A Chilling Tale
Reviewing a timely and thought-provoking book
As much of the Northern Hemisphere swelters in record heat, it’s a perfect time to ponder what our lives would be like if it weren’t for refrigeration.
Happily, author Nicola Twilley has done a stellar job of pondering for us, and the results are in her highly readable and very informative new book, FROSTBITE: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves.
Going into this book, I had a rough idea of how people coped with keeping food cool and fresh before we enjoyed the convenience of refrigerators: storing chunks of frozen pond ice from the previous winter, or relying on subterranean caves and evaporative cooling. I’ve seen old iceboxes in museums and antique stores, and visited ice-houses in the back gardens of stately European estates.
But before I read Twilley’s deeply researched book, I had no idea how our food, our eating habits, and what she calls “the international cold chain” have changed as a result of humanity harnessing the power of cold generated through electricity and compressors.
Here are just a few of the insights she reveals:
· There are vast orange juice reserves in the US, where brown pulp sits waiting in the…
