Twilley—a frequent contributor to the New Yorker and cohost of the podcast Gastropod, which looks at food through the lens of science and history—offers in her book a behind-the-scenes look at the cold chain, concluding that “our food system is frostbitten: it has been injured by its exposure to cold.” We’ve gained convenience at the expense, she writes, “of diversity and deliciousness.”
Twilley believes that refrigeration is an enabling technology for lots of the downsides we see in our current food system, from the push toward scale and monoculture to a measurable decline in the nutritional value of fruits and vegetables to harmful impacts on our climate. It is such a significant contributor to global warming and ozone depletion, she explains, that Project Drawdown, a climate solutions nonprofit, has pointed to refrigerant management as the No. 1 biggest thing we can do to mitigate climate change.
“Our food system is frostbitten: it has been injured by its exposure to cold.”
We have used refrigeration to solve problems but haven’t done a true accounting of the environmental, nutritional, and even sociocultural costs, Twilley argues. “The goal of my book was to ask, ‘Could we do things better?’”
You spent years researching enclosed spaces for your previous book, Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine, which was co-written with your frequent collaborator and spouse, Geoff Manaugh. It seems like refrigerated food is, in a way, being quarantined.
Yes! Quarantine and refrigeration are both weird ways of using space and time. With refrigeration, you’re building these particular spaces for your food that kind of work as a time machine and allow you to extend the shelf life and also move it around the globe. You’re manipulating geography. In quarantine, you’re using space and time to give you certainty that you won’t get a disease. Both are about control of nature in the end.
COURTESY OF NICOLA TWILLEY
I wouldn’t have thought of refrigeration as a spatial issue, but it makes sense.
I was interested in this idea that there was this vast artificial winter we’d built for our food to live in, this artificial cryosphere that is mostly invisible.
You have to cast your mind back to when I first got interested in this, like 15 years ago. Everyone was talking about “farm to table”—Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, Alice Waters. Every trendy new restaurant was farm-to-table. But the focus was all on the farm, which made me curious about the “to” part—how things move from the farm to the table. Pollan showed us what a feedlot looks like; I thought, maybe I can show people the spaces we’ve built for our food to live in after it’s harvested.
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