Almost a decade ago, in a maneuver that I still find myself impressed with, I leveraged a connection at a corporate PR agency to get a warm introduction to the Director of Terminal Operations at the biggest shipping terminal in New York City. It was an incredible opportunity: an excuse to book a world-class nerd field trip, and a couple of weeks later I found myself behind the wheel of a thirteen-passenger van, weaving between stacks of intermodal containers, dodging semi-trucks while our tour guide gestured at the remote-operated container lifts hovering above us.
I believe it was on that trip that I learned about a book project which I have anticipated ever since: Nicola Twilley's Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. I had by that time become a fan of Nicky's writing, and of the way she illuminates critical — but often overlooked — parts of the built world. And ever since she mentioned that she was writing a book on refrigeration, I've wanted to talk with her about it.
When the SOW Members' Reading Group finally spoke with Nicky, a few weeks ago, she was preparing to visit the Klamath Dam removal project — the largest dam removal in the history of the US, and one which she spoke about in terms of both its climate impact and the way it affects local food systems. Throughout our conversation she brought a nuanced and thoughtful perspective, peppered through with enthusiasm and moments of absolute clarity. The transcript below has been condensed and lightly edited for readability.
Spencer Wright: I'm curious how you initially found this topic. You say something in the book about the farm-to-table movement, and how the “to” part of that phrase represents the cold chain, but I'm wondering how you initially thought of this as a book-length research topic — and then how you approached it.
Nicola Twilley:
So the secret story, which I never tell in interviews because it's too in the weeds, is that my husband, Geoff Manaugh, was doing a fellowship at the Canadian Center for Architecture. At the time I wanna say they were planning an exhibition about military architecture, but I just remember walking past an ideas board with loads of post-its on it, and there was one post-it that said “Architecture of the Rear.” I had already been musing about the farm-to-table movement, and was trying to understand its supply lines, and when I saw that phrase I was like, "Oh, that's refrigerated warehouses. They are the architecture of the rear."
The other piece, which I either do or don't include depending on whether I think people will have heard of them, is that I really wanted to work with the Center for Land Use Interpretation. It's this organization based here in LA that documents the American landscape by its uses. It has a sort of faux clinical style; you'll have CLUI exhibitions on gas stations or golf courses or abandoned shopping malls or planned subdivisions — all kinds of phenomena of the American landscape. And I was like, "Oh, I think I've got it. [Laughs] This would make a perfect exhibition for them: We're gonna do refrigerated warehouses." And CLUI was super into it.
So that's how it started — it was just going to be an exhibition. But then I saw a story about the cold chain in China, and how China had made the cold chain part of their 12th five year plan. And I was like, "Oh, wow, having surveyed America's cold scape, wouldn't it be amazing to see what it looks like to build one from scratch?" So I pitched that to a fellowship call at UC Berkeley, and the minute I shared the idea and why I was excited about it, everyone was like, "Well, that's not an article, that's a book." I hadn't written a book at that time, but when I was writing feature articles I already had the tendency to turn in 10,000 words when I'd been asked for 5,000. So I was heading toward long form and just not realizing what made the difference.
SW: What *does* make the difference? How did you evolve as a writer throughout this process?
A lot. The feature article I wrote about China's coldscape was the first serious feature article I had written. I had no idea what I was doing, and there are so many things I've learned that make my life easier. I was reporting based on what I thought was interesting, not on what was going to make a good reading experience. And that has really shifted. I think I'm still following my own curiosity, and getting all the ideas and excitement that I want, I just also know that I need certain things. It's like when I started Gastropod [Nicola's excellent podcast about food], and I had been so focused on print beforehand, and I suddenly realized that if it doesn't sound good, you can't use it. It doesn't matter if it was the most interesting thing in the world — you don't have anything!
In my writing, I’ve realized that there's a certain number of people you can fit in an article before people stop being able to follow. It's like, the rules: You're not allowed more than five or six people whose names the reader is supposed to remember in a 5,000 or 6,000 word article. And so if you have a story that requires a cast of characters that's bigger than that, a set of locations that's larger than that, you have a book, actually. It's that simple.
SW: On the thread of making things palatable to readers, I'm wondering if you have a unified mental model of the cold chain. One of the interesting things about it is that it's been built in this really haphazard way, by disconnected and oftentimes competing forces. Do you have a way of thinking of it as a unified whole?
Oh, that's really interesting. The further I got, the less unified it became, and that's partly because people who work in the cold chain don't think about it in a unified way. The refrigerated warehouse people have nothing to do with the truckers, and no interest in the shipping container companies. And, the government isn’t really involved either. I'm speaking to the Global Cold Chain Alliance at their annual conference in a couple of weeks, and you would think, "Okay, the Global Cold Chain Alliance, they must have a unified mental model." But they're like, "Yeah, we don't do transport, really." And they do have Maersk on their board, but they're like, "We're refrigerated warehouses. That's it." And they certainly wouldn't ever think of supermarket chill cabinets, or the Frigidaire folks, or LG, as part of an extended cold chain. I found this very... weird.
This is a very niche architectural reference, but if you’ve seen The Continuous Monument — it was a theoretical drawing of this white, tiled monstrosity. And I think because it's cubed, and white, and spreads across the landscape… The cold chain strikes me as an invisible version of The Continuous Monument. It’s this highway that's running through everything. But that is a very sort of niche personal reference sort of. Anyway, that is sort of how I picture it.
SW: In the first chapter of the book, you established that you're really only talking about food preservation — refrigeration as it applies to food. To Westerners, refrigeration has come to be seen as the main, or maybe the only, way of ensuring freshness for a wide range of foods. Throughout the book, you relate deeply conflicting opinions on this idea: Either refrigeration is the best thing that ever happened to our diets and health, or it's the worst. In an ideal world, what role do you think refrigeration would play in food preservation? And what other technologies and habits do you think might take over parts of what we currently use refrigeration for in the West?
Yeah, it's really interesting. I think that part of the problem I have with refrigeration is that we have conflated it with freshness. And that, as you see from the book, definitely wasn't always the case. In the early days of refrigeration, there was a distinction in people's mind between refrigerated food and fresh food, and refrigerated food by definition was not fresh. That has completely changed. And it was, again, fascinating to see parts of the world where that’s changing right now. In China, you can see younger generations who think food is only fresh if it’s in the refrigerator, and older generations who think it isn't fresh if it’s refrigerated.
I'm actually going into some of the possible alternate technologies now — In the book I profiled Apeel Sciences, but there are others. There's a company using supercritical carbon dioxide that can keep red meat fresh at ambient temperatures for up to a hundred and twenty days. I talked to the head of Meat and Livestock Australia, which is the industry R&D arm there, and they're very excited about this because it could help them export cost-effectively to the Middle East, and to a growing Sub-Saharan African market. Their mandate is to expand red meat consumption, make of that what you will, but anyway, they're very excited about it. But it was really interesting in their report, they were like, "We couldn't use this in Australia because no Australian consumer would buy meat at ambient temperature. It wouldn't be fresh."
And then we talked about it a little bit more, and the guy said, "Listen, if we did use it here in Australia, we would have to ship it around and store it at ambient, then meet the consumer where they're at — and sell it chilled. Consumers do not want to know how things get to them.”
I tell that story because one of the things that I think is so important, and why I wrote this book, is that are not locked into our current system. This is not the only way to deliver perishable food. It's not just that there are alternate ways of creating cooling, which there are, it's that some things don't necessarily need to be cold. The system we have built is not the system we have to continue building. Refrigeration was indeed a great miracle, but it has had costs, and if you don't do an accounting of those costs, then you don't start to think about what alternatives might be better for the job.
SW: Yeah, it's interesting. I obviously think about my refrigerator when I consider my own home energy use, but in terms of total greenhouse impact I was simply not aware that refrigeration played such a big role. I think you put it bigger than either concrete or steel in terms of total CO2 equivalent emissions?
It is.
SW: Which is incredible.
Refrigeration was, very weirdly, only recently on people's radar. I think it is because the vapor compression system, which we've had for a hundred years now, works really well. It's reliable, it's at this point pretty cheap, it's effective, it's quite efficient as a piece of technology. And so if you ignore the climate change implications, it's really great. Yes, there are some issues around how you can't ship all the different kinds of fruits and vegetables, and we end up breeding for shipability, and we lose flavor and nutrients. Yes, there are issues around scaling up; refrigeration doesn't work for the smallest of smallholders, because of the cost of equipment, so you do get this sort of tendency to scale.
So yes, there were issues with refrigeration, but really it was a super great technology until it turned into actually one of our bigger climate change problems. I remember when the Project Drawdown team came out with their list of the top 100 things we could do to mitigate against climate change, and refrigerant management was number one, and they were visibly shocked. They were expecting something more obvious, something that people were talking about. No one even knew what a refrigerant was outside of a niche group.
SW: It strikes me that there's also a macro problem, which I think is embodied really well in a couple of the big infrastructure sites that you visit in the book. The underground refrigerated cave, which stores a lot of cheese, is maybe the most memorable. Could just tell us a little bit more about this cave, and how big pieces of infrastructure like it might hinder our ability to develop alternatives to refrigeration, at least in the Western world, for decades to come?
Yeah, there is a lot of large-scale infrastructure already built, and that is definitely going to have a hindering effect. Which is why going into Rwanda is pretty exciting, because you essentially have a blank slate. The Springfield underground caves, a former limestone mine in Missouri, is... well first of all, the owner was just the most charming guy, and so if you’re in the area I highly recommend shooting him an email and seeing if you can go in. It's still being mined; as new areas get mined out, they get transformed into new refrigerated rooms. But you do feel like you're at the hall of the dwarves in Lord of the Rings or something. You are in this subterranean cathedral-like space, and there are these really big pillars, three stories high, at regular intervals. You tend to not be able to see the end of the room because there's always a mist in the air.
It's strange. There's a beauty to these spaces — because they're kept so cold, there's frost on every surface, so there's this sort of glittering effect as well. And they're always kept quite dark because light emits heat, so it's this dark, frost-covered, endless, echoing, enormous subterranean space, with whatever humidity coalescing into little clouds that get lit by whatever lighting there is. And then all around you are pallet after pallet of cardboard boxes and yellow drums filled with Kraft cheese. I think of it as an industrial sublime. There's some poetry obviously to the caves of cheddar or Gruyère, but the caves of Kraft have their own majesty.
One of the interesting things that came up on my Springfield Underground tour, was that there is a lot of ground underneath Kansas City that can't be defrosted because it has critical infrastructure or buildings on top of it. There's a cold storage facility that I've visited several times in downtown LA — an old one from when cold storages were multi-story buildings in downtowns. They've finally sold the land, and are taking it down for redevelopment. And it has been defrosting for a year at this point, so the ground around it is all frozen. It's an intense process, defrosting a cold storage building.
SW: And so if you wanted to change the way that we store cheese, it would mean... You need to pump this limestone cave full of concrete? It just seems like it's a huge task, because we've built all of this infrastructure, and it’s all pointing in this one direction.
And we are still expanding our cold chain here in the US. At this precise moment, huge, new warehouses are being built all up and down the East coast, thanks to the Panama Canal expansions. And so I feel, at least as we expand, we might want to think about how to do that differently. It's not a blank slate in the US, and it never will be, but we are actually doubling our cold space year on year at the moment. That won't last, but it's a really hot field right now.
When cold storage started, all the cities had pipeline systems, and cold storage facilities delivering cold to nearby businesses and homes. Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, all of them had cold storages. And I've always wondered, if that had remained the model of cold delivery, would we have been able to see refrigeration as more of an interconnected phenomenon? If the cold in our home was literally connected to a cold storage warehouse, would we have understood this as a utility, like electricity or gas? Would we have seen it as something that the government might have a role in regulating, rather than this completely separate commercial business?
James Coleman: In chapter five of the book, there's a sentence that says, "As I built a map of refrigerated warehouses tracing their overlooked geography, the patterns that emerged revealed the underlying logic of our food system, as well as the ebbs and flows of the global economy." Is that map of refrigerated warehouses an actual artifact, or was that more of a mental model? If it's an artifact, can we see it?
Well, this is a little old now so it doesn't, for example, show the big East Coast boom, but we did build a little map for the CLUI exhibition. You can definitely see these clusters of refrigerated warehouses at particular freeway interchanges, at particular production areas — like Ventura County, where all the strawberries are harvested. And then you have these rings around cities as well, so you can see those. And then in LA, where we have this odd system where there’s many cities in one area, you have a weird geography because a lot of cold storage facilities are clustered in one place, Vernon, which has done sweetheart deals and there are like 80 refrigerated warehouses and six people who live there. And then, yeah, Route 66 still has this very dominating force, and you get a lot of refrigerated warehouses.
JC: It seems like you have this desire to go deep into rabbit holes. For the book, how did you decide what to include and what not to include? Is it just your taste, or did you have some other way of sort of figuring out what was worth including?
Well, obviously I let myself go all the way down the rabbit hole, which is why this book was eight years late. I think I said to myself I was never gonna have more than one footnote per page, which meant that I had to kill some darlings there. Geoff Manaugh is my first reader, and he's pretty good about saying things like "Yeah, this is interesting, but it's not taking you in the right direction." But I couldn't throw anything away, so I just have a giant Word document filled with interesting things I couldn't put in the book.
SW: Did writing a book change the way that you write feature articles?
I think it made me realize that I do too much work for feature articles. If a topic is too large, it doesn't make a satisfactory article. It fails to be contained, and feels sort of unsatisfying.
SW: I'm curious how researching this book has affected your personal habits. Does it change the way that you purchase and store and consume food?
I always feel bad answering this question from Los Angeles, because obviously, the produce bounty is real. I think everyone sort of hated on Alice Waters, the Chez Panisse chef, for saying things like, "You should only have a peach during the two weeks of the year when they’re perfect." But I do save my peach-eating for exactly the past couple of weeks in August and then next week or so in September, and then I just will not have a peach again until next season. And that’s really okay with me, because actually I have apples coming up. I am extremely aware of how obnoxious that is, but it also tastes a lot better. I also definitely try to be conscious of the underlying impulse to have a full fridge. When it's empty, you feel like there's nothing to eat — and that's just not true.
SW: I’d love to know about what your hopes for the future are. You've suggested that mostly what you want to do is get people to think about refrigeration, and reconsider the system that we have. What would your hope be for the mix of technologies that we use for food preservation?
I hope that we could take a look at the outcomes we want, the technologies that are available, the costs and benefits that we know come with standard refrigeration, and decide whether they make sense. Especially in a place like Rwanda, which is building its cold chain from scratch, you would say, "Do we need to build this many cold storages, or could we take fruits and vegetables out of the cold chain? Could we actually go to ultra-pasteurization for the milk and take that out of the cold chain? What else" So that's what I would actually hope for — a testbed situation.
This technology, refrigeration, is really 150 years old — 100 years for being completely embedded in our food system. That's not a lot. In the human history of how we have moved and stored food, it's a very short amount of time. It's entirely possible to remake it. I would love us to do that in a thoughtful way. Refrigeration really allowed us not to think about our food at all, and just have this permanent global summertime of abundance. And I think when you're not thinking about your food, well, you are making a huge mistake. Short of breathing, it's your primary relation with the planet — so let's get that right. Let's be thoughtful about it.
Thanks so much to Nicola Twilley for joining us to chat about Frostbite. The Scope of Work Members' Reading Group is now reading Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World; you can join our weekly conversations about the book by becoming a Member today.
