Alan (the Lone Librarian) Teder’s Reviews > Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves > Status Update

The low-pitched buzz of the refrigerator's electric compressor became the background soundtrack to contemporary life, so ubiquitous that The Velvet Underground used to tune their instruments to it. As founding member John Cale explained, "the drome of Western civilization" is the sixty-cycle hum of the domestic fridge.

"The situation we're in now is that we as consumers can have the same fruits and vegetables year-round," said Pratt - a situation described by food writer Joanna Blythman as "Permanent Global Summer Time," which, in turn, relies on the existence of an equally unchanging and pervasive artificial winter.

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.

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 ...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.