Book Review: ‘Frostbite, How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves’, by Nicola Twilley
Commercial kombucha falls into two main categories: shelf-stable brands that can be stored at room temperature and “raw” kombucha that must be kept cool. The former has been processed or formulated to remain stable and safe to drink without requiring refrigeration. Traditional “raw” kombucha needs to be refrigerated to slow down further fermentation and maintain its flavor and safety. It’s safe to say most commercial brands listed in the Worldwide Directory are traditional.
The cold chain
The journey from brewery to consumer piggybacks on a sophisticated ‘cold chain’ that has revolutionized food and beverage distribution via a massive network of distribution centers, refrigerated trucks, shipping containers, supermarket chillers, and home refrigerators. Nicola Twilley’s new book Frostbite, How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves, describes this ‘artificial Arctic’ in fascinating detail.
According to Twilley, refrigeration’s impact has “changed our height, our health, and our family dynamics; it has reshaped our kitchens, ports, and cities; and it has reconfigured global economics and politics.” She sets out to explore the “pockets of cold … honeycombed throughout the American landscape” and ventures worldwide to report on developments in the UK, India, and Rwanda.
History
It all began at the end of the 19th Century with the first ice-making machines. Before this, ice houses stored frozen blocks harvested from winter lakes that were then delivered to homes. This was an unreliable, expensive, and limited-scale way of preserving foods.
Interestingly, the first commercial applications for man-made ice were beer brewers. “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.” Specifically, the production of lager beer requires consistently low temperatures to ferment. German immigrants in New York were now able to produce lager year-round.
Meat, fruit and veg
As with beer, so with meats, vegetables, and fruits. Twilley details the opportunities and challenges in the adoption of a farm-to-table cold chain for each product. Solutions that revolutionized our diets include the electric shocking and vacuum packing of “wet-aged” beef before refrigeration (a section of the book best avoided by vegans and vegetarians!). Successful delivery of ripe bananas to the supermarket requires “a complex blend of temperature control and atmospheric manipulation, orchestrated asynchronously across dozens of different ripening rooms.” Lettuce and spinach are packaged in a “differentially permeable membrane” that lets oxygen and carbon monoxide diffuse through the sealed box at specific rates to maintain an ideal microclimate for the chilled produce.
Today, nearly two-thirds of all fruits and vegetables produced worldwide are eaten in a different country from the one in which they are grown.
Kombucha
While the book does not mention the reliance of kombucha on the cold chain, there are a couple of sections of interest to those who follow our industry.
Discussing the geographical location of refrigerated warehouses (one of Walmart’s advantages in supplying low-priced produce), she notes that greater Los Angeles is served by “block after block of cold storage” located in the city of Vernon, “an industrial enclave just a couple of miles south of downtown…notorious for its corrupt officials…(and) for charging rock-bottom rates for its utilities.” Perhaps coincidentally, the location of market-leader GTs Living Foods.
A fascinating analysis of the consumption patterns revealed by the contents of refrigerators in homes with different income levels in developing nations showed the poor, when they are first able to afford a refrigerator, treat it as a device to store leftovers. As incomes rise, middle-class owners’ fridges start to include treats and international brands of ice cream, soft drinks, and beer. The truly affluent not only have fridges that include ingredients from different cultures but “items marketed as healthy—fat-free, diet, or probiotic foods.” These dietary shifts that accompany economic development are clearly relevant to kombucha brands in developing regions.
Interestingly, the lack of chillers in retail markets can limit the availability of kombucha. In Germany, for example, Tadeusz with Baerbucha Kombucha in Berlin reports that “The grocery shops have either very limited fridge space, or sometimes barely any. The BIO (Organic) stores are even worse. They been placing kombucha in the dairy fridges.”
Twilley reports that drinking ice-cold beverages with a meal leads to a preference for sweeter food. The depleted state of the gut microbiome might be due in part to refrigeration, which has reduced our dependency on fermented foods. Kombucha to the rescue!
The winter of our discontent
Twilley’s assessment of the impact of refrigeration on the planet shows two sides to the coin. On the positive side, the advent of mechanical refrigeration has reduced the risk of food poisoning, rotten food that spoils in the heat before it can reach market, and monotonous, seasonally dependent diets. It “freed women from daily shopping and made fresh food both affordable and available year-round.”
The downside is the environmental impact. It takes a lot of energy to remove heat. Small farms lose out to agribusiness. Home refrigerators encourage waste.
The perpetual winter of known and steady temperature that underlies the permanent global summertime of the supermarket’s cornucopia has divorced us from food production and severed our synchrony with the seasons.
Moreover
If everyone on Earth were to require as much cold space to eat as an American, millions upon millions of refrigerated warehouses would need to be built, increasing the volume of mechanically cooled span ten times over.
The US currently has 4.6 billion cubic feet of refrigerated warehouse space nationwide. From the sixty hertz hum of the home refrigerator compressor (used by the Velvet Underground to tune their instruments – who knew?!) to the giant warehouses, chilled trucks and shipping containers, energy requirements, and refrigerant chemicals (HCFCs and HFCs) leaking into the atmosphere contribute to global warming.
This book is sure to educate and enlighten anyone curious about the global food and beverage system and the all-but-invisible network of thermal control that underpins it.
