Alan (the Lone Librarian) Teder’s Reviews > Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves > Status Update
Alan (the Lone Librarian) Teder
is on page 144 of 400
For much of the twentieth century, most people outside Central America would have rarely eaten or even encountered an avocado. (Indeed, for most of that time, they were known as alligator pears, as opposed to their current name, which is a bastardized version of the Nahuatl word for both avocados and testicles.) To the uninitiated, the avocado was challenging: it was a fruit but it wasn’t sweet ...
— 22 hours, 11 min ago
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Alan (the Lone Librarian)’s Previous Updates
Alan (the Lone Librarian) Teder
is on page 151 of 400
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.
— 21 hours, 57 min ago
Alan (the Lone Librarian) Teder
is on page 137 of 400
Contrary to popular belief, bananas are the ultimate refrigerated fruit. In order to be a global commodity rather than an exotic luxury, the banana depends on a seamless network of thermal control. This comes as something of a shock to most people.
— 22 hours, 28 min ago
Alan (the Lone Librarian) Teder
is on page 108 of 400
In aggregate, livestock make up 62 percent of all mammals on Earth; humans, at 34 percent, account for most of the rest. Everything else—dogs, cats, deer, rabbits, whales, elephants, bats, and even rats—only adds up to the remaining 4 percent.
— Mar 09, 2026 03:43PM
Alan (the Lone Librarian) Teder
is on page 107 of 400
For millennia, humanity had controlled only half the equation—a power that alone was enough to change the course of human evolution. Within our first century of domesticating cold, we not only rearranged meat production and consumption, with effects extending from Irish independence to Amazonian deforestation, but also altered the composition of Earth’s biomass beyond recognition.
— Mar 08, 2026 03:07PM
Alan (the Lone Librarian) Teder
is on page 82 of 400
It’s worth remembering that all of these far-reaching and often unexpected consequences of refrigerating meat were spurred in part by a nutritional fallacy: the mistaken conclusion that protein from flesh foods was the only essential nutrient. If chemists had come down in favor of grains and beans instead, the world might have looked very different.
— Mar 08, 2026 03:06PM
Alan (the Lone Librarian) Teder
is on page 5 of 400
refrigeration was deemed more significant than the knife, the oven, the plow, and even the millennia of selective breeding that gave us the livestock, fruits, and vegetables we recognize today. It is also a much more recent development: our ancestors learned to control fire before modern humans even evolved, but our ability to command cold at will dates back little more than 150 years.
— Mar 08, 2026 03:04PM
