3 Takeaways About Refrigeration

If you’re like me, you probably don’t think about refrigeration much, unless you lose power or your fridge dies. Then you may scramble to keep your perishable food cold so it doesn’t spoil.

So, it might surprise you to know that when mechanical refrigeration was first in use, people had to be convinced to eat refrigerated food because they didn’t think it was fresh. Or that how we stock our fridges says a lot about our socio-economic status – and that at least one person considers it a guide for compatibility in dating.

I learned all this and more from the book Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves by Nicola Twilley. I highly recommend the book, but in the meantime, here are a few of my takeaways.

Rise of the modern meat industry

Here in America (and some other countries), most of us take it for granted that cheap meat – beef, pork, poultry – is available year-round, and that we can purchase it in neat little cellophane packages that make it easy to forget that this was once a living animal.

That wasn’t always the case. Before refrigeration, to prevent meat from spoiling, animals had to be shipped live to their destination – hence the term “livestock”. Only then were they killed and distributed by butchers.

But once refrigerated train cars were available, first cooled with ice and later with mechanical means, animals could be raised and killed in the same place, and then just the meat could be shipped. This was termed the “dead-meat trade”, an accurate if unappetizing description.

The results have not been ideal. Having these centralized slaughter plants led to a rise in pollution, and they also generated the factory farms we have today, where animals are fed grain and oil seed so they grow more quickly and can be killed at a younger age. That allows year-round meat production in large volumes, to the detriment of the animals.

This also means that meat and dairy animals make up a huge percentage of the animals on the planet – 62%, in fact, with another 34% of mammals being humans. All other mammals account for only 4%.

That’s why Vaclav Smil, an environmental scientist, has pointed out that if aliens were to gauge the importance of animals on the planet based on numbers, “they would conclude that life on the third solar planet is dominated by cattle.” (p. 107)

Bananas are a cautionary tale

The bananas we eat today, the Cavendish, are not the bananas people ate 100 years ago. Before 1950, the type of banana that people around the world ate was called the Gros Michel, or Big Mike.

These Big Mike bananas became popular in the 1800s, and by the early 20th century, thanks to shipping improvements, they were being sold worldwide. Bananas even became a key part of international trade.

As with any crop that’s grown in a monoculture, the threat of disease is very real and dire. And disease is exactly what happened to the Big Mike bananas.

A fungus dubbed Panama disease (due to where it originated) started spreading in the late 1800s. Although it began in Panama, it didn’t stay there, and it destroyed tens of thousands of acres where bananas had been planted. Even worse, once the fungus got in the soil, it meant bananas could never grow there again.

Enter the Cavendish bananas. Though not as flavorful as the Big Mike variety, the Cavendish bananas were resistant to the fungus – for a time. Now, a new strain of Panama disease is threatening Cavendish bananas, and the verdict is out about which will prevail.

And this isn’t only a problem with bananas. This could happen to any monoculture, especially given the fact that we’ve bred plant varieties for how well they ship, not how they taste or what conditions or diseases they can weather.

As Twilley noted in Frostbite, bananas were once considered a triumph of “man over Nature”, but it came at a cost, and it wasn’t even a decisive triumph. “The abundance that refrigeration promises is accompanied by a diminishment in both diversity and deliciousness, the stability it brings to the marketplace comes at the cost of greater risk, and its assurance of plenty is undercut by increased vulnerability.” (p. 160)

Fridge size matters

It can be hard to buy a small fridge in the U.S. I have a condo that was built in the mid-1980s, and I only have limited space for a fridge. I’m worried that the next time I have to buy one, I won’t find one small enough.

Our large fridge sizes support a couple of things. One is the suburban approach of going to the store once a week and stocking up on everything you need, and if you have a family, that could be quite a bit of food. Plus, our modern food system expects that most food will be refrigerated. But even with refrigeration, most times people don’t eat everything in their fridge before it goes bad – in some cases because it’s hidden by other food and therefore forgotten.

Then there’s the fact that many people indulge in “aspirational buying”. This is when people buy quite a bit of fresh produce, thinking that if they have it on hand, they’ll eat it. Except many times they don’t, leading to high food waste.

Things are different in other countries. I still remember going to London for a study abroad in 1997 and being shocked at how small the fridges were – small enough that we had two of them for seven people, and they still weren’t quite enough.

This reflects a difference in thinking about how people purchase and consume food. The goal in many European cities and towns is not to expect everyone to stock up on a lot of food at once after driving several miles. Rather, the goal is to have central shopping districts, within a walkable distance, that can be visited every day or two, or even multiple times a day. Why do you need a big fridge if you’re buying your food daily?

As a result, an average French fridge has a volume of 10 cubic feet, compared to U.S. fridges that average 17.5 cubic feet (with many even larger, even up to 30 cubic feet).

Refrigeration has changed so much

I could go on, like about how refrigeration has made our food sweeter, or how foods we take for granted – such as a cheeseburger – could never exist without refrigeration.

But instead, if any of this has intrigued you, I recommend the book. It’s changed how I think about food and refrigeration, and it might do the same for you.