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December 12 - December 27, 2024
With unfortunate irony, the spread of the artificial cryosphere turns out to be one of the leading culprits in the disappearance of its natural counterpart.
Until recently, the general uptick in respiratory illness in the winter was blamed on the fact that people spend more time indoors together, swapping viruses, in cooler weather. That’s likely a factor, but cold is also directly, not just indirectly, responsible for making us sick, thanks to a previously unknown immune mechanism: cells in our nostrils that are capable of detecting incoming microbes and releasing a swarm of tiny little antiviral bubbles to surround and neutralize them.
For another, each of us has our own metabolic rate, as well as varying degrees and forms of internal padding, surface area, and body hair, and even a particular ratio of slow- to fast-twitch muscle fibers, all of which add up to make an individual more or less cold tolerant.
Just as the desire for beer is thought to have motivated early hunter-gatherers to take up farming, breweries provided the all-important early investments in mechanical refrigeration: two technologies that remade the world, both fueled by the human desire for intoxication.
pigs and cattle; going back still further, the Anglo-Saxon name for November was Blotmonad, or bloodmonth, to mark the slaughter of livestock.
In 1973 France, which had roughly the same rate of domestic fridge adoption as the UK, as well as an equal percentage of women in the workforce, passed legislation limiting the construction of stores with a floor plan of much more than 100,000 square feet. (For reference, the average size of a Walmart Supercenter is 179,000 square feet.) Italy and West Germany put in place similar regulations. Today many continental European towns and cities retain lively central shopping districts whose walkable, human scale makes them irresistible to Anglo tourists. Meanwhile, the average interior volume of
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In 1932, advertising executive Earnest Elmo Calkins wrote the introduction to a book outlining a concept he called “consumer engineering,” which relied on a combination of planned obsolescence and effective design to induce demand.
“Goods fall into two classes: those that we use, such as motor cars or safety razors, and those that we use up, such as toothpaste or soda biscuits,” he wrote. “Consumer engineering must see to it that we use up the kind of goods we now merely use. Why would you want last year’s hand bag when this year’s hand bag is so much more attractive?”
The pinnacle of his pyramid is reached once a fridge contains foods that express collective virtue: fair-trade, organic, cruelty-free products in reusable packaging. “This is where the Nordics are,” he said. “India is mostly in this efficiency stage, China is at the indulgence stage, and Brazil is already on the healthy stage.”
Nonetheless, Bekvalac and Western had a large enough sample size to pull out patterns with some confidence. Although economic status and location made a difference, the traces of chronic lung inflammation, cancer, and obesity were all more common in the recent skeletons than their preindustrial peers.
Their conclusion was that “for the most part, the industrialization of the city has been a grotesque assault on the health of Londoners.”
“It’s called the antebellum puzzle,” said Lee Craig, a professor of economics at North Carolina State University, whose research belongs to an obscure subgenre of the field called cliometrics: the application of econometric analysis to history. Antebellum refers to the decades prior to the American Civil War, which began in 1861. The “puzzle,” according to Craig, is that during these decades in the United States and Western Europe, “biological measures of the standard of living erode, even though the standard economic measures seem to be going up.”
Robert Fogel, who went on to win a Nobel Prize for his research linking changes in human physiology to economic growth, noticed that the average American male seemed to have shrunk in height by as much as an inch in the fifteen years preceding the Civil War.
Following this winter diet came “spring sickness.” According to an Indianapolis pharmacist, by April, “nearly everybody used to be sick because of lack of green stuff to eat.” Similarly, food historian Lizzie Collingham has concluded that, by spring, most pre-refrigeration northern Europeans “were pre-scorbutic, even if they were not suffering from full-blown scurvy.”
In the UK, some historians have argued that average diets before 1750 were much more diverse and nutritious than we might otherwise imagine. Pulses, berries, foraged greens and herbs, and wild game added variety and vitamins to the starchy staples and dairy on which peasants depended, and it wasn’t until industrialization and urbanization really accelerated, in the nineteenth century, that the British diet was reduced to meat, wheat, sugar, and dairy.
Spinach left in a fridge for a week will lose three quarters of its vitamin C and 13 percent of its thiamin, while broccoli will retain only a third of its vitamin C and beta-carotene and less than half of its phytonutrients.
There’s also a reasonable argument to be made that at least one of the reasons so many Americans seem to prefer junk food over fruit and vegetables is because industrialized supermarket produce tastes so bland.
But it’s possible that, by refrigerating and sanitizing our way out of the bacterial infections that killed so many city dwellers in the 1880s, we may have inadvertently created the conditions for another, less acute but equally deadly, set of diseases to emerge.
Ultimately, it seems as though the short-term health benefits of refrigeration—a decrease in illness and deaths from bacterial infections, a reduction in cases of stomach cancer, and some additional animal protein to grow a little stronger and taller—might yet prove to have been offset by its downsides. The consequences of any technology are rarely limited to what we hope and imagine they might be when it is first introduced,
At the end of my conversation with economist Lee Craig, I asked whether, if he considered the impact of refrigeration beyond just its initial decades, he’d still conclude that it was a boon to human health. “No, I would not,” he replied decisively. “The nutrition issues and the environmental issues and energy issues—all of that would make me rethink it.”
In countries with a well-developed cold chain, like the United States, food waste mostly takes place at the consumer level, in homes and at restaurants. In Rwanda, as in much of the developing world, the lack of a cold chain means that between a third and a half of everything that I saw being harvested would be lost long before it ever gets that far. Rwanda is also one of the poorest countries in the world: the gross per-capita income is currently $2.28 a day; more than a third of children under five are stunted from malnutrition;
the lab, Apeel has begun to see evidence that it will be able to quadruple shelf life—at which point it will have effectively matched refrigeration’s powers to slow produce decay. In other words, we’d get the same result from a coating made from food waste that requires very little energy for its one-time application as from the entire power-hungry and labor-intensive system we’ve built to keep our food cold. “That’s our North Star,” Rogers told me. “If you can do that, think about what it means for people who don’t have access to that infrastructure.” The
What’s more, although raising animals at industrial scale involves cruelties both small and large, those take place out of sight thanks to refrigeration, enabling meat eaters to ignore the consequences of their consumption. “Forgetfulness was among the least noticed and most important of its by-products,” as William Cronon wrote, describing the impact of Swift’s refrigerated railcar. In
short, our food system is frostbitten: it has been injured by its exposure to cold.
refrigeration was implemented, for the most part, in order to optimize markets rather than hum...
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Cold was a key ingredient in the construction of a food system that prioritizes convenience, abundance, and profit
over public health or planetary boundaries.
