Artificial Cryosphere

Fridges​ are boxes in which we put food and forget about it. That is both their wonder and their defect. The Italian sociologist Girolamo Sineri claimed that the act of preserving food is ‘anxiety in its purest form’. The domestic refrigerator allows us to shed much of that anxiety or to transform it into the guilt that comes from scraping yet another bag of slimy, uneaten lettuce into the compost, because we outsourced our worries about preserving food to that chilly box in the corner of the kitchen.

Not all countries are entirely reliant on refrigeration. In the stalls of the souks in Marrakech, fridges seem to be used only for Coca-Cola and water, while everything from haunches of meat to giant pyramids of olives is sold at room temperature. There is a sense of urgency about the selling of food. Pomegranate juice is squeezed on the spot and served warm, because the vendors don’t have ice. Men sell oysters from carts, shucking them one by one in the winter sun. Others gut shiny fish at stalls whose only refrigeration is a dwindling pile of crushed ice. In Jemaa el-Fnaa, the main square, herb stalls sell multiple varieties of mint, sage, verbena: a fraction of the price and double the quality of the same herbs in Britain, and incomparably more fragrant.

In Marrakech, when food or drink is fresh, it is really fresh; but when it isn’t fresh, it is rotten. Or dried. The herb sellers can turn their unsold wares into giant bags of dried mint and verbena, intended for tea. Women sit in front of piles of round flat loaves which must be sold today, before they stale. The fruit and vegetable sellers need to sell their stock fresh, or it is wasted. I saw many bunches of blackened bananas, wrinkled grapes that were turning into accidental raisins and wilting salad greens. Moroccan newspapers regularly report the seizure by the authorities of large consignments of spoiled food, from eggs to dates.

This semi-refrigerated way of life – which is common in middle-income countries – has long vanished from the UK, though many of us remember the warm-blood smell of the butcher’s shop, the sometimes rancid taste of butter, the cheesy aroma of bottles of school milk during break-time in summer. Do you recall the days in the 1980s when British ice-cream cones were rectangular rather than round, because the only way to fit ice cream into a tiny domestic freezer compartment was for it to be oblong-shaped, designed for slicing rather than scooping? These blocks – known unappetisingly as ‘cutting bricks’ – came in the standard flavours of the postwar decades: ‘Neapolitan’, synthetic ‘vanilla’ and so on. If you had to pick one, raspberry ripple was the winner: the jammy swirls of fake raspberry goo distracted from the oily dullness of the ice cream itself. In 1948, more than half of Americans but only 2 per cent of British households owned a fridge. By 1970, fridge ownership in the UK had increased to 60 per cent, but the only freezer most people had was a compartment at the top of the fridge, furred with sleety crystals and scarcely big enough for a bag of frozen peas and a small ice-cube tray.

In Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet and Ourselves, Nicola Twilley argues that at each stage of its development, modern refrigeration has driven us to eat and behave in ways we wouldn’t have chosen if we could design the system from scratch. To take just one example, she explains that refrigeration is the main reason that so many commercial tomatoes are flavourless. It isn’t just that the volatile aromas in a ripe tomato are killed by the cold, or that the ripeness may be generated by ethylene rather than the sun, but that most of the tomatoes grown commercially don’t have the ‘genetic capacity’ to be delicious, as the plant breeder Harry Klee told Twilley. Tomatoes, she writes, are bred for ‘the sturdiness to be shipped and stored under refrigeration’. The important thing is that, at the moment of purchase, a consumer should deem the tomato red and perfect, even if it is left to spoil after it reaches the salad drawer at home.

One way to measure economic development is to look at the way people use their fridges (if they have them). Twilley interviewed a London portfolio manager called Tassos Stassopoulos who researches consumer behaviour around fridges as a way of spotting investment opportunities in emerging markets. Stassopoulos told Twilley that he realised ‘the fridge could tell me how people would behave once they had some extra money – before they even know it themselves.’ When a poor family buy their first fridge, it is mostly used to increase efficiency, to store leftovers and ingredients for cooking. As people enter the middle classes, the fridge fills up with indulgences such as beer, ice cream and soft drinks. When households become more affluent still, the shelves contain items marketed as healthy – probiotic yoghurts, for example – and foods from other cultures. In the final stage of affluence, the fridge is full of ingredients that signal virtue: organic vegetables and fair-trade products in reusable packaging. ‘This is where the Nordics are,’ according to Stassopoulos, while ‘India is mostly in the efficiency stage, China is at the indulgence stage, and Brazil is already on the healthy stage.’

You might think that fridges and freezers have enabled us to eat more of the foods that we always wanted to eat, and made them available more of the time. But it would be equally true to say that refrigeration has dictated and shaped most of what is consumed in the developed world. Once a person gets a fridge, as Twilley writes, they feel an urge to fill it with stuff, some of which they have never eaten or drunk before: frozen orange juice (first marketed in the US in 1946), fish fingers (1953), cartons of sweetened yoghurt (1963), bags of mixed salad (1989). When someone gets a bigger fridge, they don’t just fill it with more stuff, but start to shop and cook (or not cook) in a different way, relying more on large or online supermarkets and less on markets and independent shops. In the 1950s, Twilley writes, the average British housewife made seven trips to the grocer and three trips to the butcher every week. But Britain now depends on a vast and mostly invisible ‘cold chain’: many of the ‘fresh’ products we consume have travelled across the world as refrigerated cargo and then spent weeks or months in colossal cold storage facilities before reaching us.

The ‘artificial cryosphere’ – Twilley’s name for this system of chilled and frozen warehouse space – is vast and still growing: it increased globally by nearly 20 per cent between 2018 and 2020. Twilley spent a week working in a refrigerated warehouse in California owned by Americold, a company that globally ‘maintains 1.5 billion cubic feet of cold, storing everything from ground beef destined for school lunch programmes to frozen lobsters on their way to upscale restaurant chains’. She saw pallets of Argentinian peanut butter paste intended for M&M’s; barrels of frozen guava juice for smoothies; a forty-foot tower of Asian shrimp and imitation crab meat; boxes containing bull pizzles, hearts and livers to be transformed into burger meat; and ‘entire lamb carcasses from New Zealand, wrapped in canvas and nestled together nose to tail on the wooden pallet, as if sharing a bunk bed’.

What goes on in these refrigerated units is even further from most of our minds than what really happens on a farm. As one of Twilley’s fellow workers said, ‘You see the guys in the store filling the shelves, but how did it get to them? No one ever thinks about that.’ On the upside, the facility manager claims that his workers look unusually youthful, their skin preserved by the ice. But some of them get so cold they have icicles on their moustaches and Twilley is told that ‘freezer flu’ is an occupational hazard of working at sub-zero temperatures, along with getting injured because of slower reaction times while handling heavy machinery in the cold. Another downer is the smell, which one worker described to her as ‘cardboard, wood, foam insulation, oil, and what I always just think of as the smell of cold’. Before reading Twilley’s book, I had imagined that these places wouldn’t smell of anything much. But apparently some frozen foods are surprisingly pungent and can transfer flavours if they’re not carefully handled: ice cream can’t be stored in the same room as pizza, for example, lest it absorb the garlicky pong.

These cold warehouses and the refrigerated trucks that disperse their produce are what Twilley calls the ‘missing middle’ in the modern food system. It’s impossible fully to understand either the production or consumption of food without them. Twilley says that she got interested in refrigeration around fifteen years ago while thinking about the ‘farm-to-table’ movement, an idea associated with American chefs including Alice Waters and Dan Barber and food writers such as Michael Pollan. ‘I got stuck on the conjunction,’ Twilley writes. ‘What about the to?’ The farm-to-tablers drew attention to the disconnect between eaters and farmers. Twilley’s well-researched project is subtly and importantly different. She shows that modern eaters are ignorant not just of farming but of the vast and wintry logistics that bring farm produce to our plates and determine the form and content of much of our diets.

The impact of refrigeration isn’t limited to chilled and frozen foods. Bananas are the most popular fruit in the world – they were America’s favourite fruit as early as the 1920s. Even though we store them in fruit bowls at room temperature, the banana’s rise could never have happened without refrigerated transport. Bananas are harvested green and take a couple of weeks at room temperature to ripen. Before the advent of refrigerated steamships in the early 1900s, most of the bananas that made the journey from South to North America arrived brown or rotten. Refrigeration allowed a cargo of green bananas to travel from Costa Rica to New Orleans without a hint of yellowing. The refrigeration on the early ‘banana boats’ had already been used in the meat industry, one of the first parts of the food system to be transformed by refrigeration. In 1880, two-thirds of the meat sold at Smithfield was raised in the UK and most of the rest arrived in the form of live animals from Europe. But a flood of frozen carcasses shipped from South America, New Zealand and Australia meant that, by 1910, nearly half of the meat consumed in Britain was imported and many sheep farmers were driven out of business or chose to emigrate.

There is nothing new about trying to delay the rotting of food: salting and smoking, drying and fermenting are among the oldest food preparation techniques. There is evidence of dried meat (jerky avant la lettre) from as long ago as 12,000 BCE in the Middle East; salted fish goes back to the Sumerians; fruit was preserved in honey by the Greeks. But modern refrigeration aims to preserve food not in a transformed state – like a plum compared with a prune or milk with cheese – but as if harvest-fresh. In the 1920s, some Cambridge scientists at a new unit called the Low Temperature Research Station tried to figure out how cold storage could prolong the life of fruit. Among other annoyances with long-stored fruit, they set out to address ‘woolliness’, ‘brown heart’ and ‘bladderiness’. After many experiments, they found that by chilling apples to 46°F and fiddling with the levels of carbon dioxide and oxygen, they could retrieve apples from storage in March that were as juicy and firm as when they were first picked in October.

The tricks of artificial cold were once regarded with suspicion and awe. Twilley describes the world’s first cold-storage banquet, staged in Chicago in October 1911 by the Poultry, Butter and Egg Association to allay consumer fears that refrigerated food wasn’t safe to eat. The autumn luncheon included butter churned in the summer, eggs laid in the spring and turkey that had been in cold storage for the best part of a year.

More than four hundred guests sat down amid the drapery and gilt of the Hotel Sherman’s Louis XVI room, unfolded their white linen napkins, and, over the course of two hours of what the Egg Reporter later described as ‘unalloyed pleasure’, consumed a five-course meal in which everything except for the olives in their dry martinis had spent between six months and a year in the refrigerated rooms of local cold-storage companies.

More than a hundred years on, the ingredients for this banquet can be obtained from any supermarket and we do not stop to ask when our butter was churned or whether eggs have a season.

During the ten years​ she was working on this book, people used to ask Twilley whether she thought they should get rid of their fridges. To which her answer was: of course not. And yet, for every virtue, refrigeration has a corresponding vice. On the plus side is the astonishing abundance of fresh and nutritious produce now available to us. The negative is that none of it is quite as nutritious as it seems. Spinach loses three-quarters of its vitamin C after a week spent stored in plastic in the fridge. It may still look and smell OK – which is a marvel in itself – but it is not fresh in the sense that newly picked spinach is. By the same token, fridges both prevent food waste and contribute to it. Before the cold chain existed, it was normal to lose at least a third of all fruits and vegetables because they perished en route from the field to the eater. Now, a similar percentage of fresh food is wasted, but by eaters in our own homes.

There had better be alternatives to this vast network of artificial cold, Twilley writes, given that refrigeration plays such a significant role in climate change. The rise of the artificial cryosphere has gone hand in hand with the shrinking of the natural cryosphere: the thawing of glaciers and permafrost. More than 2 per cent of global emissions are caused by the chemicals and energy used to refrigerate food. And yet large swathes of the world still lack refrigeration. The average Chinese person has access to five cubic feet of cold storage space, compared with more than three times as much for the average person in the US, where the vogue is for ever more gargantuan domestic fridges, some of them with French doors, a design launched in 2001 and known in France as the ‘réfrigerateur américain’: a two-doored fridge so vast that it is pretty much guaranteed to make its owner buy too much food and then chuck it.

Economists teach us that everything is a trade-off. The environment would be better off without the cold chain, but living without refrigeration has obvious drawbacks. Twilley travelled to Rwanda, where farmers suffer crippling losses from fresh produce rotting before it reaches the market. There is only one forced-air chiller in the whole country for pre-cooling produce after it is picked, and it is hardly ever used because of the energy costs. Live chickens are still transported on bicycles and slaughtered at home. The plucked, jointed, pre-packaged chicken pieces we are accustomed to cannot exist without the cold chain. A food industry consultant called Mike Moriarty told Twilley that when American companies began shipping chicken parts such as frozen feet to China, the lack of refrigerated storage was a problem: ‘We’d bring these things in, they’re perfect, and three days later, we find out they’re in a room temperature warehouse somewhere with a wet rag thrown over them to keep them “fresh”.’

The question is whether Rwanda – where almost half the population are small-scale farmers – can bring in a form of refrigeration that is less wasteful and harmful than the American or European version. In Rwanda, Twilley saw a lightweight electric truck called the OX, which can get produce to market much faster than the traditional men on bicycles. Some of these OX trucks have solar-powered refrigeration units and so might be able to help small farmers get fragile produce such as green beans to buyers before they spoil. It remains to be seen whether consumers in Rwanda would accept refrigerated food. Just as in the US and UK a century or more ago, cold food is regarded with suspicion. There is a recognition among Rwandan shoppers that refrigerated food is never really fresh. When traders sell consignments of refrigerated food in local markets, they often warm it up in the sun first, to make it more appetising. Rwandans still know something we have long since forgotten: in performing the miracle of preservation – and it really is a miracle – fridges make almost everything taste slightly worse.