Speaker 1: Welcome to zero. I am Akshatrati this week the cold rush.
Speaker 2: There's plenty of mistakes that happen, and all that products
Speaker 2: full of little small decisions. If you're bat like ninety percent,
Speaker 2: you're doing great. So I'd say ninety percent of what
Speaker 2: comes over here is perfectly good. And then there's always
Speaker 2: the second wave of our inspections of them.
Speaker 1: That's a guy inside of fridge, a really big fridge.
Speaker 1: His name is Matthew Derico, and he's giving a tour
Speaker 1: of a cold storage facility in the bikes. Matthew's family
Speaker 1: has been in this business for generations.
Speaker 2: We're dealing with a perishable product. It's grown under interesting
Speaker 2: conditions that are all different.
Speaker 1: A century ago, they were responsible for the first transcontinental
Speaker 1: shipment of bruccoli from California to New York on a
Speaker 1: refrigerated train. Those were the earliest days of the cold chain. Now,
Speaker 1: those of us in developed countries take it for granted.
Speaker 1: Today three quarters of everything on the average American plate
Speaker 1: is processed, packaged, shipped, stored, or sold cold. You know
Speaker 1: cold storage facilities exist, but I bet you don't know
Speaker 1: just how big these spaces have become. The US alone
Speaker 1: boasts around five point five billion cubic feet of refrigerated space.
Speaker 1: That's like one hundred and fifty Empire State building's worth
Speaker 1: of freezers, and developing countries are starting to catch up.
Speaker 1: Between twenty eighteen and twenty twenty two, the whole world's
Speaker 1: chilled and frozen warehouse space increased by twenty percent at
Speaker 1: a time when ice caps are melting faster than ever.
Speaker 1: The number of walk in refrigerators is also expanding. This
Speaker 1: coal rush has huge implications for the planet. It's something
Speaker 1: journalist Nicola Twilly has thought a lot about. She's explored
Speaker 1: quite a few giant freezers, like the one Matthew works in.
Speaker 1: That's because she's the author of a new book about
Speaker 1: how refrigeration has shaped our food, ourselves, and our planet.
Speaker 1: It's called Frostbite, and it's a really fun read full
Speaker 1: of crazy trivia, like the fact that the Irish independence
Speaker 1: movement might have refrigerated beef from the US to thank
Speaker 1: for its success. Now, refrigeration is considered a climate solution.
Speaker 1: More than thirty percent of all food produced on farms
Speaker 1: in poor nations never makes it to a store, and
Speaker 1: a coal chain can help reduce that food waste. But
Speaker 1: on the flip side, it turns out that having access
Speaker 1: to refrigeration can also lead to food waste. Americans waste
Speaker 1: more than thirty percent of their food in their homes
Speaker 1: because they hold so much in the fridge. That's why
Speaker 1: I was excit I did to talk to Nicola because
Speaker 1: the humble fridge is going to play a big part
Speaker 1: in our planet's future. Nicola, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3: Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1: Now, let's start at the beginning with the invention of refrigeration.
Speaker 1: It's one of those modern miracles that few people think
Speaker 1: about and most people take for granted. But the route
Speaker 1: to inventing the fridge was quite long. Can you take
Speaker 1: us back in time and talk us through how it happened.
Speaker 3: Yeah, if you think about it, humans have had control
Speaker 3: of fire since before we were modern humans, and yet
Speaker 3: we haven't been able to produce cold at will until
Speaker 3: maybe one hundred and fifty years ago, Max. So it's
Speaker 3: sort of an incredibly recent invention. And it's not that
Speaker 3: early humans had no idea that cold would preserve food,
Speaker 3: because they noticed that right away. It's just that there
Speaker 3: wasn't a sense of how to control it or even
Speaker 3: what cold was. It was actually all of the great
Speaker 3: minds of scientific history, Galileo, you know, Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle,
Speaker 3: Leonardo da Vinci. They all kind of wrestled with what
Speaker 3: is cold? And there was theories that, oh, it's maybe
Speaker 3: you know, these frigorific atoms, or maybe it's sort of
Speaker 3: a force that gets distributed from the north pole or
Speaker 3: rises up from the ground down from the air. No
Speaker 3: one had any idea. It was actually immensely frustrating for people.
Speaker 3: Francis Bacon died while he was trying to figure it
Speaker 3: out from a chill caused by trying to stuff a
Speaker 3: chicken with ice. So it really took a long time
Speaker 3: to work it out. And actually even when the first
Speaker 3: person to sort of create cold artificially, Scottish doctor named
Speaker 3: William Cullen, he sort of did it as a party
Speaker 3: trick because it wasn't something you could do at scale.
Speaker 3: It wasn't seen as something that would work to refrigerate
Speaker 3: our whole food system, let alone you know the way
Speaker 3: we use air conditioning now, you know our factories, houses,
Speaker 3: data centers. He just managed to evaporate some ether under
Speaker 3: pressure and freeze a flask of water, and no one
Speaker 3: looked at that and saw the potential for another seventy
Speaker 3: five years. And the first refrigerating machines were just enormous
Speaker 3: and blew up all the time and were incredibly dangerous.
Speaker 3: All of the early pioneers just constantly losing eyebrows and
Speaker 3: you know, fingers and all the rest of it. So
Speaker 3: it took a very long time. You know. The first
Speaker 3: commercial machine was the eighteen fifties. It doesn't become domesticated
Speaker 3: something that we can actually have in our homes until
Speaker 3: the nineteen twenties. So that's one hundred years ago. It's
Speaker 3: really recent.
Speaker 1: And it was shocking to know that you just went
Speaker 1: and built a refrigerator for yourself for this book. Is
Speaker 1: it really that simple?
Speaker 3: Well, so, I was an embarrassingly long way through the
Speaker 3: writing of this book when I realized I too, really
Speaker 3: didn't understand how to make cold. I was like Galileo.
Speaker 3: I had no idea, you know. I was looking at
Speaker 3: how cold had reshaped what we eat and where it's grown,
Speaker 3: and how it tastes, and how good it is for
Speaker 3: us and the planet, but I didn't understand how we
Speaker 3: made it. So a friend of a friend runs an
Speaker 3: HVAC startup, and he said, well, come to my garage.
Speaker 3: We can build a fridge. And I was like, you
Speaker 3: can't just build a fridge, but it turns out you
Speaker 3: can now. Well, to be fair, this was a bit
Speaker 3: more like when you make dinner from you know, jarred
Speaker 3: pasta sauce and a retisserie chicken and some pre washed
Speaker 3: you know, spinach leaves with something. I wasn't actually building
Speaker 3: all the elements from scratch. So we had purchased a compressor,
Speaker 3: we had purchased an evaporator, we had purchased the various
Speaker 3: There are sort of four main components, and what we
Speaker 3: did was join them up in such a way and
Speaker 3: then charge it with refrigerant, which is the chemical that
Speaker 3: evaporates under pressure to create the cooling effect. Because if
Speaker 3: any of your listeners are like me and have no
Speaker 3: idea what cold is, still it's just the absence of heat,
Speaker 3: and so cooling is that sense of loss as you
Speaker 3: remove heat. And so what you want to do, if
Speaker 3: you remember from high school physics, which I completely did not,
Speaker 3: is when a liquid evaporates into a gas that takes energy,
Speaker 3: and you suck that energy in from the atmosphere around
Speaker 3: you as heat energy, thus creating the sort of sense
Speaker 3: of losses. All that heat energy is pulled away the
Speaker 3: cooling and so it's a really simple system. The trick is,
Speaker 3: of course, to create you know, you do that once,
Speaker 3: That's what William Cullen did in seventeen fifty five. The
Speaker 3: trick is to keep doing it and create a circuit
Speaker 3: where it just goes round and round and round and
Speaker 3: keeps evaporating. But even that is surprisingly simple once you've
Speaker 3: built it. It's just something that I think is so
Speaker 3: invisible to the majority of us that we never think
Speaker 3: about it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and a major turning point came when this invention
Speaker 1: was put to work at scale. And you write before
Speaker 1: that most meat eaten in cities walked itself to market,
Speaker 1: often over enormous distances, and of course when catalysts marching
Speaker 1: miles to an urban slaughterhouse, it's getting skinnier along the way.
Speaker 1: But once the problem of moving large quantities of frozen
Speaker 1: meat was solved, all that changed, and soon beef was
Speaker 1: being shipped across oceans from America to England. How did
Speaker 1: this transform the way we eat?
Speaker 3: It's an astonishing transformation on so many levels. As you say,
Speaker 3: I mean, the problem of getting meat and also dairy
Speaker 3: into cities was really a huge one, not least of
Speaker 3: which was that you then had to slaughter them in
Speaker 3: the city. And so the area around Smithfield Market in
Speaker 3: London or the slaughterhouses in New York was just I mean,
Speaker 3: can you imagine slaughtering enough beef for a city in
Speaker 3: the middle of that city in summer, say, I mean,
Speaker 3: it was nauseating. There was blood, guts, foam, froth, it
Speaker 3: was absolutely and bringing meat from places like Argentina, New
Speaker 3: Zealand Australia where there was vast amount of land not
Speaker 3: a lot of people, it lowered the price of meat immediately,
Speaker 3: I mean by a quarter at least, and so suddenly
Speaker 3: poor people who had not been able to have meat
Speaker 3: except on very special occasions could dine on meat frequently.
Speaker 3: You know. Red meat consumption went through the roof.
Speaker 1: And today we think of one of the climate solutions
Speaker 1: as to try and eat less red meat because it
Speaker 1: produces so much green as gases, mostly from cow's belching methane. However,
Speaker 1: this increase in meat consumption happened partly because of the
Speaker 1: ability to move cheap meat around, but also because signs
Speaker 1: at the time, for some reason, at least in the West,
Speaker 1: was telling people the only way to survive is to
Speaker 1: have more protein, and the protein come from.
Speaker 3: Meat, right, This is sort of a sad mistake in
Speaker 3: the history of science. Chemistry was a relatively recent field
Speaker 3: of research in the eighteen hundreds. You know, previously there
Speaker 3: had been alchemists and they were trying to turn things
Speaker 3: into gold and find elixirs of eternal life. So it
Speaker 3: was a relatively new field and one of the things
Speaker 3: that chemists were doing, we're trying to sort out what
Speaker 3: it is in food that we need, and in the
Speaker 3: early eighteen hundreds, some mistaken experiments led them to the
Speaker 3: conclusion that actually it was only protein. Carbohydrate and fat
Speaker 3: were just sort of nice to have, not necessary, and
Speaker 3: no one knew about vitamins. Vitamins didn't come along until
Speaker 3: the nineteen thirties, so protein was the be all and
Speaker 3: end all, and that discovery coincided with the expansion of
Speaker 3: cities to the first time that London was sort of
Speaker 3: going from a million people to two million people to
Speaker 3: three million people, the largest cities the world had ever seen.
Speaker 3: And as we talked about getting meat into cities, is
Speaker 3: really hard. So you have this sudden sort of scientific
Speaker 3: realization that if we were to have, you know, strong
Speaker 3: men to work in factories and make the nation great,
Speaker 3: they must be fed with protein, and the fact that
Speaker 3: we can't get protein to them. So it was an
Speaker 3: utter panic. Of course, you know, they could have had lentils,
Speaker 3: but the scientists at the time weren't looking at lentils
Speaker 3: for their protein content. They were looking at beef. So
Speaker 3: I mean, we could have had a very different world
Speaker 3: if those scientists had been like, we all need to
Speaker 3: eat lentils. It's all a sort of misunderstanding, but it
Speaker 3: shaped our modern food system.
Speaker 1: We recently did a whole series on the show about
Speaker 1: the power grid, and in a way, you can call
Speaker 1: it the world's biggest machine because everything works in sync.
Speaker 1: And when I was reading the book, it made me
Speaker 1: think that the cold chain is kind of similar. It's
Speaker 1: a giant system. Yes, it's not in one place, and
Speaker 1: it's not connected all the time, but it is connected.
Speaker 1: So was it one of your hopes that when people
Speaker 1: read the book they realize this standalone home appliance that
Speaker 1: you have is actually part of a huge system.
Speaker 3: Exactly, Yes, And that's why I in the chapter where
Speaker 3: I look at the domestic refrigerator, I call it the
Speaker 3: tip of the iceberg. I mean within the industry our food,
Speaker 3: our perishable food supply system is called a cold chain,
Speaker 3: with the idea chain that it is connected from your
Speaker 3: farm to your fridge. The domestic fridge is really the
Speaker 3: weak link because once you pick it up the supermarket,
Speaker 3: then it sits in your car or in your bike
Speaker 3: rack or you know, shopping bag, and isn't refrigerated on
Speaker 3: its way home. But up until that point, say a
Speaker 3: green bean within an appur or two of harvest, can
Speaker 3: have been brought down to a certain temperature and kept
Speaker 3: there all the way to supermarket shelves. So I ended
Speaker 3: up seeing it as a sort of distributed winter. And
Speaker 3: it's entirely connected by this network of refrigerated chipping containers
Speaker 3: and ships and trucks and trains, but it isn't visible
Speaker 3: as one gigantic winter. It's a series of sort of
Speaker 3: pockets of cold, and this artificial winter that our food
Speaker 3: spends time in moves around and it's actually enormous. But
Speaker 3: because you never see it as a connected whole, you
Speaker 3: don't realize.
Speaker 1: Now, this artificial winter does sound very energy intensive. Were
Speaker 1: you able to put a number on the amount of
Speaker 1: emissions that are attached to refrigeration.
Speaker 3: Yes, it's a difficult one to get an exact number on,
Speaker 3: and of course you're not taking into accounts sort of
Speaker 3: the expanded emissions that come from, say, being able to
Speaker 3: eat more red meat because you can cool it. So
Speaker 3: leaving aside those sort of knock on effects, cold storage
Speaker 3: companies are currently the third highest industrial consumers of energy,
Speaker 3: so the power to run cooling equipment is more than
Speaker 3: eight percent of global electricity usage.
Speaker 1: Right now, there's energy used, But of course there's another
Speaker 1: warming impact to consider in refrigeration, and that's to do
Speaker 1: with the refrigerant. The gas that moves around, is compressed,
Speaker 1: is evaporated. In the early days, that gas was a
Speaker 1: poisonous gas, typically ammonia or sulfur dioxide, and it caused
Speaker 1: a bunch of accidents and the industry was forced to
Speaker 1: find an alternative, which it did and was pretty effective,
Speaker 1: except it was chlorofluorocarbons, which turned out to not be
Speaker 1: poisonous but created a hole in the ozone layer. So
Speaker 1: one of the most successful and vironmental treaty comes out
Speaker 1: of that desire to change the refrigerant one more time,
Speaker 1: from CFCs to what became hfc's, which did not create
Speaker 1: a hole in the hose and layer, but are super
Speaker 1: warming gases. There are thousands of times more warming ten
Speaker 1: for ten for CO two. Now we are at that
Speaker 1: point where we need to eliminate hfc's as well. So
Speaker 1: what are the choice of refrigerants that we have today
Speaker 1: and what does innovation look like?
Speaker 3: So, yeah, that's a great question. There are lower global
Speaker 3: warming potential as they call it GWP refrigerants coming on
Speaker 3: the market. Many refrigerated warehouses and such like are moving
Speaker 3: to ammonia systems.
Speaker 1: For example, we're going back to the poisonous gas. It's
Speaker 1: very dangerous, except we can handle it better this time.
Speaker 3: I'm assuming, well, I mean if it. I had a
Speaker 3: graphic description from a guy who runs a refrigerated warehouse
Speaker 3: who said, you know, when you see that white cloud,
Speaker 3: you're seeing death. It wants your crevices. Apparently it goes
Speaker 3: for your eyeballs. It's just really a nasty chemical. And
Speaker 3: so one of the problems actually is that the cold
Speaker 3: chain is expanding everywhere. It's expanding even in countries that
Speaker 3: seem as though they already have plenty of refrigerated space,
Speaker 3: such as the United States, but it is expanding fastest
Speaker 3: in parts of the world that don't have a cold
Speaker 3: chain currently, so sub Saharan Africa, large parts of Southeast Asia.
Speaker 3: Those places are building a cold chain from scratch right now.
Speaker 3: And they are also not typically equipped with a lot
Speaker 3: of trained engineers who can work with these dangerous gases,
Speaker 3: and a lot of the replacement refrigerants are much harder
Speaker 3: to use, flammable, toxic, just difficult and require more sophisticated machinery.
Speaker 3: So it's really a hard thing to replace these HCFCs
Speaker 3: and HFCs with these new refrigerants in places that already
Speaker 3: don't have enough engineers to make the simple non toxic
Speaker 3: refrigerants work. So that's one of the huge issues. And
Speaker 3: actually now there's a huge black market in hdfcs and
Speaker 3: hfc's because they're cheaper, easier to use. The old equipment
Speaker 3: runs on them, and so even though they're being phased
Speaker 3: out or even in some cases banned, they're still widely
Speaker 3: traded and widely used because they work and people know
Speaker 3: how to use them. So that's a huge problem. But
Speaker 3: to me, I thought The most interesting thing was not
Speaker 3: to think about the future of refrigeration beyond just okay,
Speaker 3: how do we make a better refrigerant, but can we
Speaker 3: make a better way of cooling? And even beyond that,
Speaker 3: can we make a better way of food preservation? Food
Speaker 3: preservation is the goal here, after all. Cooling is just
Speaker 3: how we do it.
Speaker 1: And you also traveled to China as part of your reporting. Now,
Speaker 1: I went to China last in twenty eighteen, so it's
Speaker 1: been a while. But having traveled to the US and
Speaker 1: the UK before I traveled to China, I was kind
Speaker 1: of shocked by how developed the country was. Infrastructure was fantastic,
Speaker 1: the fast trades but really fast. The system to pay
Speaker 1: was easier, you could use apps, et cetera. But you
Speaker 1: found that the coal chain wasn't developed enough, and that
Speaker 1: was a little bit surprising to me. Why is that
Speaker 1: the case.
Speaker 3: Well, that's changing really really fast. So China made building
Speaker 3: a coal chain a modern cold chain part of its
Speaker 3: twelve five year plan. And you know, when China sets
Speaker 3: out to do something, they really do it. And so
Speaker 3: it took a while and it was uneven. You know
Speaker 3: that the major cities had much better refrigerated facilities. The
Speaker 3: rural areas had nothing, and there were gaps, and you know,
Speaker 3: people would say to me, oh, we would import you know,
Speaker 3: chicken and it would come in beautiful and at the
Speaker 3: port it would be kept cold, and then we would
Speaker 3: find it, you know, five days later in a rural
Speaker 3: distribution warehouse with just a wet towel over it to
Speaker 3: keep it quote unquote fresh. So it was a work
Speaker 3: in progress when I went, but it's accelerating fast. And
Speaker 3: I would say, China, it's a huge country. It has
Speaker 3: a huge food system. It's cold chain is still only
Speaker 3: one sixth the size of the US one, so there's
Speaker 3: still you could argue that the US one is bigger
Speaker 3: than we need, but there's definitely still room for growth
Speaker 3: in China. But you can start start seeing that it's
Speaker 3: really getting there. So, for example, Washington State cherries used
Speaker 3: to be air freighted to China because they were popular
Speaker 3: as gifts, and you couldn't get decent cherries imported from
Speaker 3: the countryside in China because the cold chain didn't exist
Speaker 3: to get them to the cities. So it's easier to
Speaker 3: import them, air freight them from Washington State, then bring
Speaker 3: them in from the countryside in China, just because the
Speaker 3: cold chain wasn't there. That's changing. So now it's making
Speaker 3: less economic sense to air freight them, and as the
Speaker 3: cold chain is built up in China, more economic sense
Speaker 3: to bring them in from the countryside. And you can
Speaker 3: see that change in sort of real time. Washington State
Speaker 3: farmers are adjusting to that because the cold chain in
Speaker 3: China's picking.
Speaker 1: Up after the break. How refrigeration can reduce food waste
Speaker 1: or if you're not careful, increase it. If you've been
Speaker 1: enjoying this episode, please take a moment to rate and
Speaker 1: review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It helps
Speaker 1: other listeners find the show. Having seen enough refrigerators in
Speaker 1: America over the years of traveling to America, oh my god,
Speaker 1: American fridges are huge and they really don't need to
Speaker 1: be ah. But on food waste itself, there are two
Speaker 1: stories to be told when it comes to refrigeration. On
Speaker 1: the one hand, in developing countries where you still get
Speaker 1: a lot of agriculture being part of the economy, not
Speaker 1: having a coal chain can lead to a lot of
Speaker 1: food waste as the food travels from the farm to
Speaker 1: the consumer because it rots in the process. On the
Speaker 1: other hand, having access to refrigeration in developed countries means
Speaker 1: people just buy a ton of food and think it's
Speaker 1: going to be all okay in the fridge, and it
Speaker 1: isn't the case, and a lot of food is wasted
Speaker 1: in refrigerators. So how do we actually try and figure
Speaker 1: out how to reduce food waste and use refrigeration as
Speaker 1: a benefit not a loss.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a really interesting problem. You know. Food waste
Speaker 3: is often touted as the reason to build a cold
Speaker 3: chain in countries like I visited Rwanda with a UN
Speaker 3: sponsored sort of effort to bring the cold chain. I mean,
Speaker 3: people are losing thirty to forty percent of the harvest
Speaker 3: before it ever gets to market. Now, that's a horrific
Speaker 3: waste in a country as poor, and you can't afford
Speaker 3: to be losing that much food. So you can see
Speaker 3: why there's a desire for a cold chain. The problem,
Speaker 3: as you say, is that in the developed world, we
Speaker 3: are throwing away thirty to forty percent of our food
Speaker 3: at the retail and consumer end. The abundance that refrigeration
Speaker 3: has given us is translated into a sort of lack
Speaker 3: of care, a willingness to waste the food is so
Speaker 3: plentiful and so cheap that people would rather go and
Speaker 3: buy something else, I mean honestly, rather than sniff their milk,
Speaker 3: because obviously sniffing off milk will kill you. Everyone knows
Speaker 3: that they would rather pour it out and buy you know,
Speaker 3: just trust the cell by label and buy another pint.
Speaker 3: And that's that isn't an impact of refrigeration too. So
Speaker 3: some of the things I looked at here are first
Speaker 3: of all, sell by dates ridiculous. There is no sort
Speaker 3: of logic to them. I mean, in the US, it's
Speaker 3: a particular mess you have because it can be state
Speaker 3: by state. So in Montana milk will expire a week
Speaker 3: earlier than it will in the rest of the country.
Speaker 3: There's nothing particularly you know, poisonous to milk about Montana.
Speaker 3: It's just the system. So that's ridiculous. You know. People
Speaker 3: have tried to come up with all kinds of smart
Speaker 3: fridges and technological solutions here. To my mind, the things
Speaker 3: that work most effectively are actually ways to save food
Speaker 3: food from the refrigerator and make it visible. So there's
Speaker 3: a few different things. I mean, one, there's a quote
Speaker 3: from an architect I love that says, small fridges make
Speaker 3: good cities. But we know this with motorways. When you
Speaker 3: build a bigger motorway, you get more traffic. Is what
Speaker 3: actually happens. People think it's going to be great and
Speaker 3: you know traffic what No, it's the theory of induced demand.
Speaker 3: Well it applies to fridges too. As your fridge expands,
Speaker 3: you just stalk it and then more goes to waste,
Speaker 3: and so small fridges shopping on a more frequent basis,
Speaker 3: so you have to go to the store and you're
Speaker 3: actually thinking about what you're going to eat for dinner
Speaker 3: that evening, rather than shopping for some distant sort of
Speaker 3: two week horizon when obviously things are going to change
Speaker 3: and you're not going to feel like, I don't know,
Speaker 3: spaghetti bolona is when it turns out to be a
Speaker 3: sunny weekend, you know. And so so a lot of
Speaker 3: those sorts of things are important in people's minds. A
Speaker 3: fridge nowadays is actually like a bank vault, like you
Speaker 3: put things in it and they stay safe. That's not
Speaker 3: actually the case. The you know, the produce is still dying.
Speaker 3: The meat, the bacteria on the meat are still reproducing.
Speaker 3: It's just happening more slowly, but it is not a
Speaker 3: safety vault that will keep your food good forever. And
Speaker 3: so I think I find keeping food out of the fridge,
Speaker 3: not milk and meat obviously, but fruit and vegetables actually
Speaker 3: reminds you that it's there. It tastes better when you
Speaker 3: eat it. As tomatoes, peaches, things like that should never
Speaker 3: be in the fridge anyway. That knocks out their flavor
Speaker 3: producing mechanisms. They will taste worse. Bread should never be
Speaker 3: in the fridge. Potatoes, onions, these things should never be
Speaker 3: in the fridge. So yes, saving food from the fridge,
Speaker 3: shopping buying less, those kinds of things. One of the
Speaker 3: refrigeration experts I spoke to found that she's working on
Speaker 3: a project that was using urban agriculture, not to try
Speaker 3: and feed the city because you can't do it at
Speaker 3: that scale, but as a way to remind people, oh, right,
Speaker 3: this is living produce. It is fresh when it is harvested,
Speaker 3: and it isn't fresh a week later, and once you
Speaker 3: are aware of the work that goes in the seasonality
Speaker 3: things like that, people were wasting less food. That was
Speaker 3: what she found. So growing food actually had the benefit
Speaker 3: of people wasting less food.
Speaker 1: Writing this book, did it change the way you eat.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it did. I mean I was already you know,
Speaker 3: I make a podcast about food science and history. I
Speaker 3: write about food, so I was already a relatively conscious
Speaker 3: of sort of thinking about where my food came from
Speaker 3: and things like that. But and you know, knowing what's
Speaker 3: in season when and such like. But absolutely it made
Speaker 3: me much more aware of the fact that say, you
Speaker 3: buy a bag of spinach, you put it in your fridge,
Speaker 3: you eat it. A week later, you're patting yourself on
Speaker 3: the back, thinking you did yourself, you know, a favor there.
Speaker 3: You had a healthy bag of you didn't waste it,
Speaker 3: you got all those vitamins. No, after a week in
Speaker 3: your fridge, that spinach has half the vitamins and minerals
Speaker 3: it did when you first bought it. So having that realization,
Speaker 3: I think seeing those statistics, it reinforced the fact that
Speaker 3: it's not getting any better in the fridge. Now, some
Speaker 3: things get better in the fridge. A curry left over night,
Speaker 3: that gets better, But you know, as Bolonnet's sauce, yes,
Speaker 3: because you know, the fat and the collagen has time
Speaker 3: to sort of solidify and then redisperse and it becomes silkier.
Speaker 3: But fruit and vegetables, no, don't stockpile them, you know,
Speaker 3: buy it and eat it. So it really has changed
Speaker 3: sort of how I shop and eat. And it has
Speaker 3: definitely made me focus on seasonality too, Like I just
Speaker 3: don't eat apples outside of the autumn. And you know what,
Speaker 3: that's great because there's there's other fruits you can have
Speaker 3: in the summer and other fruits. I have citrus in
Speaker 3: the spring and I have berries in the summer, and
Speaker 3: it's annoying and obnoxious and I try not to be
Speaker 3: preachy about it, but also it all tastes better, Like
Speaker 3: you really don't need to have a tomato in December.
Speaker 3: It's gonna taste like nothing anyway, Just don't do it.
Speaker 1: I learned a lot from the book. Thank you, Nichola,
Speaker 1: Thank you so much.
Speaker 3: This is fun.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to zero. And now for the
Speaker 1: sound of the week. That's the hum of a refrigerator.
Speaker 1: John Klee of the band Velvet Underground calls it the
Speaker 1: drone of Western civilization. It's so constant. He says that
Speaker 1: the band would use its steady sixty cycle hum to
Speaker 1: tune their instruments. That's another great piece of trivia from
Speaker 1: Nichola's book, and also check out gastropod her podcast about
Speaker 1: How We Eat. If you liked this episode, please take
Speaker 1: a moment to rate and review the show on Apple
Speaker 1: Podcasts on Spotify. Share this episode with a friend or
Speaker 1: with Joe Biden and other lovers of ice cream. You
Speaker 1: can get in touch at zero pod at Bloomberg dot net.
Speaker 1: Zero's producer is Mighty Lee Rau. Bloomberg's Head of podcast
Speaker 1: is Sage Powerman, and head of Talk is Brendan newnam Our.
Speaker 1: Theme music is composed by Wonderly Special thanks to Kira Bendrim,
Speaker 1: Aaron Rudkoff and Matthew Griffith. I am Ashadrati. I'm back soon.