speaker 3: most refreshing thing I can put in my mouth.
Speaker 2: Huh. I just realized I drink room temperature water. I
Speaker 2: have a glass of it right here, So I guess
Speaker 2: I can't just stand with you one hundred percent there, Chuck,
Speaker 2: I'm sorry.
Speaker 3: Well, actually, the studio is the only place where I
Speaker 3: don't drink iced water because it makes noise, So I
Speaker 3: have a a you know, out of the refrigerator coold,
Speaker 3: so it's still pretty cold.
Speaker 2: Sure, supposedly your body metabolizes room temperature water much more easily,
Speaker 2: but supposedly you also burn more calories warming water up
Speaker 2: in your body. So all right, you're gonna be torn.
Speaker 3: Well, I believe you because you said it.
Speaker 2: One other thing about ice and drinks, I think the
Speaker 2: best martinis are the ones that have you get them
Speaker 2: so cold that they have like a little shard of
Speaker 2: like arctic ice on the top.
Speaker 3: I love that. But supposedly that's not the way, but
Speaker 3: I love that.
Speaker 2: I love it too. It's so good out ooh.
Speaker 3: And are getting so sidetracked over these drinks. We're not
Speaker 3: even through like the first paragraph here. But the martini,
Speaker 3: the ultimate martini, is when they do that, and then
Speaker 3: they bring you the tiny, you know, little half pitcher
Speaker 3: sitting in a little tiny bowl of ice.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I love that too. And then also when they
Speaker 2: leave five thousand dollars in cash with you as well,
Speaker 2: for no reason other than ordering the five thousand dollars Martini.
Speaker 3: All right, So people are cooling their drinks with ice
Speaker 3: in ancient times and places around the seventh century. Of course,
Speaker 3: the Chinese are always discovering the biggest and best ways
Speaker 3: to do things. Way back in the day, they found.
Speaker 2: Out you hedged yourself right then, and I was like, oh,
Speaker 2: be careful, right.
Speaker 3: Saltpeter, which is used in making gunpowder, was found to
Speaker 3: absorb heat when dissolved in water, so they.
Speaker 2: Would not know that.
Speaker 3: Maybe one of the first artificial cooling methods was to
Speaker 3: make a little saltpeter bath and you would just sit
Speaker 3: a jar of whatever you want to keep cool in
Speaker 3: that cooler water.
Speaker 2: Pretty cool, get it. Yep, That's gonna happen many times,
Speaker 2: and I'll never do it on purpose, so I just
Speaker 2: apologize in advance.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: One of the other things that people figured out pretty
Speaker 2: quickly is that when you have a liquid evaporating, usually water,
Speaker 2: as it evaporates turns from liquid to gas. That phase
Speaker 2: change is what they call it. The eggheads call it
Speaker 2: a phase change. It requires energy, and typically it gets
Speaker 2: that energy to change phase from heat, my god, the heat,
Speaker 2: and it usually just pulls it from the surrounding air,
Speaker 2: which means that when a liquid turns into a gas,
Speaker 2: the air around it is cooler because it pulls that
Speaker 2: heat right out of the air to use it for
Speaker 2: the phase change. And if you have some way of
Speaker 2: moving that cooler water from around whatever vessel of or sorry,
Speaker 2: the cooler air from around the vessel of water that's evaporating,
Speaker 2: you have yourself a primitive air conditioning system that sometimes
Speaker 2: called it swamp cooler.
Speaker 3: I saw, Yeah, I've heard that before. This is something
Speaker 3: that has been done in India for centuries and centuries.
Speaker 3: And you know, it's not refrigerator cold, but if you're
Speaker 3: looking to keep something cool and something a little bit,
Speaker 3: and it's not a bad way to do it, for sure.
Speaker 2: No, for sure. And it has to be this is
Speaker 2: the downside. It has to be a dry, hot place. Yeah,
Speaker 2: if it's muggy out then it's not going to have
Speaker 2: much in an effect.
Speaker 3: But I also saw it a swamp ironically, Yeah, I.
Speaker 2: Thought that was weird too. I also saw one of
Speaker 2: the other really basic uses for is to dampen a
Speaker 2: towel and hang it in front of a breezy window
Speaker 2: and as that water evaporates in the towel as it
Speaker 2: dries off is what the lady people call it. The
Speaker 2: breeze pushes that cooler air into your house. And I
Speaker 2: realized that I was having trouble like envisioning this stuff
Speaker 2: for why anybody would go to the trouble And I
Speaker 2: was like, oh, yeah, before the kind of AC and
Speaker 2: refrigeration that we're used to, you had to go to
Speaker 2: all sorts of trouble. It's just so easy to take
Speaker 2: for granted these days. But before this and in other
Speaker 2: places where they don't have AC, people would hang damp
Speaker 2: towels in front of a breezy window to get cooler.
Speaker 2: That's how desperate they were to cool down.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I imagine knocking something down a few degrees makes
Speaker 3: a big difference. Yeah, you know in the pre AC days,
Speaker 3: you know, sure, bearing things in the ground is also
Speaker 3: a good way to keep things cool. You know, like
Speaker 3: three to five feet down, you're gonna find pretty consistent
Speaker 3: temperatures depending on where you are. If you're in the north,
Speaker 3: it can be forty five to fifty degrees down there,
Speaker 3: more like seventy in the south, and you know that's fahrenheit.
Speaker 3: And of course, anyone who's ever spent any time camping
Speaker 3: or hiking, knows, as I did when I was a kid.
Speaker 3: My dad would build a little like cordoned off area
Speaker 3: with stacked rocks in a very cold mountain river to
Speaker 3: put like jugs of milk and stuff like that, and
Speaker 3: when we were camping as a family.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's things called spring houses or spring boxes, depending
Speaker 2: on how big the structure is. But typically if you
Speaker 2: have a stream or a spring running through your homestead,
Speaker 2: which from what I've read recently is like like point
Speaker 2: number one that you want to make sure your homestead
Speaker 2: has as a source of fresh water, one of the
Speaker 2: cool things you could do with that is to build
Speaker 2: an enclosure around it. But first within the enclosure, what
Speaker 2: you want to build is like a kind of like
Speaker 2: a widened area for the stream to flow into, and
Speaker 2: then it kind of fills up and then it exits
Speaker 2: the other side of this widened area. So you narrow
Speaker 2: the channel of the spring or the stream line it
Speaker 2: with rocks, line this box with rocks, basically, and it
Speaker 2: stays about half full year round of this nice cool
Speaker 2: mountain spring or mountain stream water, and you just keep
Speaker 2: your butter in there and crocs and stuff. So it's
Speaker 2: just like doing it in the stream, but you're basically
Speaker 2: making it a little easier to store your things in there,
Speaker 2: and you could put more stuff in it than you
Speaker 2: would if you just threw it in the stream like
Speaker 2: a total hay seed. Like even even the mountainous of
Speaker 2: mountain people are like, you don't you didn't go to
Speaker 2: the trouble of building a spring for somebody who just
Speaker 2: throws it into the stream themselves.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so far keeping track now you have name checked eggheads,
Speaker 3: lay people, and.
Speaker 2: Hay seeds and mountain folk.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and mountain folk, that's what we do here. So
Speaker 3: in the seventeenth century in Europe they had official ice
Speaker 3: houses and they were you know, you'd bring down ice
Speaker 3: from where you could get ice, like literal just ice
Speaker 3: from the wild, like in Scandinavia, and they were using
Speaker 3: it to preserve food obviously also for like the medical
Speaker 3: community would use it for different things and also chilling
Speaker 3: those drinks. Still, but you know, you would you could
Speaker 3: use ice to treat burns and things like that, to
Speaker 3: bring down a fever, you know, making things cooler was
Speaker 3: a big benefit to a doctor.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Also remember in our feet of cold starve a
Speaker 2: fever short stuff. We talked about how there was like
Speaker 2: a doctor's viewed heat and cold as a duality of health. So, yeah,
Speaker 2: somebody was sick with one of the hot sicknesses, you
Speaker 2: would probably give them a cold drink and that was
Speaker 2: considered as good as medicine is today.
Speaker 3: Yeah, or of course any you know, sprains and you
Speaker 3: know muscle pulls, things like that. Heat and ice. It
Speaker 3: can be used in various ways. Sure, the rice method,
Speaker 3: you know. Sure.
Speaker 2: So one other thing I want to mention real quick
Speaker 2: is we're talking about people like technologies that are like
Speaker 2: thousands of years old. There was something called a yakh
Speaker 2: chawl that Persians created that to listeners may or may
Speaker 2: not sound familiar, depending on when we release the short
Speaker 2: stuff on it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it's either just out or coming out soon.
Speaker 3: It's getting its own short stuff because it was just
Speaker 3: kind of too much there.
Speaker 2: It was pretty cool, Yeah, but it was like an
Speaker 2: ancient Persian ice making machine that dates back at least
Speaker 2: to four hundred BCE, which is really impressive. But yeah,
Speaker 2: we'll get way more in depth on those in whatever
Speaker 2: short stuff we do. But the point is that people
Speaker 2: have been doing doing this for a really long time,
Speaker 2: and they figured out some really ingenious technologies that harness
Speaker 2: natural processes to cool and as we kind of progress
Speaker 2: through the technology, you'll see that we're basically doing the
Speaker 2: same thing just a little more whiz bang, much more efficiently.
Speaker 2: It delivers much cooler air or water whatever we're cooling,
Speaker 2: but it's still basically the same premise as what we
Speaker 2: were doing thousands of years ago to keep things cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally. I think it's super cool. If you want
Speaker 3: to talk about like real ice, and there's this really extensive,
Speaker 3: in depth, long New Yorker thing, which you know, most
Speaker 3: New Yorker things are about Frederick Tudor, the Ice King,
Speaker 3: who's around in the nineteenth century. And he was the
Speaker 3: guy that was like, hey, we got all this ice
Speaker 3: up in New England, like our lakes are literally frozen,
Speaker 3: and why don't we try and make some money by
Speaker 3: shipping this ice out? He had, you know, he tried
Speaker 3: to get investors and they were like, I don't know,
Speaker 3: it seems like that stuff is going to melt if
Speaker 3: you put it on a ship and try and send
Speaker 3: it to Cuba. And he said, oh, watch me, and
Speaker 3: he puts some on a ship and sent some toward
Speaker 3: Cuba and it melted and he was like, oh man,
Speaker 3: they were totally right. But he kept at it and
Speaker 3: kept at it. And you know, they used to use
Speaker 3: things like straw to help keep the ice a little
Speaker 3: more insulated, and he said, sawdust actually works a whole
Speaker 3: lot better. And he and other people got in on
Speaker 3: the game. And there was like American ice being chipped
Speaker 3: all over the world in the nineteenth century, which is
Speaker 3: and making it there, which is kind of hard to believe.
Speaker 2: Yes, And I've been racking my brain what episode we
Speaker 2: first introduced the ice King in. I cannot, for the
Speaker 2: life of me remember what it was loose, I don't know,
Speaker 2: I don't think so, I really don't remember what it was.
Speaker 2: But he popped up again later in our episode on
Speaker 2: Thorreau because one of the places where he was cutting
Speaker 2: ice from was Walden Lake, and Threau noted the ice
Speaker 2: King cutting ice in Walden Pond, Sorry, Mayners, while he
Speaker 2: was writing his book Walden. I think he appears in Walden.
Speaker 3: Two things you just named checked Mayners, that's another one.
Speaker 2: And Henry David Thureau, the original hippie.
Speaker 3: That's true. But one thing I did want to mention
Speaker 3: and that's a nice little segue. Was just to plug
Speaker 3: a little Instagram post I made recently. I was cleaning
Speaker 3: out my closet and I found a bunch of old
Speaker 3: schoolwork from elementary school, and while this part was from
Speaker 3: high school, I did a satire, an extra credit satire
Speaker 3: on Thoreau about someone who went to live deliberately in
Speaker 3: the woods, and you know, the big joke at the end.
Speaker 3: As they made it like thirty minutes or something. It
Speaker 3: wasn't the best comedy work, you know, for a ninth grader.
Speaker 3: It was okay, sure, but people should go check it
Speaker 3: out because I did a bunch of screenshots of various projects,
Speaker 3: a lot of space travel stuff and book reports. But
Speaker 3: one big one was on ancient Egypt, and I literally
Speaker 3: and the thing was like, Hi, my name is Chuck Bryant,
Speaker 3: and I'm going to be your guide through ancient Egypt.
Speaker 3: And at the end it was like, I hope you
Speaker 3: enjoyed your tour, and I'd once again signing off, I've
Speaker 3: been your guide. And people are like, oh my god,
Speaker 3: you were doing stuff you should know as a fifth grader.
Speaker 3: That's awesome, man, It's really pretty cute. But you can
Speaker 3: go to chuck the podcast or Instagram to check that
Speaker 3: stuff out. People got a real kick out of it.
Speaker 2: For sure. I'll go check it out to you.
Speaker 3: You would like it.
Speaker 2: And it's not like I avoid your Instagram. I just
Speaker 2: don't go on it. It's okay.
Speaker 3: I know that, buddy. I know you're telling everyone else that,
Speaker 3: but I know that's not your jam yet.
Speaker 2: So I talked about how the technology is really just
Speaker 2: kind of improved on ancient technology. The uses for this
Speaker 2: stuff too have really kind of been relatively the same.
Speaker 2: We haven't had a lot of stuff that we wanted
Speaker 2: ice for aside from cooling our drinks, which is really honestly,
Speaker 2: Olivia turned up a mention of the king of Takua
Speaker 2: or Tacoa, I saw different spellings in what's now Syria,
Speaker 2: and he used it to ICE's drinks almost four thousand
Speaker 2: years ago. So I mean, people have been doing that
Speaker 2: for a really long time. Another one is to store
Speaker 2: perishable food, like you said, keeps the flies away, right,
Speaker 2: And in doing these things is we've gotten better and
Speaker 2: better at it. It started to have like really monumental,
Speaker 2: massive sweeping changes on humanity, and here in America. One
Speaker 2: of the first changes it had. We will talk about
Speaker 2: right after this.
Speaker 3: Stop.
Speaker 1: Lately, I've been learning some stock about in Saua or
Speaker 1: how you many how.
Speaker 4: About the one on border like dis.
Speaker 5: Yonder worm. But it was so nice who.
Speaker 2: So chuck. I was talking about how refrigeration had massive
Speaker 2: sweeping changes as we got better at it, and in America,
Speaker 2: one of the first things it did was it allowed
Speaker 2: people to expand their diet some because unless you were
Speaker 2: in like a southern state or something like that, you
Speaker 2: did not have access to a lot of different kinds
Speaker 2: of food year round, like during the spring and summer,
Speaker 2: maybe even in the fall a little bit, you would
Speaker 2: have things like like dairy and poultry and meat. And
Speaker 2: then as win yes, and and as winter started to
Speaker 2: set in, you had pickled cabbage, pickled neighbor who died
Speaker 2: that winter, like pickled everything. Canning didn't even come around.
Speaker 2: I didn't know this until the nineteenth century. I thought
Speaker 2: it was really really old, so like you really did
Speaker 2: not So actually you didn't have pickled anything, now that
Speaker 2: I think about it. You had like salted stuff, cured stuff,
Speaker 2: and a lot of it was grains too, right, stuff
Speaker 2: you could store fairly easily. And then when we started
Speaker 2: learning how to preserve food with refrigeration and got better
Speaker 2: and better at it. Like people, their diets just changed radically.
Speaker 2: Like apparently in the Northern States, by the time spring came,
Speaker 2: you were so malnourished from a lack of niasin vitamin
Speaker 2: B three that you normally get from like poultry and
Speaker 2: fish and meat, that they had a name for it,
Speaker 2: spring sickness. Today we call it pellagra, but it's a
Speaker 2: type of like severe malnutrition that people would just annually
Speaker 2: get it because they had that limited access to different foods.
Speaker 2: And then once we started being able to store and
Speaker 2: then more importantly ship items by refrigerating it, then things
Speaker 2: really change. That spring sickness went away. And I'm also
Speaker 2: the first person in history to say the word refrigerating.
Speaker 3: Also, before people write in they were definitely pickling things
Speaker 3: before they were canning, so you could still pickle.
Speaker 2: Things, Okay, cool, So yes, you could pickle your neighbor.
Speaker 3: Then, Yeah, they had jars and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: Well, what's the pill then, I mean they just hadn't
Speaker 2: figured out how to use heat baths and that kind
Speaker 2: of thing.
Speaker 3: What for canning, Yeah, I don't know, maybe how to
Speaker 3: seal something properly would be my guess. But although I
Speaker 3: don't know, maybe, like wax ceiling, maybe canning should be
Speaker 3: an episode, all right, and we can figure that out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's figure it out.
Speaker 3: I can regale everyone with more tales of being drug
Speaker 3: to the cannery as a child.
Speaker 2: That's all right. I forgot about that.
Speaker 3: Which is actually true. It makes me sound one hundred
Speaker 3: years old, but that's actually true. So yeah, when artificial
Speaker 3: cold came on the scene, that really really really changed
Speaker 3: the game. There was a physician in chemists from the
Speaker 3: University of Glasgow in the eighteenth century seventeen forty eight
Speaker 3: named William Cullen who it looks like did the first
Speaker 3: experiment on artificial cooling and kind of demonstrating how that
Speaker 3: was possible. And he, like you said, it was just
Speaker 3: sort of a version of what they had done in
Speaker 3: ancient times with those water in the clay jars and
Speaker 3: exploiting that phase change from liquid to gas using the
Speaker 3: thermal energy. But he used instead of water diethyl diethel
Speaker 3: diethyl ether, and he would pump it out of a
Speaker 3: container and it would come to a boil and that
Speaker 3: heat would pull all the heat from the surrounding area
Speaker 3: just like it did back an old It was just
Speaker 3: sort of different, a different medium, and that would cool
Speaker 3: things down.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this chuck was one of those episodes where I
Speaker 2: went near mad trying to understand like the physics of
Speaker 2: the whole thing, or even like the mechanical engineering aspects
Speaker 2: of this stuff. And it's got to be because my
Speaker 2: dad was a mechanical engineer by profession. Yeah, so, like,
Speaker 2: I've got that little bug that I can't ignore. And
Speaker 2: I looked all over for how William Collen's thing worked,
Speaker 2: and apparently no one knows because the same like four
Speaker 2: or five sentences are basically copy and pasted everywhere on
Speaker 2: the internet.
Speaker 3: That's frustrating.
Speaker 2: So we do know that in the before even seventeen fifty,
Speaker 2: he was the first person to demonstrate artificial refrigeration. It
Speaker 2: didn't go anywhere, but he showed that this was entirely possible,
Speaker 2: and that it was pretty clever to use something like
Speaker 2: an artificial refrigerant rather than just say water, although water
Speaker 2: is an excellent refrigerator and a lot of different applications.
Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure. A guy, an American this time named
Speaker 3: Jacob Perkins, came along about fifty ish years later in
Speaker 3: eighteen thirty four, and he's credited basically for developing the
Speaker 3: first working what we would call refrigerator and his machine,
Speaker 3: and you know, again it's just not too different from
Speaker 3: how they do it today. They just do it a
Speaker 3: lot better, right, But he used a vapor compression cycle. Again,
Speaker 3: it's all about the the thermal loss of that phase change,
Speaker 3: but in this case they're just exploiting it, you know,
Speaker 3: because if you move the pressure back and forth between
Speaker 3: the two, it keeps a constant cool, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So it's just nuts. If you see like a
Speaker 2: diagram and how it's explained and how a vapor compression
Speaker 2: refrigerator works, which is almost certainly the kind of refrigerator
Speaker 2: you have in your home. There's really just like four
Speaker 2: components to it, and they're really doing some basic stuff
Speaker 2: to this. But it's more a question of like why,
Speaker 2: like why would you put something in low pressure and
Speaker 2: heat it up for the next step to be to
Speaker 2: like depressurize it and cool it down and then you
Speaker 2: print it into liquid up here. It's just it doesn't
Speaker 2: make sense. It's almost just nuts, like somebody just went
Speaker 2: crazy with a diagram. But apparently that's how it works,
Speaker 2: and it's all I think. It's like you said, it's
Speaker 2: just taking advantage of the different properties of lower pressure
Speaker 2: liquid or higher pressure gas, like they can cool and heat,
Speaker 2: and they're there. I guess it puts off so much
Speaker 2: coolness or so much heat that it can be used
Speaker 2: to refrigerate. And then it passes through this other thing,
Speaker 2: like I think a condenser, and that gives off the
Speaker 2: waste heat that's what's under your fridge, and then like
Speaker 2: the evaporator cools everything down, and then I finally got it. Chuck, Okay,
Speaker 2: So I've been looking at it wrong the whole way.
Speaker 2: The refrigerator doesn't pump cold into your fridge, right, the
Speaker 2: actual mechanical refrigerant process. What it does is it sucks
Speaker 2: heat out of your refrigerator. And once I finally understood that,
Speaker 2: I was like, I got it. Finally I got it,
Speaker 2: because this cooler refrigerant goes through a coil, and I
Speaker 2: thought like it was emitting cold and that that's how
Speaker 2: it cooled down. Now it's drawing any heat from there,
Speaker 2: kind of tricking the heat into joining the coil and
Speaker 2: leaving the fridge box cooler, which is what that refrigerant
Speaker 2: wanted all the time. It thinks that the heat was
Speaker 2: a sucker for falling for it, but that's exactly what
Speaker 2: it does every time, And now the entire refrigerator is
Speaker 2: way colder.
Speaker 3: Amazing.
Speaker 2: I think it's kind of amazing too, because it's the
Speaker 2: opposite of what I always thought was going on.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's super cool. I love that they've used various
Speaker 3: liquids over the years, ammonia's when they used for a while,
Speaker 3: methyl chloride for a while. All of these things were
Speaker 3: toxic though, so until they figured out a safer way,
Speaker 3: which you know they would soon enough, people would actually die.
Speaker 3: In the nineteen twenties, there were cases where methyl chloride
Speaker 3: leaks happened actually killed people. And then they said, you
Speaker 3: know what, maybe we should come up with a synthetic
Speaker 3: substance that does basically the same thing. So they came
Speaker 3: up with dichlorofluoromethane aka free on, and until the nineteen nineties,
Speaker 3: freeon was the go to. And then we said, hey,
Speaker 3: that's not so great either because of our environment in
Speaker 3: the ozone layer, and so let's develop even newer safer
Speaker 3: chemicals did keep things cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which hydrofluorocarbons are good for the ozone layer, but
Speaker 2: they're actually horrible as greenhouse gases. There's a rating of
Speaker 2: just how much of an effect, like a chemical has
Speaker 2: on warming the atmosphere, and they use carbon dioxide CO
Speaker 2: two as a one. That's like the baseline because we
Speaker 2: know how much it warms the atmosphere over one hundred years,
Speaker 2: so it has a global warming potential or GWP of
Speaker 2: one carbon dioxide does hydrofluor carbons have a global warming
Speaker 2: potential of fourteen thousand, eight hundred. Wow, that's a lot
Speaker 2: more than CO two if you really stop and think
Speaker 2: about it. And these are the refrigerants we're still using.
Speaker 2: These are the alternatives that we developed and started using
Speaker 2: in the nineties. So it's like we go from the
Speaker 2: frying pan into the fire. Whenever we try to do
Speaker 2: something environmental.
Speaker 3: It feels like, yeah, that's probably true to me. This
Speaker 3: is where this episode gets super interesting, And this is
Speaker 3: kind of what I was really after when it came
Speaker 3: to the assignment, which is when things started moving around.
Speaker 3: Cooling systems started getting better and better, people were developing
Speaker 3: this stuff, and at the same time, railroads were growing
Speaker 3: and growing and expanding and expanding, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 3: people in the Midwest farmers could, you know, They were like, hey,
Speaker 3: I want to be able to ship my stuff and
Speaker 3: sell it to the East coast. So the whole food
Speaker 3: scene was changing because of this. In the eighteen fifties,
Speaker 3: they started, and this to me is just like super ingenious,
Speaker 3: they started keeping railroad cars cool by using ice. So
Speaker 3: they would they were called reefers r ee f e R.
Speaker 3: A reefer was a refrigerated you know, railcar, and they
Speaker 3: had these big hatches in the roof they would load
Speaker 3: just these huge, huge blocks of ice and then fans
Speaker 3: that were driven by you know, powered by the turning
Speaker 3: of the axle on the train or on the train
Speaker 3: car rather, and that just you know, it just blew on.
Speaker 3: I'm like a breeze pasted a cool towel in your window,
Speaker 3: and all of a sudden you had refrigerated train cars.
Speaker 3: They were lined in like flax and sawdust, like we mentioned,
Speaker 3: sometimes dirt, sometimes cow hair. And even though people were
Speaker 3: a little bit at first like I don't know about this,
Speaker 3: the meat packing industry really got on board because they said,
Speaker 3: we've been shipping live cows across country for people to
Speaker 3: take care of when they get there, When we can
Speaker 3: butcher every thing in one place and ship out this
Speaker 3: what they call dead meat. It's disgusting, but that's what
Speaker 3: they called it, right.
Speaker 2: That's what sixth grade bullies call you too when they
Speaker 2: tell you to meet them in the playground at three.
Speaker 3: Did meet?
Speaker 2: But that changed, That changed absolutely everything. This is when
Speaker 2: meat became like a staple of the American diet. We
Speaker 2: talked a little bit about Chicago being the epicenter of
Speaker 2: this and that what did Americans eat before the FDA
Speaker 2: came along or something.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2: But all of a sudden, meat was much easier, much
Speaker 2: cheaper to ship, and they could ship it further and further,
Speaker 2: so they started supplying the cities with meat and people
Speaker 2: started to be able to afford it, and that just
Speaker 2: that was another huge change, not just for humans, but
Speaker 2: for cows too, because apparently the cow population in the
Speaker 2: United States more than doubled in thirty years after we
Speaker 2: figured out how to refrigerate some meat or ship refrigerated meat.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that's incredible.
Speaker 2: That cows.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a lot of dead cows. It completely changed
Speaker 3: Chicago as a city, and it completely changed the way
Speaker 3: we were eating as a nation. All of a sudden,
Speaker 3: you had refrigerated cars also shipping produce. It wasn't just
Speaker 3: about the cows and the beef, even though it was
Speaker 3: a big part of it. But all of a sudden
Speaker 3: you could be like, Hey, I'm growing this fruit in Florida.
Speaker 3: And have you Have you ever had not just an
Speaker 3: orange and your stocking for Christmas? You ever had a
Speaker 3: big bag of oranges sitting around your house, Well, we're
Speaker 3: happy to provide that for you and us fruit. I
Speaker 3: think it was one of the first companies to get
Speaker 3: involved in like sending their good stuff all over the place,
Speaker 3: and you know, as a result, obviously the prices really
Speaker 3: really dropped. That was an article in the New York
Speaker 3: Sun in eighteen ninety four that talked about the price
Speaker 3: of pears went from forty cents to two for a
Speaker 3: nickel in just a couple of decades thanks to refrigerated cars.
Speaker 2: It's even more impressive when you adjust for inflation. So
Speaker 2: a single pair was eleven dollars in the eighteen seventies,
Speaker 2: and they were two for a dollar eighty in the
Speaker 2: eighteen nineties thanks to refrigeration. Did you ever get an
Speaker 2: orange in the bottom of your Christmas stocking? Because I
Speaker 2: never understood why until I started researching this. No, you
Speaker 2: never did. Oh we always didn't. I was always like,
Speaker 2: why is there an orange in the bottom of this stocking?
Speaker 2: Making it seem like stuff in here than there actually is.
Speaker 3: I feel like I would remember that our stockings were
Speaker 3: a couple of little fun things, like a little top
Speaker 3: or some silly putty, but usually just like socks and
Speaker 3: stuff like that.
Speaker 2: Sure, I'm guessing that the reason I did and you
Speaker 2: didn't is because I was raised in the north, the Midwest.
Speaker 2: Maybe I'll bet that's why. And so it was like
Speaker 2: a Midwestern tradition because we didn't have access to oranges,
Speaker 2: and you could eat an orange year round, basically you
Speaker 2: lucky duck.
Speaker 3: Trains. Eventually, shipping wise gave way to trucks and they said, hey,
Speaker 3: now we got these trucks that we can, you know,
Speaker 3: refrigerate as well, and so we're not you know, things
Speaker 3: were built around industries, entire industries. Separate industries were built
Speaker 3: near rail yards because rail shipping was the only only game,
Speaker 3: you know, for a long time. So and I think
Speaker 3: it was in the that What Did We Eat episode
Speaker 3: when we talked about Chicago, like the whole meat packing
Speaker 3: area was around the rail yards because they could you know,
Speaker 3: they wanted to have it super close. So now all
Speaker 3: of a sudden, you could say, hey, stuff is you know,
Speaker 3: it's really much cheaper to raise cattle or grow vegetables
Speaker 3: way out in the boonies. You can get cheaper labor,
Speaker 3: cheaper land. So now we can do that and just
Speaker 3: throw it on a refrigerated truck to get it across country. Yep.
Speaker 2: So chuck. Little by little as these like innovations in
Speaker 2: shipping stuff meat produce things that just could not make
Speaker 2: it from you know, California to oh, I don't know,
Speaker 2: let's say Denver without rotting or something. As we got
Speaker 2: better and better at this, something called the chain started
Speaker 2: to emerge and involve. And that was basically how we
Speaker 2: move perishable items from one part of the country to
Speaker 2: another thanks to this refrigerated stuff. And it was super
Speaker 2: primitive and separate. I think the I don't know if
Speaker 2: you said or not, but the very first private railcars
Speaker 2: were these meat packers refrigerated cars. They just did this
Speaker 2: on their own as like a great business move. But
Speaker 2: these things became so invaluable and people became so hooked
Speaker 2: on having stuff available year round that they normally wouldn't
Speaker 2: that it just became an institution, like a part of
Speaker 2: any growing, developing country's infrastructure. There was something called the
Speaker 2: cold chain.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Absolutely. There was an engineer early on who did
Speaker 3: not realize his dream, but he was sort of the
Speaker 3: first visionary in the mid nineteenth century. His name was
Speaker 3: Charles tell ye ooh nailed it. He was the guy
Speaker 3: that kind of envisioned this and said, hey, the cold
Speaker 3: chain is a thing that we could make a reality
Speaker 3: and then we can sort of reorganize rationally on how
Speaker 3: we grow food and how we ship food. And it
Speaker 3: was his idea. He apparently died in extreme poverty because
Speaker 3: he never realized a dream to its fullest, but he tried.
Speaker 3: He actually got a British steamership and outfitted it with
Speaker 3: a refrigerator. Even named it lee Les frigger Rique frigger raffete. Yeah, okay, like.
Speaker 2: Like fantastic basically, but fantastic refrigerator is basically what it means.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that sounds like a magnifique fantastic refrigerator concern. And
Speaker 3: this was in eighteen seventy seven and he was bringing
Speaker 3: beef across the ocean from Uruguay to Paris, and when
Speaker 3: they got there, he was like, everyone's gonna love this.
Speaker 3: And the French were like, uh, you think I'm eating
Speaker 3: meat that's been dead for a month. Yeah, you're crazy,
Speaker 3: and we're going to pass a bunch of laws that
Speaker 3: banned this kind of thing for the next twenty years.
Speaker 2: And tell you're screeched.
Speaker 3: I'm not crazy, shut up, take it back. Yeah exactly.
Speaker 2: So, like you said, he died penniless, as you like
Speaker 2: to say, but his legacy lived on. Eventually people said like, Okay,
Speaker 2: we can get used to this. But it took some
Speaker 2: It took some selling for sure. One of the other
Speaker 2: major things that helped establish the cold chain was not
Speaker 2: just shipping, but it had to like sit for a
Speaker 2: little while when it got to where it's going. Like
Speaker 2: it's not like the train stopped at every every house
Speaker 2: for anyone who wanted eggs, Like it went to one
Speaker 2: central destination and it unloaded its contents, and so as
Speaker 2: a result, cold storage had to develop. You remember Rocky,
Speaker 2: he helped train by punching huge sides of beef that
Speaker 2: would that was part of the cold chain he worked in.
Speaker 2: At least I guess that's where he worked, was a
Speaker 2: cold storage place.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, like a meatpacker storage facility.
Speaker 2: I think.
Speaker 3: By the way, second Rocky reference in here, there was
Speaker 3: another very subtle one. We'll see if that listeners can
Speaker 3: pick that out.
Speaker 2: It already happened.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, a little easter egg.
Speaker 2: I didn't pick it out. I want to know.
Speaker 3: All right, I'm gonna tell you off air ready, I'll
Speaker 3: tell you right now.
Speaker 2: Okay, thank you for telling me.
Speaker 3: It sounded like you were acting just then a new
Speaker 3: kind of were But I really did just tell Josh.
Speaker 3: But yes, let's leave that as an easter egg anyway. Yeah,
Speaker 3: cold warehouses started becoming a thing again. That sawdust insulation
Speaker 3: provided a lot of the you know insulation. I guess
Speaker 3: these were in the eighteen sixties, and you know, it
Speaker 3: wasn't like your refriger or cold, but they were storing
Speaker 3: like fruit and produce. So it basically it was like, hey,
Speaker 3: you don't get too warm and spoil is what they
Speaker 3: were trying to you know, accomplish there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it didn't have to be frozen necessarily, no, no.
Speaker 3: No, no, But by nineteen oh four, this was a
Speaker 3: legitimate thing. There were more than six hundred huge storage
Speaker 3: you know cold storage facilities, I think one one hundred
Speaker 3: and two million cubic feet and you know, mainly based
Speaker 3: around cities. But they were holding everything from you know,
Speaker 3: produce to namely eggs because people wanted their eggs year round.
Speaker 3: And back then, before they started breeding chickens to lay
Speaker 3: eggs y around, they were basically laying in the spring
Speaker 3: and people wanted those eggs in the winter.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they really did breed them chuck through selective
Speaker 2: breeding programs. There's something called the red jungle fowl, which
Speaker 2: is a type of chicken. Wild chicken lays about ten
Speaker 2: to fifteen eggs per year, and like you said, normally
Speaker 2: in the spring, maybe in the early summer, that's just
Speaker 2: not enough if you want eggs year round. So the
Speaker 2: breeds that we developed, like the leg horns, which is
Speaker 2: the top egg layer, the champ, they lay about three
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty eggs per year year round.
Speaker 3: That's a lot.
Speaker 2: But before that, yeah, you could just hang on to eggs.
Speaker 2: I almost said you could just sit on eggs for
Speaker 2: a while thanks to cold storage.
Speaker 3: That's right, But you know, we said the French were
Speaker 3: kind of grossed out by this. It wasn't just the French.
Speaker 3: A lot of people had a hard time kind of
Speaker 3: coming around to this idea of eating things that had
Speaker 3: been around for a while, and false rumors spread that
Speaker 3: you know, that stuff could make you sick, it could
Speaker 3: cause cancer. So in nineteen eleven, as a pr rebuttal,
Speaker 3: I guess, the Poultry, Butter and Egg Association had a
Speaker 3: cold storage banquet at the Hotel Sherman in Chicago where
Speaker 3: they served an entire meal of foods that had been
Speaker 3: preserved through refrigeration to a lot of folks, including the
Speaker 3: mayor and the health commissioner. It's sort of like, hey,
Speaker 3: here's where we are now. You don't need to be
Speaker 3: grossed out. And people said, okay, I may not be
Speaker 3: grossed out, but I'm also like have to get use
Speaker 3: the idea of not buying the eggs from the farmer
Speaker 3: down the street, or getting my milk from down the street,
Speaker 3: or the produce from the farmer down the street. And
Speaker 3: so it took a while for people to come around
Speaker 3: to just getting food away from a source they really
Speaker 3: sort of knew personally entrusted, yeah, and that was.
Speaker 2: One of the roles of the FDA and the Pure
Speaker 2: Food and Drug Act of nineteen oh six was to
Speaker 2: basically say, Okay, we get why you don't trust some
Speaker 2: of these people because some of them are actual total scals.
Speaker 2: Some of the people selling food. Apparently, one technique was
Speaker 2: to if you had a bunch of meat that was
Speaker 2: about a spoil, you just froze it and shipped it
Speaker 2: and the person wouldn't be able to tell until they
Speaker 2: thawed the meat out and tried to sell it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and you just rip them off. That was a big one.
Speaker 2: Or if you had a cold storage facility, if you're
Speaker 2: storing something for months, you need to keep it cold
Speaker 2: for months. There can't be like a week where everything
Speaker 2: breaks down and you just hang on to that stuff
Speaker 2: and sell it anyway after things get back online. And
Speaker 2: this was the kind of thing that like people in
Speaker 2: the US, we're having to worry about. So thanks to
Speaker 2: the Pure Food and Drug Act of nineteen oh six
Speaker 2: and then later on actual laws that gave it teeth,
Speaker 2: that kind of helped set the stage for people to
Speaker 2: finally relax and be like, Okay, I can deal with
Speaker 2: frozen food. Because it was like the GMOs of its day,
Speaker 2: like people were just like, it'll give you cancer if
Speaker 2: you eat frozen food. Like it was like people did
Speaker 2: not trust food that had been frozen.
Speaker 3: That's right. We should take our second break here at
Speaker 3: minute forty two, and we're gonna come back finally with
Speaker 3: home refrigeration right after this.
Speaker 2: Stop.
Speaker 1: Lately, I've been learning some stuff about insomnia or alumnia.
Speaker 5: How about the one on border like disorder, that cht
Speaker 5: north border, that one being worn. But it was so
Speaker 5: nice I learned, except body, listen.
Speaker 4: Shot, stop, stop, stop, all right.
Speaker 3: So, iceboxes had been a thing since you know, at
Speaker 3: least in nineteenth century. Uh, they started to become more
Speaker 3: and more common. And this is you know, a big
Speaker 3: wooden sort of cabinet in your kitchen usually would and
Speaker 3: it was lined with something like a tin lining or
Speaker 3: zinc maybe, and the iceman would come around deliver a
Speaker 3: big block of ice to your house. And that's how
Speaker 3: things were kept cool in the icebox. And if you
Speaker 3: are a gen xer or older, your grandparents may have
Speaker 3: even said the word icebox. My grandmother certainly did, because
Speaker 3: she lived to be one hundred and was around and
Speaker 3: then when they called them ice and when they were icebox.
Speaker 2: Right, and not just call them. Yeah, there's also that
Speaker 2: whole excellent subgenre of desserts that are icebox like icebox cakes.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, lemon icebox pie yeh. But finally, in nineteen fourteen,
Speaker 3: we get our first mechanical refrigerator in the house. The
Speaker 3: domestic electric refrigerator or the dome E l Re fridge
Speaker 3: made its debut. And this was still not a fully
Speaker 3: integrated refrigerator. It was a device that you got to
Speaker 3: put in your ice box to keep things cool and
Speaker 3: to keep that ice from melting.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So, yeah, it didn't take off. They weren't super reliable,
Speaker 2: they were pretty expensive. But not too long later, a
Speaker 2: decade or so later, nineteen twenty seven, GE introduced its refrigerator.
Speaker 2: It's nicknamed the monitor top because there's a big round
Speaker 2: turret on top of the refrigerator that gives it a
Speaker 2: very distinctive look. It looks like a robot fashioned by
Speaker 2: like a six Yeah, but monitor refers to the Civil
Speaker 2: War ironclad USS monitor and that's just that was the nickname.
Speaker 2: I was looking all over for what General Electric called it,
Speaker 2: and they seem to have just called it refrigerator.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's kind of cool looking if you want to
Speaker 3: look up a photo, I mean, it looks as described leftovers.
Speaker 3: And this was something I was really curious about that
Speaker 3: had been a thing. It was eighteen seventy eight, I
Speaker 3: think when that term was coin. But leftovers back then
Speaker 3: meant like you got to eat this stuff the next
Speaker 3: day because people didn't want their food to go bad.
Speaker 3: People didn't waste stuff like they do now and just
Speaker 3: throw stuff away. They didn't eat it, so dinner went
Speaker 3: into the breakfast or the lunch, or it went into
Speaker 3: a big pot the next day that was on the stove,
Speaker 3: and you just had these big sort of stews of
Speaker 3: leftover things. Now that you had the mechanical electric refrigerator,
Speaker 3: all of a sudden, you could preserve stuff and you
Speaker 3: could serve You didn't have to transform something. You could
Speaker 3: like warm up and serve the same meal that you
Speaker 3: ate a few days ago. And that was a pretty
Speaker 3: radical thing at the time.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, for sure. Again though people were kind of like,
Speaker 2: I don't know about this. I was about to say, fortunately,
Speaker 2: but related to that scarcity during World War two and
Speaker 2: World War One, but also the Great Depression, basically said hey, everybody,
Speaker 2: you can't just like be throwing food away, like we
Speaker 2: need to be very thrifty with food, and that really
Speaker 2: kind of gave leftovers a big boost also because the
Speaker 2: government came in and created propaganda campaigns to kind of
Speaker 2: persuade people to start eating leftovers more because again, thanks
Speaker 2: to your new handy ge refrigerator, you can do that
Speaker 2: kind of thing.
Speaker 3: That's right, it's pretty great, you know. The cold chain
Speaker 3: is what really changed the game early on. But it
Speaker 3: also changed like not just availability, but like literally creating
Speaker 3: news of foods, like inventing new foods. Iceberg lettuce is
Speaker 3: so named because it could hold up to being shipped
Speaker 3: on ice and it is an iceberg. Hey man, I'll
Speaker 3: go to bad for iceberg l really really yeah. I
Speaker 3: think it's unfairly labeled as as junk and like iceberg
Speaker 3: in with some arugula and a little romaine and some
Speaker 3: leafy greens that went a little iceberg because it's so
Speaker 3: crunchy and you don't get that kind of texture from
Speaker 3: I mean maybe a little bit, but it's the crunchiest
Speaker 3: lettuce to me, So I think it gets a very
Speaker 3: snobby sort of people look down on it for for
Speaker 3: bad reasons. My is my take. But I like a
Speaker 3: little iceberg.
Speaker 2: Tell them what John Waters called iceberg lettuce.
Speaker 3: I thought that was great, the polyester of lettuce. Yeah.
Speaker 3: But I was also raised a you know, lower middle
Speaker 3: class kid who grew up eating iceberg lettuce, and so
Speaker 3: it has a fun place in my heart.
Speaker 2: For that reason, I understand I hated salad, So maybe
Speaker 2: that's why I hate iceberg lets, because that's all that's
Speaker 2: all we got was iceberg as well, and like French
Speaker 2: dressing or something like that, or ranch, and that was it,
Speaker 2: and you ate it and you liked it, and you
Speaker 2: shut up about it.
Speaker 3: I would party on an old school eighties iceberg salad
Speaker 3: so hard for.
Speaker 2: Real, like even when you were a kid, you would
Speaker 2: eat that.
Speaker 3: Uh yeah, I mean that's the only kind of you know.
Speaker 3: I mean it's probably not even vegetable, but I considered
Speaker 3: it a vegetable. I didn't like a lot of vegetables,
Speaker 3: but I would eat a salad.
Speaker 2: So that's funny. I hated salad so much. I would
Speaker 2: refuse to be served anything except for some iceberg lettuce
Speaker 2: and some carrots. And I wouldn't even eat that. No
Speaker 2: salad dress in nothing like whenever everyone else was finished.
Speaker 2: If I was still eating my salad, I had to
Speaker 2: stay at the table and finish it. And so at
Speaker 2: that time I would just start slowly putting it bye
Speaker 2: by bye under the credenza behind me. But then I
Speaker 2: was shortsighted enough I didn't go back and clean it out.
Speaker 2: So every few months, like the credit we get moved
Speaker 2: and there'd be a pile of like desiccated iceberg, lettuce
Speaker 2: and carrots.
Speaker 3: The other thing I like to use iceberg for now
Speaker 3: is like, if you're making something in a lettuce cup,
Speaker 3: iceberg works really well. Okay, oh yeah, yeah for sure,
Speaker 3: like chicken larb.
Speaker 2: Or something like that. Totally I'll agree with you on that.
Speaker 3: So frozen foods obviously wasn't a thing for a long
Speaker 3: long time, but finally in the nineteen fifties they said, hey,
Speaker 3: you know what, we can cool things, we can freeze things.
Speaker 3: We can freeze meals, and we can freeze orange juice.
Speaker 3: And I know we've already talked about TV dinners and
Speaker 3: concentrated frozen concentrate orange juice, but those were two really
Speaker 3: big game changers, only made possible for advances in refrigeration
Speaker 3: and freezing and chipping.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and while we're on it, I believe in our
Speaker 2: Food Origins episode, I don't remember what it was, but
Speaker 2: we talked about the TV Dinner and we totally credited
Speaker 2: Jerry Thomas as salesman for Swanson is coming up with
Speaker 2: the idea. And since then it's become much clearer that
Speaker 2: Jerry Thomas might have had almost nothing to do with this,
Speaker 2: and that the real hero was a twenty one year
Speaker 2: old bacteriologist named Betty Cronin, who was the one who
Speaker 2: not only she might not have come up with the idea,
Speaker 2: I think she said one of the Swanson sons did,
Speaker 2: but she was the one who figured out how to
Speaker 2: make it work and to make these meals that are
Speaker 2: different foods entirely that all cook at the same time
Speaker 2: and come out the way that they're supposed to. That
Speaker 2: was all her.
Speaker 3: That's right. Betty Cronin unsurprisingly not forgotten, but doesn't get
Speaker 3: nearly the accolades she should have gotten.
Speaker 2: No, she does now though.
Speaker 3: Yeah, way to correct the record, friend. So yeah, TV Dinners,
Speaker 3: I mean I would go listen to that episode. It
Speaker 3: was pretty great, but it definitely you know, it came
Speaker 3: along as TV was coming along. And it was a
Speaker 3: big deal. And even though I mean there are still
Speaker 3: TV dinners sort of like that. But if you go
Speaker 3: in the frozen fe I mean, I don't get any
Speaker 3: of this stuff, But if you go the frozen food section,
Speaker 3: I mean you can get almost any kind of meal
Speaker 3: frozen these days.
Speaker 2: Yeah, even a iceberg lettuce is he Oh yeah, that's
Speaker 2: not what that means anymore.
Speaker 3: Oh no, I'm not going to let someone ruin hawking
Speaker 3: up a loogie for everybody. That's one of life's great pleasures, sir.
Speaker 2: There's one other thing I wanted to mention. So the
Speaker 2: cold chain is now so diverse and there's so many
Speaker 2: different versions of it all working together. It's now called
Speaker 2: the cold web. And Olivia gives a great example of
Speaker 2: what we can do now. We can catch a fish
Speaker 2: in Norway, send it off to China for processing, and
Speaker 2: then send it from China to the United States for eating,
Speaker 2: all within a half an hour.
Speaker 3: That's amazing.
Speaker 2: Well maybe longer than that, but still it is still amazing.
Speaker 3: Anything else, you should do an episode on gullibility.
Speaker 2: Nice idea? You got anything else?
Speaker 3: I got nothing else.
Speaker 2: I got ten twelve more minutes worth the material. Do
Speaker 2: you mind just sitting there.
Speaker 3: No, let's do it.
Speaker 2: Since Chuck said let's do it, I think it's time
Speaker 2: for listener mail.
Speaker 3: This is about the Pink House. Hey, guys, I can't
Speaker 3: believe there is finally a subject I can share some
Speaker 3: information about. Every year I would visit my cousins who
Speaker 3: live about twenty minutes away from Plumb Island, and heading
Speaker 3: to the beach was a yearly activity. As we all
Speaker 3: grew and we had our own families, the yearly gathering
Speaker 3: at Plumb Island got bigger and better, and passing the
Speaker 3: Pink House has always been to tell that you were
Speaker 3: just a few minutes away from the beach. I grew
Speaker 3: up hearing the same story you guys shared about that
Speaker 3: being a spite house, and believed it to be true,
Speaker 3: as it truly sits alone on the Salt March. It's
Speaker 3: pretty weird looking. Just last month, though, being a new
Speaker 3: homeowner on the island, I was sent a town newsletter
Speaker 3: in which a tribute to the Pink House gave a
Speaker 3: different history. I've attached the article for you to read.
Speaker 3: While it wasn't quite built with spite, there seems to
Speaker 3: have been some spite in the story. Our family loves
Speaker 3: the show and even flew to Boston to take our
Speaker 3: two adult girls who live in Boston to see you live.
Speaker 3: Thanks to you, we are walking local experts on the
Speaker 3: biosphere too. And that is from Amy Sandy, who is wonderful.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks a lot, Amy. Number one, thank you for
Speaker 2: coming to see our show. And number two, congratulations on
Speaker 2: your new house.
Speaker 3: Yeah for sure.
Speaker 2: And number three, thank you for sending us a delightful email.
Speaker 2: And if you want to be like Amy, you can
Speaker 2: send us an email too. To stuff podcasts at iHeartRadio
Speaker 2: dot com.
Speaker 3: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
Speaker 3: more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 3: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.