Frostbitten

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.