(p. 10) Consider the improbable fact of the supermarket banana. In “Frostbite,” an exploration of the vast system known as the cold chain, the journalist Nicola Twilley follows the banana through a “seamless network of thermal control.” This series of refrigerated trucks, rail cars, shipping containers and warehouses ends in the ripening room, with its temperature gauges and gas immersion baths, all to meet our demand for ripe tropical fruit in all seasons. “Produce is a labor of love,” a warehouse owner tells her. “I tell people that working here is like a face tattoo — you’ve got to be really sure you want it.”
Twilley is a food and health reporter who has studied cold and refrigeration for many years.
. . .
The home refrigerator is barely a century old. Twilley is shown how simple it is to build one, and then tells us just why it took so long to figure out. Early efforts were bent toward making ice with giant and dangerous machinery; breakthroughs in the use of vacuum pumps and compressors “cut out the middleman” of the ice itself.
. . .
One story leads into another. A technology invented to dry photographic film at Eastman Kodak led first to the extraction of fish oil and, eventually, bagged salad.
. . .
. . .; I found this book hard to put down. The startling statistics — the cold chain preserves almost three-quarters of the food Americans eat; American households open the fridge door an average of 107 times a day — separate tales of unsung scientists. We meet the self-taught engineer Fred Jones, who invented the first mobile mechanical refrigeration unit, expanding the speed and size of the cold chain. Twilley also introduces the physicist Barbara Pratt, who perfected the refrigerated shipping container by traveling the world in one.
For the full review see:
Sallie Tisdale. “Freeze Frame.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, August 4, 2024): 9.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date June 24, 2024, and has the title “Have Refrigerators Spoiled Everything?”)
The book under review is:
Twilley, Nicola. Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. New York: Penguin Press, 2024.