"Frostbite" Semi-Review

My thoughts on a flawed book and my critique of a certain kind of argument

I just finished listening to Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves, by Nicola Twilley. It was a fun listen; these books that are kind of quasi-related to my professional interests are perfect audiobooks for me. I especially liked the historical and documentary bits, such as the history of the ice trade, visiting a cold-storage warehouse, and the early uses of refrigeration.

Twilley notes that the quest to make lager, which needs cool temperatures, year-round was one of the initial reasons artificial cooling was developed. She writes a lot about the evolving cultural and technical ideas about refrigeration. Refrigeration was seen as making food less fresh, at first. Some of this was more or less superstition, but it was also because food that was getting old could appear fresher than it was, and because the absence of a proper “cold chain” from harvest to consumption meant that food often began to go bad at some point in the chain.

In terms of how the technology was understood, the first uses of artificial cooling were to produce ice, with the insight that artificial cold could directly replace ice coming a bit later. There were many ideas about how artificial cold would work, including one that used pipes going into homes, with cold imagined like a metered public utility service. History imposes a narrative, because we can see how the story ends and each step on the way fits into the eventual known conclusion, but none of that was obvious or preordained at the time.

These bits of trivia about past attitudes often make little sense today, which is kind of humbling; what certainties do we hold now that will come to seem impossibly silly or ignorant? It’s a reminder that we don’t know as much as we think we do.

However, as the book went on, I found its analysis and politics a bit tendentious, and I want to discuss that here, especially because there’s a land use aspect to this that I think the author could have probed more than she did.

First, though, I’ll say that the most interesting analytical bit in the book is Twilley’s argument that refrigeration alters the scale of food-related commerce. Because cooling warehouses are expensive, supermarkets buy huge volumes from large reliable consistent suppliers, etc., there’s an “embiggening” effect of making the food supply refrigerated. This advantages large farms, large wholesalers and warehouses, and large supermarkets. This both pushes smaller producers out of the market, leading to economic concentration, and blandifies and streamlines what is getting produced.

This is a really interesting point, and it rings true to me. I think “scale” is a really important and subtle aspect of a lot things related to housing, land use, commerce, and transportation. Car orientation and suburbanization had this same “embiggening” effect on the scale at which business was done (larger and fewer stores, larger and more centralized distribution and supply networks) and real estate development (larger lots, larger development firms). The mass refrigeration of the food supply would appear to be one factor in this overall process by which smallness, variety, and localism were largely stamped out of American life in the 20th century.

At one point Twilley quotes someone, in a bit on Paris and the greater reliance on frequent food shopping, about how great cities and small refrigerators went together. It may have been this fellow she quoted, a designer who argues that “Small Fridges Make Good Cities.” The idea being that less space to store food, frequent shopping, more and smaller and more proximate grocery stores, etc., are all part of an urban way of life. By contrast, the suburban model turns consumers into something like food warehousers themselves.

This is an interesting point, and a different way of thinking about the scale issue. I’m not sure many Americans, however, would find “You should own a smaller fridge so we make our communities more like cities” is a winning argument.

All of that is pretty neutral, but I said I found the book tendentious. My basic issue with it is twofold. One, its “on the one hand, on the other hand” approach of technical neutrality combined with problematizing and implying but then walking back the apparent point.¹ I’m going to write a whole book about how refrigeration is not the boon we think it is, not the answer to food waste we think it is, not the answer to nutrition we think it is, and an environmental disaster to boot, but I’m not against refrigeration, I just think we should tweak how we use it and not rely on it for everything. I guess one sentence doesn’t make a compelling book.

Secondly,