Speaker 1: Hi, it's sukshat. While some of us enjoy downtime, this week,
Speaker 1: we're bringing you a cool, wintry episode that should pair
Speaker 1: well with any leftovers from your holiday cooking. It's about
Speaker 1: refrigeration and the nearly invisible cold chain that makes it
Speaker 1: possible for us to eat the twenty first century diets
Speaker 1: we enjoy, and it's something that Nicola Twilly, who I
Speaker 1: spoke with earlier this year, thinks we don't pay enough
Speaker 1: attention to. So take a listen and enjoy. We'll be
Speaker 1: back in the new year with a fresh episode with
Speaker 1: the writer Kim Stanley Robinson about his climate visions for
Speaker 1: twenty twenty five. Welcome to Zero. I am Akshatrati.
Speaker 2: This week the Cold Rush.
Speaker 3: There's plenty of mistakes that happen in all that progres system,
Speaker 3: full of little small decision. If your bat like ninety percent,
Speaker 3: you're doing great, So I'd say ninety percent of what
Speaker 3: comes over here is perfectly good. And then there's always
Speaker 3: the second wave of our inspections.
Speaker 1: That's a guy inside of fridge, a really big fridge.
Speaker 1: His name is Matthew de Rico, and he's giving a
Speaker 1: tour of a cold storage facility in the bikes. Matthew's
Speaker 1: family has been in this business for generations.
Speaker 3: We're dealing with a perishable product. It's grown under interesting
Speaker 3: conditions that are all different.
Speaker 1: A century ago, they were responsible for the first transcontinental
Speaker 1: shipment of broccoli from California to New York on a
Speaker 1: refrigerated train. Those were the earliest days of the cold chain.
Speaker 1: Now 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.
Speaker 2: Shipped, stored, or sold cooled. You know cold.
Speaker 1: Storage facilities exist, but I bet you don't know just
Speaker 1: how big these spaces have become. The US alone boasts
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 2: Lead to food waste.
Speaker 1: Americans waste more than thirty percent of their food in
Speaker 1: their homes because they hold so much in the fridge.
Speaker 1: That's why I was excited to talk to Nicola, because
Speaker 1: the humble fridge is going to play a big part
Speaker 1: in our planet's future. Nikola, welcome to the show.
Speaker 4: 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 4: Yeah, if you think about it, humans have had control
Speaker 4: of fire since before we were modern humans, and yet
Speaker 4: we haven't been able to produce cold at will until
Speaker 4: maybe one hundred and fifty years ago, Max. So it's
Speaker 4: sort of an incredibly recent invention. And it's not that
Speaker 4: early humans had no idea that cold would preserve food,
Speaker 4: because they noticed that right away. It's just that there
Speaker 4: wasn't a sense of how to control it or even
Speaker 4: what cold was. It was actually all of the great
Speaker 4: minds of scientific history Galileo, you know, Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle,
Speaker 4: Leonardo da Vinci, they all kind of wrestled with what
Speaker 4: is cold? And there was theories that, oh, it's maybe
Speaker 4: you know, these frigorific atoms, or maybe it's sort of
Speaker 4: a force that gets distributed from the north pole or
Speaker 4: rises up from the ground down from the air. No
Speaker 4: one had any idea. It was actually immensely frustrating for people.
Speaker 4: Francis Bacon died while he was trying to figure it
Speaker 4: out from a chill caused by trying to stuff a
Speaker 4: chicken with ice. So it really took a long time
Speaker 4: to work it out. And actually even when the first
Speaker 4: person to sort of create cold artificially, a Scottish doctor
Speaker 4: named William Cullen, he sort of did it as a
Speaker 4: party trick because it wasn't something you could do at
Speaker 4: at scale. It wasn't seen as something that would work
Speaker 4: to refrigerate our whole food system, let alone. You know
Speaker 4: the way we use air conditioning now, you know our factories, houses,
Speaker 4: you know data centers. He just managed to evaporate some
Speaker 4: ether under pressure and freeze a flask of water, and
Speaker 4: no one looked at that and saw the potential for
Speaker 4: another seventy five years. And the first refrigerating machines were
Speaker 4: just enormous and blew up all the time and were
Speaker 4: incredibly dangerous. All of the early pioneers just constantly losing
Speaker 4: eyebrows and you know, fingers and all the rest of it.
Speaker 4: So it took a very long time. You know, the
Speaker 4: first commercial machine was the eighteen fifties. It doesn't become
Speaker 4: domesticated something that we can actually have in our homes
Speaker 4: until the nineteen twenties, so that's one hundred years ago.
Speaker 4: It's 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 4: Well, so, I was an embarrassingly long way through the
Speaker 4: writing of this book when I realized I too, really
Speaker 4: didn't understand how to make cold. I was like Galileo,
Speaker 4: I had no idea. You know. I was looking at
Speaker 4: how cold had reshaped what we eat, and where it's grown,
Speaker 4: and how it tastes, and how good it is for
Speaker 4: us and the planet. But I didn't understand how we
Speaker 4: made it. So a friend of a friend runs an
Speaker 4: HVAC startup and he said, well, come to my garage.
Speaker 4: We can build a fridge. And I was like, you
Speaker 4: can't just build a fridge. But it turns out you
Speaker 4: can now. To be fair, this was a bit more
Speaker 4: like when you make dinner from you know, jarred pasta
Speaker 4: sauce and a retisserie chicken and some pre washed you know,
Speaker 4: spinach leaves. Was something I wasn't actually building all the
Speaker 4: elements from scratch. So we had purchased a compressor. We
Speaker 4: had purchased an evaporator. We had purchased the various there's
Speaker 4: sort of four main components, and what we did was
Speaker 4: join them up in such a way and then charge
Speaker 4: it with refrigerant, which is the chemical that evaporates under
Speaker 4: pressure to create the cooling effect. Because if any of
Speaker 4: your listeners are like me and have no idea what
Speaker 4: cold is, still it's it's just the absence of heat.
Speaker 4: And so cooling is that sense of loss as you
Speaker 4: remove heat. And so what you want to do, if
Speaker 4: you remember from high school physics, which I completely did not,
Speaker 4: is when a liquid evaporates into a gas that takes energy,
Speaker 4: and you suck that energy in from the atmosphere around
Speaker 4: you as heat energy, thus creating the sort of sense
Speaker 4: of losses. All that heat energy is pulled away the
Speaker 4: cooling and so it's a really simple system. The trick is,
Speaker 4: of course, to create you know, you do that once.
Speaker 4: That's what William Cullen did in seventeen fifty five. The
Speaker 4: trick is to keep doing it and create a circuit
Speaker 4: where it just goes round and round and and keeps evaporating.
Speaker 4: But even that is surprisingly simple once you've built it.
Speaker 4: It's just something that I think is so invisible to
Speaker 4: the majority of us that we never think 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 4: It's an astonishing transformation on so many levels. As you say,
Speaker 4: I mean, the problem of getting meat and also dairy
Speaker 4: into cities was really a huge one, not least of
Speaker 4: which was that you then had to slaughter them in
Speaker 4: the city. And so the area around Smithfield Market in
Speaker 4: London or the slaughterhouses in New York was just I mean,
Speaker 4: can you imagine slaughtering enough beef for a city in
Speaker 4: the middle of that city in summer, say, I mean,
Speaker 4: it was nauseating. There was blood, guts, foam, froth, it
Speaker 4: was absolutely horrific. And bringing meat from places like Argentina,
Speaker 4: New Zealand Australia, where there was vast amount of land
Speaker 4: not a lot of people. It lowered the price of
Speaker 4: meat immediately, I mean by a quarter at least, and
Speaker 4: so suddenly poor people who had not been able to
Speaker 4: have meat except on very special occasions could dine on
Speaker 4: meat frequently. You know, red meat consumption went through the roof.
Speaker 1: And today we think of one of the climate solutions
Speaker 1: is to try and eat less red meat because it
Speaker 1: produces so much greena's 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 science
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 comes from meat.
Speaker 4: Right. This is sort of a sad mistake in the
Speaker 4: history of science. Chemistry was a relatively recent field of
Speaker 4: research in the eighteen hundreds. You know, previously there had
Speaker 4: been alchemists and they were trying to turn things into
Speaker 4: gold and find elixirs of eternal life. So it was
Speaker 4: a relatively new field and one of the things that
Speaker 4: chemists were doing. We're trying to sort out what it
Speaker 4: is in food that we need, and in the early
Speaker 4: eighteen hundred some mistaken experiments led them to the conclusion
Speaker 4: that actually it was only protein. Carbohydrate and fat were
Speaker 4: just sort of nice to have, not necessary, and no
Speaker 4: one knew about vitamins. Vitamins didn't come along until the
Speaker 4: nineteen thirties, so protein was the be all and end all,
Speaker 4: And that discovery coincided with the expansion of cities to
Speaker 4: the first time that London was sort of going from
Speaker 4: a million people to two million people to three million people,
Speaker 4: the largest cities the world had ever seen. And as
Speaker 4: we talked about, getting meat into cities is really hard.
Speaker 4: So you have this sudden sort of scientific realization that
Speaker 4: if we were to have, you know, strong men to
Speaker 4: work in factories and make the nation great, they must
Speaker 4: be fed with protein, and the fact that we can't
Speaker 4: get protein to them, so it was an utter panic.
Speaker 4: Of course, you know, they could have had lentils, but
Speaker 4: the scientists at the time weren't looking at lentils for
Speaker 4: their protein content. They were looking at beef. So I mean,
Speaker 4: we could have had a very different world if those
Speaker 4: scientists had been like we all need to eat lentils.
Speaker 4: It's all a sort of misunderstanding, but it shaped our
Speaker 4: 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 realized this standalone home appliance that
Speaker 1: you have is actually part of a huge system.
Speaker 4: Exactly, yes, And that's why I in the chapter where
Speaker 4: I look at the domestic refrigerator, I call it the
Speaker 4: tip of the iceberg. I mean, within the industry our food,
Speaker 4: our perishable food supply system is called a cold chain,
Speaker 4: with the idea chain that it is connected from your
Speaker 4: farm to your fridge. The domestic fridge is really the
Speaker 4: weak link because once you pick it up the supermarket,
Speaker 4: then it sits in your car or in your bike
Speaker 4: rack or you know, shopping bag and isn't refrigerated on
Speaker 4: its way home. But up until that point, say a
Speaker 4: green bean within an hour or two of harvest kind
Speaker 4: have been brought down to a certain temperature and kept
Speaker 4: there all the way to supermarket shelves. So I ended
Speaker 4: up seeing it as a sort of distributed winter. And
Speaker 4: it's entirely connected by this network of refrigerated chipping containers
Speaker 4: and ships and trucks and trains, but it isn't visible
Speaker 4: as one gigantic winter. It's a series of sort of
Speaker 4: pockets of cold. This artificial winter that our food spends
Speaker 4: time in, moves around in. It's actually enormous, but because
Speaker 4: you never see it as a connected whole, you 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 4: Yes, it's a difficult one to get an exact number on,
Speaker 4: and of course you're not taking into accounts sort of
Speaker 4: the expanded emissions that come from, say, being able to
Speaker 4: eat more red meat because you can cool it. So
Speaker 4: leaving aside those sort of knock on effects, cold storage
Speaker 4: companies are currently the third highest industrial consumers of energy,
Speaker 4: so the power to run cooling equipment is more than
Speaker 4: eight percent of global electric usage right now.
Speaker 1: There's energy used. But of course there's another warming impact
Speaker 1: to consider in refrigeration, and that's to do with the refrigerant.
Speaker 1: The gas that moves around, is compressed, is evaporated. In
Speaker 1: the early days, that gas was a poisonous gas, typically
Speaker 1: ammonia or sulfur dioxide, and it caused a bunch of
Speaker 1: accidents and the industry was forced to find an alternative,
Speaker 1: which it did and was pretty effective, except it was chlorofluorocarbons,
Speaker 1: which turned out to not be poisonous but created a
Speaker 1: hole in the ozone layer. So one of the most
Speaker 1: successful environmental treaty comes out of that desire to change
Speaker 1: the refrigerant one more time, from CFCs to what became hfc's,
Speaker 1: which did not create a hole in the ozone layer,
Speaker 1: but are super warming gases. There are thousands of times
Speaker 1: more warming ton for ton for CO two. Now we
Speaker 1: are at that point we need to eliminate hfc's as well.
Speaker 1: So what are the choice of refrigerants that we have
Speaker 1: today and what does innovation look like?
Speaker 4: So, yeah, that's a great question. There are lower global
Speaker 4: warming potential as they call it GWP refrigerants coming on
Speaker 4: the market. Many refrigerated warehouses and such like are moving
Speaker 4: to ammonia systems. For example, we're going.
Speaker 1: It's very dangerous, except we can handle it better at
Speaker 1: this time.
Speaker 4: I'm assuming well, I mean, if it leaks. I had
Speaker 4: a graphic description from a guy who runs a refrigerated
Speaker 4: warehouse who said, you know, when you see that white cloud,
Speaker 4: you're seeing death. It wants your crevices. Apparently, it goes
Speaker 4: for your eyeballs. It's just really a nasty chemical. And
Speaker 4: so one of the problems actually is that the coal
Speaker 4: chain is expanding everywhere. It's expanding even in countries that
Speaker 4: seem as though they already have plenty of refrigerated space,
Speaker 4: such as the United States. But it is expanding fastest
Speaker 4: in parts of the world that don't have a cold
Speaker 4: chain currently, so sub Saharan Africa, large parts of Southeast Asia.
Speaker 4: Those places are building a cold chain from scratch right now.
Speaker 4: And they are also not typically equipped with a lot
Speaker 4: of trained engineers who can work with these dangerous gases,
Speaker 4: and a lot of the replacement refrigerants are much harder
Speaker 4: to use. Flammable, toxic, just difficult and require more sophisticated machinery.
Speaker 4: So it's really a hard thing to replace these HCFCs
Speaker 4: and HFCs with these new refrigerants in places that already
Speaker 4: don't have enough engineers to make the simple non toxic
Speaker 4: refrigerants work. So that's one of the huge issues. And
Speaker 4: actually now there's a huge black market in hdfc's and
Speaker 4: hfs c's because they're cheaper, easier to use. The old
Speaker 4: equipment runs on them, and so even though they're being
Speaker 4: phased out or even in some cases banned, they're still
Speaker 4: widely traded and widely used because they work and people
Speaker 4: know how to use them. So that's a huge problem.
Speaker 4: But to me, I thought the most interesting thing was
Speaker 4: not to think about the future of refrigeration beyond just okay,
Speaker 4: how do we make a better refrigerant, but can we
Speaker 4: make a better way of cooling? And even beyond that,
Speaker 4: can we make a better way of food preservation? Food
Speaker 4: preservation is the goal here, after all, cooling is just
Speaker 4: how we do it.
Speaker 1: And you also travel 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 travel 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 4: Well, that's changing really really fast. So China made building
Speaker 4: a cold chain, a modern cold chain, part of its
Speaker 4: twelfth five year plan. And you know, when China sets
Speaker 4: out to do something, they really do it. And so
Speaker 4: it took a while and it was uneven. You know,
Speaker 4: the major cities had much better refrigerated facilities. The rural
Speaker 4: areas had nothing, and there were gaps, and you know,
Speaker 4: people would say to me, oh, we would import you know,
Speaker 4: chicken and it would come in beautiful and the port
Speaker 4: would be kept cold, and then we would find it,
Speaker 4: you know, five days later in a rural distribution warehouse
Speaker 4: with just a wet towel over it to keep it
Speaker 4: quote unquote fresh. So it was a work in progress
Speaker 4: when I went, but it's accelerating fast. And I would say, China,
Speaker 4: it's a huge country. It has a huge food system,
Speaker 4: its cold chain is still only one sixth the size
Speaker 4: of the US one, so there's still you could argue
Speaker 4: that the US one is bigger than we need, but
Speaker 4: there's definitely still room for growth in China. But you
Speaker 4: can start seeing that it's really getting there. So for example,
Speaker 4: Washington State cherries used to be air freighted to China
Speaker 4: because they were popular as gifts, and you couldn't get
Speaker 4: decent cherries imported from the countryside in China because the
Speaker 4: cold chain didn't exist to get them to the cities.
Speaker 4: So it's easier to import them air freight them from
Speaker 4: Washington State than bring them in from the countryside in China,
Speaker 4: just because the cold chain wasn't there. That's changing, so
Speaker 4: now it's making less economic sense to air freight them,
Speaker 4: and as the cold chain is built up in China,
Speaker 4: more economic sense to bring them in from the countryside.
Speaker 4: And you can see that change in sort of real time.
Speaker 4: Washington State farmers are adjusting to that because the cold
Speaker 4: chain in China is picking up.
Speaker 1: After the break. How refrigeration can reduce food waste or
Speaker 1: if you're not careful, increase it.
Speaker 2: 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 Aha. But on food waste itself, there are two
Speaker 1: stories to be total 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 4: Yeah, it's a really interesting problem. You know. Food waste
Speaker 4: is often touted as the reason to build a cold
Speaker 4: chain in countries like I visited Rwanda with a un
Speaker 4: sponsored sort of effort to bring the cold chain. I mean,
Speaker 4: people are losing thirty to forty percent of the harvest
Speaker 4: before it ever gets to market. Now, that's a horrific
Speaker 4: waste in a country as poor, and you can't afford
Speaker 4: to be losing that much food. So you can see
Speaker 4: why there's a desire for a cold chain. The problem,
Speaker 4: as you say, is that in the developed world, we
Speaker 4: are throwing away thirty to forty percent of our food.
Speaker 4: At the retail and consumer end. The abundance that refrigeration
Speaker 4: has given us is translated into a sort of lack
Speaker 4: of care, a willingness to waste. The food is so
Speaker 4: plentiful and so cheap that people would rather go and
Speaker 4: buy something else, I mean, honestly, rather than sniff their milk,
Speaker 4: because obviously sniffing off milk will kill you. Everyone knows
Speaker 4: that they would rather pour it out and buy you know,
Speaker 4: just trust the cell by label and buy another pint.
Speaker 4: And that's that isn't an impact of refrigeration too. So
Speaker 4: some of the things I looked at here are first
Speaker 4: of all, sell by dates ridiculous. There is no sort
Speaker 4: of logic to them. I mean, in the US, it's
Speaker 4: a particular mess you have because it can be state
Speaker 4: by state. So in Montana milk will expire a week
Speaker 4: earlier than it will in the rest of the country.
Speaker 4: There's nothing particularly you know, poisonous to milk about Montana.
Speaker 4: It's just the system. So that's ridiculous. You know, people
Speaker 4: have tried to come up with all kinds of smart
Speaker 4: fridges and technological solutions. Here, to my mind, the things
Speaker 4: that work most effectively are actually ways to save food
Speaker 4: from the refrigerator and make it visible. So there's a
Speaker 4: few different things. I mean, one, there's a quote from
Speaker 4: an architect I love that says small fridges make good cities.
Speaker 4: But we know this with motorways. When you build a
Speaker 4: bigger motorway, you get more traffic. Is what actually happens.
Speaker 4: People think it's going to be great and you know
Speaker 4: traffic what No, it's the theory of induced demand. Well
Speaker 4: it applies to fridges too. As your fridge expands, you
Speaker 4: just stock get and then more goes to waste, and
Speaker 4: so small fridges shopping on a more frequent basis, so
Speaker 4: you have to go to the store and you're actually
Speaker 4: thinking about what you're going to eat for dinner. That evening,
Speaker 4: rather than shopping for some distant sort of two week
Speaker 4: horizon when obviously things are going to change and you're
Speaker 4: not going to feel like, I don't know, spaghetti bolone
Speaker 4: is when it turns out to be a sunny weekend,
Speaker 4: you know. And so so a lot of those sorts
Speaker 4: of things are important in people's minds. A fridge nowadays
Speaker 4: is actually like a bank vault, like you put things
Speaker 4: in it and they stay safe. That's not actually the case.
Speaker 4: The you know, the produce is still dying. The meat,
Speaker 4: the bacteria on the meat are still reproducing. It's just
Speaker 4: happening more slowly. But it is not a safety vault
Speaker 4: that will keep your food good forever. And so I
Speaker 4: think I find keeping food out of the fridge. Not
Speaker 4: milk and meat obviously, but fruit and vegetables actually reminds
Speaker 4: you that it's there. It tastes better when you eat it.
Speaker 4: As tomatoes, peaches, things like that should never be in
Speaker 4: the fridge anyway. That knocks out their flavor producing mechanisms.
Speaker 4: They will taste worse. Bread should never be in the fridge, potatoes, onions,
Speaker 4: these things should never be in the fridge. So yes,
Speaker 4: saving food from the fridge shopping, buying less those kinds
Speaker 4: of things. One of the refrigeration experts I spoke to
Speaker 4: found that she's working on a project that was using
Speaker 4: urban agriculture, not to try and feed the city because
Speaker 4: you can't do it at that scale, but as a
Speaker 4: way to remind people, oh, right, this is living produce.
Speaker 4: It is fresh when it is harvested, and it isn't
Speaker 4: fresh a week later, and once you are aware of
Speaker 4: the work that goes in the seasonality things like that,
Speaker 4: people were wasting less food. That was what she found.
Speaker 4: So growing food actually had the benefit of people wasting
Speaker 4: less food.
Speaker 1: Writing this book, did it change the way you eat?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 4: It did. I mean I was already you know, I
Speaker 4: make a podcast about food science and history. I write
Speaker 4: about food, so I was already a relatively conscious of
Speaker 4: sort of thinking about where my food came from and
Speaker 4: things like that. But and you know, knowing what's in
Speaker 4: season when and such like. But absolutely it made me
Speaker 4: much more aware of the fact that say you buy
Speaker 4: a bag of spinach, you put it in your fridge,
Speaker 4: you eat it a week later, you're patting yourself on
Speaker 4: the back, thinking you did yourself. You know, a favor
Speaker 4: there you had a healthy bag of spinach. You didn't
Speaker 4: waste it, You got all those vitamins. No, after a
Speaker 4: week in your fridge, that spinach has half the vitamins
Speaker 4: and minerals it did when you first bought it. So
Speaker 4: having that realization, I think seeing those statistics, it reinforced
Speaker 4: the fact that it's not getting any better in the fridge. Now,
Speaker 4: something's get better in the fridge. A curry left over night,
Speaker 4: that gets better. But you know, as bolonnaise sauce, yes,
Speaker 4: because you know, the fat and the collagen has time
Speaker 4: to sort of solidify and then redisperse and it becomes silkier.
Speaker 4: But fruit and vegetables, no, don't stockpile them, you know,
Speaker 4: buy it and eat it. So it really has changed
Speaker 4: sort of how I shop and eat. And it has
Speaker 4: definitely made me focus on seasonality too, Like I just
Speaker 4: don't eat apples outside of the autumn. And you know what,
Speaker 4: that's great because there's other fruits you can have in
Speaker 4: the summer and other fruits. I have citrus in the
Speaker 4: spring and I have berries in the summer. And it's
Speaker 4: annoying and obnoxious and I try not to be preachy
Speaker 4: about it, but also it all tastes better, like you
Speaker 4: really don't need to have a tomato and December it's
Speaker 4: 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 2: 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: nicholas 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 Powman and head of Talk is Brendan newnam Our.
Speaker 1: Theme music is composed by Wonderley Special Thanks to Kira Bendrum,
Speaker 1: Aaron Rudkoff and Matthew Griffith.
Speaker 2: I am Ashadrati back so