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<\/a><\/figure>\nNicola Twilley.\u00a0 Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves.<\/a>\u00a0 Penguin.\u00a0 NY. 2024, pp. 387 ISBN: 9780735223288. <\/p>\n Richard Zimmer.<\/a> Sonoma State University<\/em><\/p>\n The title of Nicola Twilley\u2019s\u00a0 extremely readable and engaging book says it all: refrigeration has changed all aspects of our life.\u00a0 It has shaped the way we keep and cook\u00a0 food\u2014and ourselves\u2014and the ways in which cold has shaped food production, the supply chains, the organization of work and labor, related industries, and also human habitation.\u00a0 Twilley takes us from the beginnings of food preservation to the ways in which food kept cold shapes our ways of life.<\/p>\n She starts by plunging the reader into a deep freezer facility in Ontario, California. It is a highly dangerous world, \u00a0new to her and to most of us\u2014with its own mechanical life, social life, and language.\u00a0 It is also essential as to how different parts of the food chain fit together\u2014from production to packaging to shipping.\u00a0 It is also a model of how countries, \u00a0which have yet to develop such structures, \u00a0are developing their own refrigeration policies and practices.<\/p>\n Next, \u00a0she recounts the history of food preservation, including the various attempts to use ice in this process.\u00a0 \u00a0Ice preservation started thousands of years ago.\u00a0 European Enlightenment scientists began experimenting with gases and later with machinery.\u00a0 It was the development of industrial society in the nineteenth century, documented in chapter two, that first saw increased the demand for transporting existing ice and then for creating ice itself to address the needs of the larger urban society.<\/p>\n Twilley then turns her focus on the changes\u2014social, economic, and political\u2014that a scientific mistake caused in the world in the\u00a0 19th<\/sup> century: \u201c\u2026Justus von Liebig\u2026mistakenly concluded that protein was the only nutritive element in food\u201d (69).\u00a0 Providing protein in the form of meat became the new goal\u2014so as to feed the increasing urban populations of Europe and North America.\u00a0 To\u00a0 provide that protein, whole economies and whole societies and politics changed in European centers and the \u201cfeeder\u201d areas, such as Australia, New Zealand, and the Americas.\u00a0 For example, Irish left Ireland not just because of the potato famine but because of the changes in meat production. And the pressure was on to develop the technology to bring meat to market from afar\u2014and that meant refrigeration.\u00a0 Furthermore, she contends: \u201c\u2026all of these far-reaching and unnecessary consequences of refrigerating meat were spurred in part by a nutritional fallacy: the mistaken conclusion that protein from flesh foods was the only essential nutrient.\u00a0 If chemists had come down in favor of grains and beans instead, \u00a0the world might have looked very different\u201d (82).<\/p>\n Once the idea and practice of refrigeration became accepted by an often-wary public, it began to change again. Initially, various kinds of meats, especially beef and lamb, \u00a0were cold frozen.\u00a0\u00a0 Over time, it was found that aging meats in cold worked better to soften them and prevent unhealthy bacteria from forming.\u00a0 Cold dry aging for meats worked well\u00a0 and is still done\u2014at a\u00a0 significantly higher labor cost (104 et seq.<\/u><\/em>)\u00a0 New forms of cutting and packaging meats simplified the process.\u00a0 But it meant more semi-and unskilled workers in the slaughterhouses and packaging plants.\u00a0 Refrigeration \u00a0has meant that cattle, lamb, pork, and chicken have become the largest animal populations on Earth\u2014while fish have decreased by half (105-108). This is happening with significant environmental consequences.\u00a0<\/p>\n Twilley then explores what refrigeration (and packaging)\u00a0 have done to and for fruits and vegetables.\u00a0 Produce ripens differently from meat.\u00a0 And each type of produce has its own trajectory. \u00a0Lettuce originally was shipped with ice\u2014hence, \u201ciceberg lettuce.\u201d\u00a0 Later, refrigeration addressed how to keep the different varieties of lettuce \u201cfresh.\u201d Refrigeration also caused systemic changes:\u00a0 California\u2019s Salinas Valley produces 70% of the country\u2019s crop.\u00a0 And packaged salads required the development of special plastic bags.<\/p>\n Twilley goes on to explore how different varieties of apples could be kept from ripening too early. The ones that stayed unripe longer, like many other fruits, could be sold all year long.\u00a0 \u00a0The same is true of bananas.\u00a0 Wha happens, however, is that only some varieties of produce respond to refrigeration:\u00a0 \u201cThe abundance that refrigeration promises is accompanied by a diminishment in both diversity add deliciousness, the stability it brings to the marketplace comes at the cost of greater risk, and its assurance of plenty is undercut by increased vulnerability\u201d (160).<\/p>\n Nevertheless, people\u00a0 anywhere in the world can now enjoy produce all year long.\u00a0\u00a0 Twilley paints an exciting\u00a0 and fascinating account of the\u00a0 century long development of refrigerated shipping, \u00a0storage, and finished food preparation. Tne result is that countries and regions become specialized in specific crop production, processing, and storage. \u00a0\u201cCalifornia is increasingly outperformed by its understudies: today more than half the fruit and nearly a third of the vegetables eaten in the United States are imported\u201d (188). \u00a0The finished food preparation meant the explosive production of frozen meals and the resultant changes in lifestyles of people.\u00a0<\/p>\n Previous offshoring meant also changes in land use and labor. Covid and other threats to the supply chain necessitate a re-evaluation of offshoring of any products, in this case food \u00a0(References 1 and 2 ).\u00a0 One emerging solution is urban farming (Reference 3).<\/p>\n Cold storage continues to determine where foods are kept and from where they are shipped.\u00a0 In the US, the Central States are a major hub.\u00a0 Missouri, for example, has caves which are centrally located, \u00a0and transportation, such as the old Route 66\u2014Interstate\u00a0 40.\u00a0 Ports get fitted and repurposed along the East Coast as well.\u00a0 And, Twilley adds, similar changes are occurring in China\u00a0 (211 et seq.<\/u><\/em>)<\/p>\n Refrigeration had made it possible for food to be delivered to consumers as fresh or frozen.\u00a0 Twilley then examines what changes occurred in their lives because food could be kept cold.\u00a0 Home refrigerators changed from being ice boxes\u00a0 to centers of \u00a0a person\u2019s or family\u2019s life.\u00a0 A refrigerator could be\u00a0 a display of a \u00a0person\u2019s persona,\u00a0 It could show how much money they are willing to spend and what their taste is.\u00a0 It could also be the person\u2019s or family\u2019 art gallery on its door. It could be the\u00a0 repository of what someone eats, how they think about\u00a0 food, and what the\u00a0 person \u00a0throws away.\u00a0 Twilley\u00a0 notes the UCLA Anthropology Department\u2019s study of how people use their\u00a0 cold machines to prioritize their food purchases and usages.\u00a0 \u00a0Extra space meant more buying, including more wastage because, even with the cold, food did spoil or did not keep.\u00a0 William Rathje, the Garbologist,\u00a0 found that people thought that they did not waste food\u2014but they did.\u00a0 Middle class people wasted more than lower class and upper-class people (233-4).\u00a0 And visual innovations, such as lazy Susan trays did not always help.\u00a0 Moreover, grocers did not want to share expiration dates with refrigerator manufacturers, because a consumer throwing away food does not hurt their profits (235).<\/p>\n Refrigerating everything has sparked a counter-refrigeration revolution. Not\u00a0 everything that is now in the refrigerator, many advocates say, should be there.\u00a0 Some, like apples, \u00a0do well in semi-outside settings, and some, like root vegetables, \u00a0do better standing up in the way they originally grew.\u00a0\u00a0 Cool places in cubbies and counters can provide an appropriate location (243).\u00a0 One is reminded of vegetable cellars in farm areas and the\u00a0 below-the-kitchen window little enclaves in urban areas of the early Twentieth Century.\u00a0<\/p>\n Refrigeration changed what we eat and drink and when we eat it.\u00a0 Twilley points to the cheeseburger as an example.\u00a0 Its various components are a result of components that arrive from their sources and are frozen or refrigerated at different times of the year (244).\u00a0 Refrigeration made cold beer easily possible.Refrigeration allowed for new combinations of food, including leftovers.\u00a0<\/p>\n But is refrigeration the\u00a0 solution to storage, the cure-all?\u00a0 \u201cUltimately, it seems as if the short-term health benefits of refrigeration\u2014a reduction in illness and death from bacterial infections, a reduction in cases of stomach cancer,\u00a0 and some additional animal protein to grow a little stronger and taller\u2014might yet\u00a0 prove to have been offset by its downsides\u201d (274). Twilley draws on medical, food production, and economic research and ties it to several centuries of food production and consumption to suggest this.\u00a0\u00a0 Preindustrial Western countries had preservatives and more variety of food.\u00a0 Industrialization destroyed this.\u00a0 Refrigeration did help restore some of the deficits caused by its lack, such as a person\u2019s height.\u00a0 It may have taken away the necessary microbes that affect physical, elevating inflammation, \u00a0and mental health.\u00a0 It may also encourage fast-food consumption because refrigerated produce has lost its taste.\u00a0 And it may have encouraged more consumption of sweet drinks because cold \u201c\u2026inadvertently led us to prefer sweeter food\u201d (272).\u00a0<\/p>\n The Global North and certain parts of the \u201cdeveloped\u201d Global South are also beneficiaries of air conditioning.\u00a0 Together with the advantages of refrigeration for foodstuffs, they are living in a new\u00a0 era:\u00a0 the \u201cComfortocene\u201d (Barber 2023).\u00a0 For the first time in human history, people can adjust the climate and their world to their\u00a0 pleasure\u2014but at a great cost in energy and resources.\u00a0<\/p>\n Twilley then addresses the whole world and the future \u00a0\u00a0in terms of refrigeration.\u00a0 The Global South does not have adequate refrigeration.\u00a0 Consequently, there is more spoilage.\u00a0 Exciting initiatives, such as ACES-the Africa Center of Excellence for Sustainable Cooling and Cold Chain in Rwanda, are experimenting with different kinds of refrigeration as well as moving foodstuffs\u00a0 from source to consumer (298 et seq.<\/u><\/em>)\u00a0\u00a0 But still larger problems remain, not just in that area but for the planet as a whole\u2014the different compounds for refrigerants and the massive amounts of energy necessary to cool foodstuffs for an increasing population (295-297).\u00a0 The implications for climate change, Twilley argues, are serious.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n So, too, are getting people to change what they cool or freeze to eat and where they do those activities.\u00a0 Many people are trying to develop new forms of refrigeration as well as trying to convince people to use these forms.\u00a0 One might include\u00a0 communal coolers.\u00a0\u00a0 So far there are no major breakthroughs. Another is to preserve food by coating the outside in an edible acceptable powder because preservation is dependent on oxygen ( cf<\/u><\/em>. 305-6).\u00a0 Another approach is to get people in the Global North to synchronize themselves with the seasonality of foods, a practice lost with the advent of refrigeration (312).<\/p>\n Twilley ends her journey with another window of hope and warning. She recounts her visit to the seed bank in Northern Norway.\u00a0 All the world\u2019s plants seeds are there.\u00a0 After her visit, she foresees the future and argues that\u00a0 that future is in significant part dependent on how all the nations of the world develop refrigeration policies that affect the climate and environment (321).<\/p>\n This is a book appropriate for all levels of university students and for the general reader.\u00a0 It is of particular use for anthropologists and social scientists of food and nutrition, work, economic issues, development, agriculture, and gender.\u00a0 It offers excellent views of the people and places involved in the world of refrigeration as well as an excellent history of the process.\u00a0 Lastly, it provides resources for further research.<\/p>\n References Cited<\/strong><\/p>\n Daniel Barber.\u00a0 Modern Architecture and Climate: Design Before Air Conditioning.\u00a0 Princeton University Press\u00a0 2021.\u00a0 Princeton, New Jersey.<\/p>\n Cited Sites:<\/p>\n 1<\/p>\n https:\/\/www.usda.gov\/media\/press-releases\/2022\/06\/01\/usda-announces-framework-shoring-food-supply-chain-and-transforming<\/a><\/p>\n (Accessed Dec. 10, 2024)<\/a><\/p>\n 2<\/p>\n