Frostbite Quotes

“For most of refrigeration’s short history”
― Nicola Twilley, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves

“The river of dead meat flowing into Britain stimulated a countercurrent in live humans”
― Nicola Twilley, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves

“One pallet held gallons of beef blood in milk cartons; the label on another set of boxes said that they contained bull pizzles”
― Nicola Twilley, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves

“Although the idea that working in the cold would lead to catching cold makes intuitive sense”
― Nicola Twilley, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves

“In 2012, the Royal Society—the UK’s national academy of science—declared refrigeration the most important invention in the history of food and drink. Judged in terms of its impact on a range of criteria, including productivity and health, 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. Mechanical cooling—refrigeration produced by human artifice, as opposed to the natural chill offered by weather-dependent snow and ice—wasn’t achieved until the mid-1700s, it wasn’t commercialized until the late 1800s, and it wasn’t domesticated until the 1920s.”
― Nicola Twilley, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves

“when the brain is focused on bodily discomfort, it can’t really concentrate on anything else.”
― Nicola Twilley, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves

“Sonnenburg told me that his research has shown that it’s surprisingly difficult to create lasting change in a person’s gut microbes by changing their diet. “Fermented foods do that,” he said. “When you finally see an intervention that actually changes the diversity of people’s microbiome, it really is a startling moment.” He and his colleagues found that the increase in microbial diversity that followed the consumption of fermented foods was also correlated with a significant reduction in blood-based markers of inflammation.”
― Nicola Twilley, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves

“In the span of just a few decades, the public’s perception of refrigeration had flipped: something that had seemed risky, untrustworthy, and unnatural became instead essential to good health, in that it allowed consumers to consume perishable protein in the quantities necessary to achieve their full potential. This narrative not only appealed to the American enthusiasm for self-improvement but also reflected a widespread optimism about the power of technology to manage and, ultimately, improve upon nature.”
― Nicola Twilley, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves

“All around the edges of the room, these primal cuts—dozens of briskets, loins, and ribs—were layered four or five high, impaled on the ascending hooks of stainless-steel meat trees that hung from the ceiling. “I wouldn’t want to eat that,” Solasz said, appearing out of nowhere as I admired the fruit of this upside-down forest. At this point, he explained, the beef is too fresh—it has not completed its transformation from muscle into meat. “It would be tough right now,” he said. “It needs a little age to be tender.”
― Nicola Twilley, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves

“Among its provisions were extremely short limits on the duration that meat, fish, eggs, and butter could be stored under refrigeration. The only problem, as Harry Dowie and other representatives of the nation’s fishers and farmers eagerly pointed out in their congressional testimony, was that those limits had no basis in science. Americans were eating plenty of refrigerated beef and chicken, and some were fine while others weren’t, but no one knew why. For much of its first half century, refrigeration had been an engineering problem. Now it was time for the chemists to get involved once again.”
― Nicola Twilley, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves

“The occasion for all of this excitement was the world’s first cold-storage banquet: a meal at which only previously refrigerated foods were to be served. On Monday, October 23, 1911, more than four hundred guests sat down amid the drapery and gilt of the Hotel Sherman’s Louis XVI room, unfolded their white linen napkins, and, over the course of two hours of what The Egg Reporter later described as “unalloyed pleasure,” consumed a five-course meal in which everything except for the olives in their dry martinis had spent between six months and a year in the refrigerated rooms of local cold-storage companies. Rather than the grower or variety, the menu proudly listed each item’s most recent address: the salmon came from a short stay at Booth’s Cold Storage, the chicken had resided at Chicago Cold Storage since December 1910, and the turkey and eggs had spent the past eleven and seven months, respectively, at the Monarch refrigeration plant. Addressing a reporter from the Bulletin of the American Warehouseman’s Association, Meyer Eichengreen, vice president of the National Poultry, Butter and Egg Association, one of the event’s sponsors, was happy to provide more detail. “Your capon received its summons to the great unknown along about last St. Valentine’s day,” he explained. “And the egg in your salad—go right on and eat—well, some happy hen arose from her nest and clucked over that egg when winter was just merging into spring.”
― Nicola Twilley, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves

“That crazy man Swift,’ the wiseacres called him,” wrote Louis. “It was one of those things which everyone knew couldn’t be done.” One of Swift’s oldest business partners back east, James Hathaway, broke with him over it. “Hathaway knew, as did everyone else, a thousand reasons why nobody could sell Chicago-dressed beef in the East, and why the East would continue to eat meat from cattle shipped alive for slaughter at the point of consumption.” Even Swift’s own family doubted him: “ ‘Stave’s Wild West scheme’ it came to be known among the Cape Cod relatives.” Like Tudor before him, Swift didn’t listen to the doubters. (Indeed, Louis makes it clear that Swift never admitted he might be wrong, ending conversations in which it was clear he was in error by saying, “Let’s talk about something else.”) And like Tudor’s before him, his road to success was “long and wearying” and filled with more difficulties than he could have imagined. “His technical troubles with the cars and with getting the meat chilled properly before hanging it in the cars very nearly broke him,” according to Louis.”
― Nicola Twilley, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves

“That crazy man Swift,’ the wiseacres called him,” wrote Louis. “It was one of those things which everyone knew couldn’t be done.” One of Swift’s oldest business partners back east, James Hathaway, broke with him over it. “Hathaway knew, as did everyone else, a thousand reasons why nobody could sell Chicago-dressed beef in the East, and why the East would continue to eat meat from cattle shipped alive for slaughter at the point of consumption.” Even Swift’s own family doubted him: “ ‘Stave’s Wild West scheme’ it came to be known among the Cape Cod relatives.”
― Nicola Twilley, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves

“Gustavus Swift achieved fame and fortune by refrigerating—and, in so doing, revolutionizing—the American meat supply. “He was not to change the world’s maps, nor make military history,” his eldest son, Louis, wrote in his biography of his father, The Yankee of the Yards, coauthored with journalist Arthur Van Vlissingen Jr. “Instead, he was the human instrument by which destiny transformed the world’s sources and supplies of an essential class of foodstuffs.” According to his son, Swift wasn’t driven by grand ambition or a desire to benefit mankind. Instead, his motivation sprang from a much less lofty place: a mania for saving money.”
― Nicola Twilley, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves

“At the start of the nineteenth century, when Frederic Tudor first began shipping and selling ice, more than nine out of every ten Americans still lived in the countryside and ate what they could grow or gather and preserve. Because food availability was still seasonal and local, there was no average American diet in 1800, and poor, indigenous, or enslaved people were often unable to access enough to eat.”
― Nicola Twilley, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves

“Yet the success of Tudor’s frozen-water industry motivated an entire generation of would-be synthetic-cold manufacturers. “By slowing down time’s destructive work, le froid increases the power and resources of Man,” said one of them, a Frenchman named Charles Tellier. But what if man also had the power to control cold, producing it in quantity and at will?”
― Nicola Twilley, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves

“While Wyeth handled the technology, Tudor focused on business development. He gave ice cream–making demonstrations to confectioners, he offered coffee shop owners a water-cooling jug of his own design, and he came up with ice-block subscription models—customers could sign up for one or two deliveries a day, on a monthly plan. He even designed and built some of the earliest domestic iceboxes, which he called “Little Ice Houses,” so that customers could store their daily allowance of ice at home. Meanwhile, despite his self-pitying journal entries, Tudor had to admit that the nascent ice industry enjoyed some unique advantages. Ships departing New England ports were generally light on their outbound voyages, and frequently resorted to carrying stones as ballast, which they simply tossed overboard at their destination in order to return with foreign cargo. Once they were convinced that most of Tudor’s ice wouldn’t melt in transit, they gladly carried it at low rates: even a discounted cargo made more economic sense than a pile of rocks.”
― Nicola Twilley, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves

“A man who has drank his drinks cold at the same expense for one week can never be presented with them warm again,” he explained, outlining his plan to create ice addicts out of Havana drinkers by supplying the stuff for free to the city’s bartenders for a limited time—then, once their customers were hooked, charging retail.”
― Nicola Twilley, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves

“Ultimately, natural ice was just too expensive, too unreliable, and too ephemeral to rely on for large-scale food preservation. Until 1805, that is, when a short, slight high school dropout named Frederic Tudor launched a new industry: the international frozen-water trade.”
― Nicola Twilley, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves

“None other than George Washington, first president of the United States, had problems keeping ice in a specially built cellar on his Mount Vernon estate. His diary entry for Sunday, June 5, 1785, records the disappointment: “Opened the well in my cellar in which I had laid up a store of ice but there was not the smallest particle remaining.”
― Nicola Twilley, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves

“Nicolas Appert, a talented chef with no formal education, wondered whether the method he used to put up sugared fruit in glass jars might be applied to the problem of conserving soup, vegetables, beef stew, and beans. “A dynamic and jovial little man,” according to French historian Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, Appert began his experiments by funneling peas and boiled beef into old champagne bottles, corking them, and sitting them in hot-water baths for varying lengths of time. As curiosity became obsession, Appert sold his Parisian confectionery business and retired to a small town just outside the city, where he spent the better part of a decade perfecting his method. In 1803, Appert delivered the first batch of preserved food to the French navy for field-testing. The contents of his bottles received rave reviews: the beef was pronounced “very edible,” while the beans and green peas had “all the freshness and flavor of freshly picked vegetables.” Appert was awarded the prize and promptly used the money to finance more experiments. Rather than patent his technique, he published a book of detailed instructions so that anyone could master “l’art de conserver.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, he died a pauper. Despite being formally recognized as “a benefactor of humanity” by the French government, even his wife eventually left him, and he ended up buried in a mass grave.”
― Nicola Twilley, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves

“Beneath these annual rhythms, the aseasonal fulfillment of American desires continued unabated. For hour after hour, we received, stocked, restocked, and picked: frozen guava juice in barrels, destined for a Dr. Smoothie bottling plant; cans of refrigerated peanut butter paste, imported from Argentina to fill M&M’s and Clif Bars; pallets stacked with rolls of X-ray film for local hospitals; and thousands and thousands of freshly baked King’s Hawaiian buns, trucked in hot from Torrance—a thermal disruption for which Americold charges extra. “We need to bring it down slowly to keep the moisture in the product. Bread will crystallize if it’s cooled too fast,” explained Espinoza. “People think it’s so fresh and soft,” said Carlos. “I tell them it’s been in here for months, and they don’t believe me.”
― Nicola Twilley, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves

“Yet, to my surprise, no one had tried to tie those threads together into a coherent narrative—a story that could help us understand the extraordinary scope and implications of the refrigeration revolution. As I pored over my copy of the International Association of Refrigerated Warehouses’ annual directory of member facilities, I couldn’t help but wonder: Where are the Shackleton and Scott of the artificial cryosphere? Why is no one embarking on bold expeditions into its farthest-flung corners, braving its icy wastes, mapping its unexplored contours, meeting its inhabitants, and chronicling its customs? Then I realized that perhaps I should put on some thermal underwear and do it myself. This book is the result.”
― Nicola Twilley, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves

“Judged in terms of its impact on a range of criteria, including productivity and health, 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.”
― Nicola Twilley, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves

“The cold chain—as the network of warehouses, shipping containers, trucks, display cases, and domestic fridges that keep meat, milk, and more chilled on their journeys from farm to fork is technically known—has become such an essential part of our food system that it is taken for granted.”
― Nicola Twilley, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves

“The refrigerated warehouse is the missing middle in food’s journey from farm to table: a black box whose mysterious internal workings allow perishable food to conquer the constraints of both time and space. Even those chefs who are proud to know the life story of each steak they serve, or the foodies who insist on meeting the farmer who raised the meat they eat, would never dream of inquiring as to its storage history—or imagine that beef carcasses have to be electrocuted in order to withstand the rigors of refrigeration without toughening up.”
― Nicola Twilley, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves

“Americold is one of the largest providers of temperature-controlled warehouse space, not only in the United States but around the world. Globally, the company maintains 1.5 billion cubic feet of cold, storing everything from ground beef destined for school lunch programs to frozen lobsters on their way to upscale restaurant chains like McCormick & Schmick’s. In Ontario, most of the 100,000-square-foot warehouse is given over to Danone products: pallet after pallet of Horizon chocolate milk, Land O’Lakes creamer, Silk soy milk, and Greek yogurt, much of which comes from a plant just forty-five minutes away. “They focus on creating food,” explained Espinoza. “We focus on making sure it gets to their customers intact.”
― Nicola Twilley, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves