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August 13 - September 11, 2025
To its earliest pioneers, control of cold endowed humankind with godlike powers over the otherwise immutable forces of decay and loss, unlocking limitless abundance by removing the constraints of distance and the cycles of seasonality. Today, our dietary dependence on refrigeration is almost complete—and human control over nature has never seemed less sustainable.
In conclusion, they wrote, without rot, “we predict complete societal collapse only within a year or so, linked to catastrophic failure of the food supply chain.”
Cheese—memorably characterized by author Clifton Fadiman as “milk’s leap toward immortality”—relies
The jagged chunks glittered like milky-blue quartz, throwing shards of light across the warm wooden walls.
In the early 1800s, Jane Austen wrote to her sister, “For Elegance & Ease & Luxury…I shall eat Ice & drink French wine, & be above vulgar economy.”
Despite this bluster, one string of diary entries consists simply of the word ANXIETY printed in larger and larger block caps;
When a middle-aged Englishwoman, Sarah Mytton Maury, reminisced about her 1840s visit to the United States to visit her sister, she wrote, “Of all the luxuries in America I most enjoyed the ice—its use was then rare and expensive in England.” Jugs of ice water cooled her bedroom on hot nights, friends received her with a glass of iced lemonade or a sherry cobbler with “huge crystals floating about,” and dinner parties on sweaty August evenings always culminated in ice cream.
In the 1860s, the American Civil War cut the Southern states off from the shipments of lake and river ice upon which they had become dependent, and several inventors seized the chance to build prototype ice machines as replacements.
“Ice-cream poisoning” was a common and often lethal affliction: in 1893, the American Druggist and Pharmaceutical Record warned that “deaths from ice-cream poisoning are reported with painful regularity, and physicians seem powerless to save the patient once symptoms of poisoning have set in.”
As a headline in a Buffalo, New York, newspaper put it, There is No Death, Only Cold Storage.
Few people are even aware that their salad bag is a high-tech respiratory apparatus.
Refrigerated, ethylene-dosed ripening rooms—with a little assistance from Instagram influencers and a free-trade deal with Mexico—are the reason for the fourfold increase in the average American’s annual avocado consumption since the 1990s.
What this meant was that orange juice could be more than a juice—it could be a brand. In exactly the same way that Coke and Pepsi are both colas, yet Coke fans swear by its vanilla flavor notes, while Pepsi aficionados prefer its sweeter, more citrusy taste, Minute Maid and Tropicana are both juices, but Minute Maid (which is owned by Coke) is known for its “unique candy type flavor,” according to one Tropicana insider, while Tropicana (which, you guessed it, is owned by Pepsi) has its own signature taste.
Nearly two-thirds of all fruit and vegetables produced in the world are eaten in a different country from the one in which they were grown.
Shopping at Whole Foods is more expensive, not necessarily because its food is healthier or better for the environment but because its supply chain is so inefficient.
As founding band member John Cale explained, “the drone of Western civilization” is the sixty-cycle hum of the domestic fridge.
Village and town centers across the US and Britain were slowly eviscerated by the fridge-enabled move to weekly shopping. One government study found that a supermarket on the edge of town shrank business for smaller, more central shops by as much as three quarters.
“He can’t make ice because there are chicken nuggets in it.”
“We eat a lot of fresh vegetables and fruits, too,” said Family 16’s mother. “Well, I should say we have them on hand,” she corrected herself with a laugh.
Demos’s gamble was that, by packaging soy milk as if it shared the fragile freshness of milk, he could convince Americans to make the switch—and it paid off.
Freshness—a quality that used to be bounded by constraints of time, seasonality, and geography—was increasingly determined by association: fresh foods are foods that require refrigeration; refrigerated foods are thus, by definition, fresh.
At least three of our basic taste receptors—sweet, bitter, and umami, or savory—are extremely temperature sensitive. When food or drinks cool the tongue to below fifty-nine degrees, the channels through which these three taste receptors message the brain seem to close up, and the resulting signal is extremely weak. This is why a warm Coca-Cola or a melted ice cream is so sickly sweet: because they’re intended to be consumed cold, they have to contain too much sugar to boost the signal and register in our brains as tasting sweet at all.[*8]
in 1916, somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of all the food grown in America was “hauled to the dump-pile” before it even reached a grocery store, icebox, or dinner table.
operating a cold chain costs the same, if not more, in Nairobi as it does in New York City: five to fifteen cents per kilo of produce. This means that refrigeration adds about 1 percent to the cost of a tomato in the developed world but about 30 percent to its cost in the developing world. “Nobody is going to pay that,” Tanatar said.
Produce takes the same number of breaths before dying in the cold; it just takes them more slowly, delaying its inevitable decline.
In early human history, our ancestors might have done this by sharing excess meat from the hunt in a feast, in the expectation that such largesse would be reciprocated at a later date—anthropologists call this “social storage”—or by fermenting fruit and grains to form storable liquid calories as alcohol.
Refrigeration tends to shift where the waste takes place, as opposed to eliminating it.
In short, our food system is frostbitten: it has been injured by its exposure to cold.
Cold was a key ingredient in the construction of a food system that prioritizes convenience, abundance, and profit over public health or planetary boundaries.
Reconnected to the cycle of the natural world, we might see through the cold chain’s illusory promise of eternal abundance. And we might once again treat food—our most intimate connection to Earth—with the respect it deserves.
“They said that if she could read The Times through the ice, the quality was approved,” he said.