AI transcript
0:00:16 “Wanna understand exactly how interest rate rises will impact your mortgage or how New
0:00:22 York City gets fresh produce or exactly what on earth was going on over at FTX before
0:00:23 the whole thing collapsed?”
0:00:27 Twice a week, we sit down with the perfect guest to answer these sort of questions and
0:00:32 understand what’s going on with the biggest stories in finance, economics, business and
0:00:33 market.
0:00:34 I’m Tracy Allaway.
0:00:35 And I’m Jill Weisenthal.
0:00:38 And we are the hosts of Bloomberg’s All Thoughts podcast.
0:00:40 Look us up wherever you get your podcasts.
0:00:49 The All Thoughts podcast from Bloomberg.
0:00:55 The late 20th and early 21st century, this era we’ve just been living through, has obviously
0:00:59 been this period of incredible technological change.
0:01:06 But in terms of technology transforming everyday life, our era is not unprecedented, which
0:01:09 is to say our era is precedented.
0:01:15 I would argue, in fact I have argued, that in terms of everyday life, there was an even
0:01:21 bigger technology driven transformation in the period 100 years earlier, in the period
0:01:24 of the late 1800s and early 1900s.
0:01:30 That period saw the coming of cars and planes, the spread of telephones and the electric grid,
0:01:34 and the spread of refrigeration.
0:01:39 Refrigeration allowed us to preserve and transport food like never before, and in fact wound
0:01:45 up really completely transforming the way people eat, the food we eat every day.
0:01:51 I recently interviewed a journalist named Nicola Twilly, who just wrote a book on refrigeration
0:01:53 and how it changed us.
0:01:57 The book is called Frostbite, and one of the things the book really made clear is how
0:02:03 refrigeration changed daily life in this really profound way.
0:02:09 Nicke describes this transformation in microcosm via the work of this husband and wife sociologist
0:02:10 team.
0:02:17 The husband and wife visited a town in Indiana, first in 1890, and then again in 1925.
0:02:21 And they talk about the different ways life has changed in this town.
0:02:26 And Nicke focuses on the way refrigeration changed the way people eat.
0:02:31 In 1890, what they found is that the city had two diets.
0:02:34 It had a winter and a summer diet.
0:02:40 And then the winter diet was just really meat, starches, carbs, pastry, potatoes, things
0:02:42 like that.
0:02:47 And the only sort of vegetables to enliven it were either root vegetables, turnips,
0:02:53 cabbages, apples you could store in the root cellars, or things you had pickled or preserved
0:02:55 from summer.
0:03:02 But fresh fruit, green vegetables, leaves, berries, none of that.
0:03:06 And you talk about how people would be sick, essentially, like everybody in town would
0:03:08 get sick by the end of winter.
0:03:11 Yeah, they called it spring sickness.
0:03:15 Today, we’d call it sort of a pre-scorbatic syndrome.
0:03:18 So like about to have scurvy.
0:03:19 Like about to have scurvy.
0:03:21 Not full-blown scurvy, but you know.
0:03:26 It’s a mild scurvy that everybody got every winter.
0:03:27 Exactly.
0:03:35 And so then these academics, these sociologists come back in the 1920s once refrigeration is
0:03:39 clearly not ubiquitous by that point, but it’s in the world.
0:03:44 And how do they find the diet in this town has changed?
0:03:46 It has changed utterly.
0:03:53 They can buy oranges and lettuce shipped from California and bananas shipped all the way
0:03:55 from Central America.
0:04:01 All but the very, very poorest are beginning to be able to enjoy some of the sort of what
0:04:05 I call the supermarket in the US today, permanent global summertime.
0:04:08 You can have anything you want at any time.
0:04:11 Spring sickness has been alleviated.
0:04:17 No one speaks of spring sickness anymore and it’s totally a, you know, the older generation
0:04:19 remember it, the younger don’t.
0:04:27 I’m Jacob Goldstein and this is What’s Your Problem.
0:04:29 My guest today is Nikki Twilly.
0:04:33 Her new book Frostbite is full of useful insights into science and markets and technological
0:04:34 change.
0:04:40 Also, the book has just a bunch of good stories, including, but not limited to, the central
0:04:46 role of beer in human history, the shockingly complex technology that goes into the bags
0:04:51 of salad greens on the shelf at the grocery store, and why the technological frontier
0:04:57 in refrigeration may mean that we don’t need to keep so much stuff so cold.
0:05:02 My conversation with Nikki started more or less at the beginning.
0:05:07 Humans have been able to control fire since before we were even modern humans.
0:05:09 That goes way back.
0:05:11 What we got, he came early.
0:05:12 All over it.
0:05:16 And some people argue that’s what made us human, you know, the ability to cook and then feed
0:05:19 our big brains, et cetera.
0:05:21 Cold, much trickier.
0:05:29 All the great minds, you know, Newton, Galileo, Robert Boyle, all of the scientists that you’ve
0:05:37 heard of, Leonardo da Vinci, tried to figure out where on earth cold came from.
0:05:44 But yeah, in 1755 a Scottish doctor, almost as a party trick, figured out how to freeze
0:05:54 water, a pupil of his had noticed that if you put a thermometer in ether, which evaporates
0:05:59 very quickly, and when something evaporates, it pulls heat away.
0:06:04 The energy of turning that thing, that liquid into gas, pulls heat away so you get a cooling
0:06:05 sensation.
0:06:08 He used a bunch of different liquids to try and make this work.
0:06:15 He used chili oil, he used brandy, he used menthol, you know, he was going for all the
0:06:23 sort of ones that give you a tingly sensation, logic, but in the end he did manage to create
0:06:28 a setup that froze water for the first time.
0:06:34 This was the first time, 1755, that humans were able to make cold on demand.
0:06:37 And he was just like, “Well, this seems kind of interesting, but I don’t really know what
0:06:39 to do with it, so others should investigate.”
0:06:43 And no one did anything for 100 years because it was like, “What are we going to do with
0:06:44 this?
0:06:45 It’s a party trick.”
0:06:46 Yeah, that part is wild, right?
0:06:52 It’s like, “Here’s this giant breakthrough, we’re ready,” and then crickets.
0:06:58 You know, I quote a line from Robert Browning in the book, “Humanity’s reach had exceeded
0:06:59 its grasp.”
0:07:04 We had figured out how to do something, but we didn’t know what to do with it, you know?
0:07:09 It just, the picture of what you could do with cold wasn’t there yet.
0:07:12 Right, and you write about that, right?
0:07:18 You point out that in the 1800s, the first kind of industrialization of cold that emerges
0:07:23 is not from this new technology, but from a guy just selling ice, just like cutting
0:07:27 ice out of frozen lakes and putting it on ships and sending that around the world and
0:07:29 selling that.
0:07:35 And it’s not until like 100 years after that Scottish doctor inventing refrigeration that
0:07:42 this guy in Australia, James Harrison, who you write about, he’s like, “Oh, maybe refrigeration
0:07:45 could be, you know, a business.”
0:07:46 So tell me about that piece of it.
0:07:48 Tell me about James Harrison.
0:07:52 So as with many things with technology, a few different people are fiddling about with
0:07:57 this at the same time and making prototypes, and it’s to do with who actually gets it going.
0:08:04 But James Harrison, son of a Scottish salmon farmer, emigrated to Australia as many British
0:08:07 people did at the time, worked as a printer.
0:08:13 He was actually a journalist, wrote and printed the local newspaper near Brisbane.
0:08:20 And he, printing an Australia summer heat, he noticed that if he wiped ether over the
0:08:24 type, then the ink didn’t smudge.
0:08:27 Because of that cooling effect, again, it would evaporate off.
0:08:32 And at the time, natural ice was reaching Australia, but it was expensive.
0:08:35 The amount that had melted by the time it had got to Australia and the distance, et cetera,
0:08:37 it was expensive and it was rare.
0:08:42 He was like, “I bet I could use this ether thing and build a refrigeration machine.”
0:08:45 I mean, he blew himself up several times.
0:08:48 There was many sets of eyebrows were lost.
0:08:55 But he ended up with a functioning machine and he was the first one to sell a refrigeration
0:09:01 machine, something that was capable, at first, not of cooling things, but of cooling water,
0:09:02 of making ice.
0:09:06 This is another funny thing, like humans didn’t think, “Oh, we could just cool a room.”
0:09:09 They thought they were only used to natural cold.
0:09:10 Ice is cold.
0:09:14 If we want something to be cold, let’s freeze water and make it ice, right?
0:09:15 That’s like step one.
0:09:16 Exactly.
0:09:19 And who is his market?
0:09:20 Who’s he selling ice to?
0:09:23 Brewers, 100% brewers.
0:09:29 Some people credit beer with being why humans got into agriculture and domesticating grain
0:09:34 and settling down, forming civilization because we wanted to drink.
0:09:35 Yeah.
0:09:37 You mentioned that in passing in the book.
0:09:39 That’s like one sentence in the book.
0:09:41 And I read it and I thought, “Is it true?”
0:09:44 I mean, nobody knows if it’s true, but how plausible is that theory?
0:09:46 It’s a pretty plausible theory.
0:09:53 This is a theory that is subscribed to by many archaeologists and reasonably backed
0:09:56 up by residue in pots.
0:10:02 People were definitely making alcohol, almost the first thing they did with their grains.
0:10:08 The Homer Simpson line, beer, the cause of and solution to all of our problems?
0:10:09 Pretty much.
0:10:11 Like perhaps historically true, right?
0:10:17 If you think of the rise of agriculture as the creation of many, many problems and then
0:10:20 the solution to many, many problems.
0:10:21 Exactly.
0:10:22 And ditto refrigeration.
0:10:28 So, yeah, so why are brewers the first market for artificial refrigeration?
0:10:33 So you can make beer without refrigeration.
0:10:39 It’s just, and if you can drink it warm, I grew up in England and people do still.
0:10:41 It’s not my taste, but you know.
0:10:44 Technology, 100 years of technology, not withstanding.
0:10:46 Not withstanding.
0:10:47 You know why?
0:10:49 It’s actually a flavor thing.
0:10:53 Loggerings taste more bitter when they’re warmer.
0:10:57 And if you are looking for that taste in your beer, as British people are, like, oh, I’ll
0:11:01 have a pint of bitter, they say, well, then warmer is better.
0:11:07 But the point is that lager was having a boom in popularity, in particular, because Germans
0:11:12 were emigrating everywhere and bringing with them their love for lager and lager yeast
0:11:16 doesn’t really function particularly well above 50 degrees.
0:11:22 And so in the lagering caves in St. Louis and Brooklyn, it was getting too hot in summer
0:11:23 to make beer.
0:11:28 And I mean, summer is when beer tastes best.
0:11:31 So this was a crisis.
0:11:37 And the brewers were huge consumers of natural ice, but then, you know, there would be natural
0:11:38 ice famines.
0:11:43 If there was a warm winter, there wouldn’t be enough natural ice to go around.
0:11:44 The price would go up.
0:11:52 And also, increasingly, as cities got bigger and in an era before, you know, sanitation,
0:11:55 the natural ice was getting polluted and really dirty.
0:11:56 So you see that?
0:11:57 It’s nasty, right?
0:12:03 You think of ice in a cave in a basement in Brooklyn in 1870, like that is nasty.
0:12:04 There was a certain–
0:12:05 In the summer?
0:12:06 Super nasty.
0:12:07 Certain funkiness.
0:12:08 Certain funkiness.
0:12:09 Let’s put it that way.
0:12:14 They were the early adopters of this refrigeration technology.
0:12:20 The first refrigerating machines ever sold were both to breweries, one in London, one
0:12:22 in Australia.
0:12:27 And they are the ones who also pioneered the whole idea of, like, wait, we don’t have
0:12:29 to make ice.
0:12:31 We could just cool the cellar.
0:12:34 And that was actually a brewer in Brooklyn, figured that out.
0:12:36 Sort of cutting out the middleman, right?
0:12:37 Exactly.
0:12:41 Which is kind of beautiful in a history of technology way, where they’re like, we want
0:12:46 the room to be cool, we know ice is cold, we’ve got this machine.
0:12:48 And it just takes, what, years?
0:12:52 How long does it take before anybody figures out that you don’t actually need to melt
0:12:56 water into ice, put the ice in the room, you can just cool the room?
0:12:57 About 20, 25 years now.
0:12:58 Wow.
0:12:59 Yeah.
0:13:00 Like a generation.
0:13:01 Yeah.
0:13:02 The technology is right there.
0:13:03 It’s just like an insight problem.
0:13:04 Exactly.
0:13:10 It’s just, I mean, if you’re used to thinking of cold as a property of ice, then seeing
0:13:14 it as not, it’s sort of a leap.
0:13:17 No one in history has ever used a machine to cool air.
0:13:18 Exactly.
0:13:19 Until, yeah.
0:13:25 Until, you know, this brewer in Brooklyn came along and did that.
0:13:26 And it was a huge improvement.
0:13:30 You can imagine, like, ice melts, it’s funky, it’s disgusting.
0:13:36 Now you have this clean, dry refrigeration machine just cooling the room.
0:13:40 The only problem was these were all prototypes.
0:13:41 They’re massive.
0:13:46 They use very explosive chemicals and they’re steam powered, so they’re constantly blowing
0:13:47 up.
0:13:48 They’re uninsurable.
0:13:49 They’re unreliable.
0:13:53 Every single one is unique because they’re all prototypes.
0:13:58 So it just took, whenever I sort of look back at this history, I have to remind myself,
0:14:02 it took a long time because there was a lot to figure out.
0:14:07 It was a French monk who eventually figured, oh, if we put the compressor, the thing that
0:14:12 sort of compresses the refrigerant so that it can evaporate again, if we put that in
0:14:18 an enclosed container, that’s going to work much better because then it won’t, you know,
0:14:19 keep breaking down.
0:14:23 And he did that because he wanted to, you know, to chill the communion wine in the south
0:14:24 of France.
0:14:25 Beer adjacent.
0:14:27 It’s all alcohol in the end.
0:14:34 And by the way, that, you know, that insight that the monk had of using a hermetically
0:14:39 sealed compressor, like, that’s basically the way refrigerators work today, right?
0:14:42 Like that’s the basic idea still.
0:14:48 Everything about the early refrigerator is basically the same as the refrigerator we
0:14:52 use today, except we’re using electricity rather than steam.
0:14:56 And the chemicals we use are, you know, we’re not using ether anymore.
0:15:01 We’re using various things with extremely long names.
0:15:04 But otherwise the principle, the mechanics, identical.
0:15:09 So you write about the way people take this technology and extend it so that you can keep
0:15:13 trucks cold and you can keep ships cold, right?
0:15:17 And then we get this world, this thing that becomes called the cold chain, which is a
0:15:21 world where we can keep food cold from the moment, you know, a vegetable is picked or
0:15:27 an animal is slaughtered basically until the time I pull it out of my fridge or my freezer
0:15:28 to cook it.
0:15:34 And once we have this cold chain, people start to to kind of rethink food in a bigger way.
0:15:38 And there’s a few pieces of that, of that kind of rethinking that I want to talk about
0:15:40 from the book.
0:15:45 So so tell me about this thing called the low temperature research station.
0:15:50 No one had any clue what temperature things should be at to last the longest, but not
0:15:54 freeze and not, you know, or not turn brown or whatever.
0:16:00 No one had any clue like what should be stored with what and for how long it all of that
0:16:02 had to be figured out.
0:16:06 And so the low temperature research station was really the first attempt to do that.
0:16:10 It was set up by the British government post World War One.
0:16:14 Britain is a very small little island filled with a lot of people.
0:16:18 And even back then it imported most of its food.
0:16:24 And as German new boats were sinking ships, bringing food from the colonies, the British
0:16:28 government were like, huh, we should figure out how to keep a supply on hand sort of
0:16:30 a reserve.
0:16:32 This is a matter of national security.
0:16:37 We can’t just do a just in time system, you know.
0:16:43 And so they set up this low temperature research station where a bunch of scientists tackled
0:16:44 everything.
0:16:45 I mean, they looked into meat.
0:16:51 In the book, I spend most of my time looking at how they studied apples.
0:16:53 Apples were a huge fruit at the time.
0:16:57 This is before the rise of the banana, so to speak.
0:17:05 And the apple was kind of it and apples would come from the colonies and need to be stored.
0:17:12 And there was, you know, a whole set of research going on into how do you store apples?
0:17:15 And it’s not just a matter of temperature as it turns out.
0:17:18 It’s also a matter of what the apple is breathing.
0:17:21 And this is a thing I didn’t really realize until I wrote this book.
0:17:25 But when you harvest produce, it’s still alive.
0:17:27 It’s still metabolizing.
0:17:29 It’s still breathing.
0:17:34 And like us, it has a certain number of breaths left until it dies.
0:17:37 When you say breathing, it’s taking in what?
0:17:39 I mean, it’s not, is it?
0:17:40 Oxygen.
0:17:43 Oh, so it’s not the usual, it’s not photosynthesis.
0:17:44 It’s not photosynthesis.
0:17:45 No.
0:17:49 So what is it taking in and what is it putting out?
0:17:52 It’s taking in oxygen and putting out carbon dioxide.
0:17:53 Just like us.
0:17:54 Just like us.
0:17:55 Yeah.
0:17:57 Apples, they’re just like us.
0:18:02 And just like us, they have a certain number of breaths before they die.
0:18:06 We know this about ourselves, although we don’t tend to think about it very much.
0:18:10 We think about it a lot, to be honest, but whatever.
0:18:16 So what do they figure out about apples at the low temperature research station?
0:18:21 Well, they figure out that you can make an apple breathe much more slowly if you reduce
0:18:23 the oxygen levels.
0:18:31 And they figure this out by putting apples in a vaseline-lined coffin, they call it,
0:18:34 sitting them in there.
0:18:35 You suck out the oxygen.
0:18:38 And there’s this sort of, it’s a finely-tuned thing.
0:18:42 You can’t remove all the oxygen because then the apples will just ferment, and then it’s
0:18:43 all over.
0:18:44 Oh, interesting.
0:18:45 New York Cider.
0:18:46 Yeah.
0:18:52 So you need to get it low enough so that they’re still breathing, just breathing as slowly
0:18:54 as possible.
0:18:57 And that actually varies by apple species.
0:19:04 So you might be able to take a pink lady down to 0.5% oxygen, but a red delicious only down
0:19:05 to 2%.
0:19:11 But the point is you’re sort of putting the apple into almost suspended animation.
0:19:15 It’s just breathing as slowly as possible.
0:19:21 And it’s sort of like if you play the podcast on half speed, it takes twice as long while
0:19:26 the apple that is breathing at half speed lives twice as long.
0:19:31 And so they figured this out, put it into commercial practice, and this is how apples
0:19:32 are stored today.
0:19:36 It’s why you can go to the store right now, which is before the apple season starts, and
0:19:42 buy a Washington State apple and it will be juicy and fresh and also nearly a year old.
0:19:47 And is temperature also a part of that formula to sort of induce this hibernation?
0:19:48 Oh, yeah.
0:19:52 You have to bring the temperature down, and again, that varies based on the species.
0:19:59 But cold’s main method of preserving things is to slow things down.
0:20:05 We know we are slower in the cold, bacteria and fungi are slower in the cold, apples are
0:20:08 slower in the cold.
0:20:12 You’re just adding the atmospheric effect to it as a sort of additive, so it’s slowed
0:20:16 down even more.
0:20:22 Still to come on the show, the technological marvel that is, a plastic bag full of lettuce.
0:20:32 .
0:20:36 Want to understand exactly how interest rate rises will impact your mortgage?
0:20:39 Or how New York City gets fresh produce?
0:20:44 Or exactly what on earth was going on over at FTX before the whole thing collapsed?
0:20:47 Twice a week, we sit down with the perfect guest to answer these sort of questions and
0:20:52 understand what’s going on with the biggest stories in finance, economics, business and
0:20:53 market.
0:20:54 I’m Tracy Allaway.
0:20:56 And I’m Jill Weisenthal.
0:20:58 And we are the hosts of Bloomberg’s All Thoughts Podcast.
0:21:00 Look us up wherever you get your podcasts.
0:21:09 The All Thoughts Podcast from Bloomberg.
0:21:11 So apples are a good one.
0:21:17 I mean, there’s a lot of specific innovations for different foods, but another one I want
0:21:21 to talk about is lettuce.
0:21:23 Tell me the lettuce story.
0:21:29 For a long time, lettuce had to be grown near where it was consumed.
0:21:36 And then once ice, you know, ice making machines came along, well, that’s when California
0:21:38 got into the lettuce business.
0:21:46 And the Salinas Valley became the largest ice producing area of the world, second only
0:21:50 to New York City and the amount of ice they made there because they were icing down all
0:21:52 the lettuce.
0:21:59 And that meant the lettuce itself had to change because, you know, the soft Boston bib type,
0:22:01 they don’t do so well when they’re iced.
0:22:09 You need something sturdy, like, oh, an iceberg, which gets its name supposedly from the fact
0:22:16 that when these crisp head lettuces were jammed into rail cars and topped with a load of ice
0:22:22 and re-topped, you know, every couple hundred miles along the railway, it would look like
0:22:29 icebergs were coming, you know, like a train car set of icebergs was coming towards you.
0:22:30 Yeah.
0:22:34 You wrote that before this time, the kind of lettuce that we call iceberg was called Los
0:22:35 Angeles, right?
0:22:36 Yes.
0:22:37 Los Angeles lettuce.
0:22:38 Yeah.
0:22:44 And like kind of, I mean, I guess people like it, but like not a real lettuce lettuce, right?
0:22:51 If you want your like green vegetables, iceberg lettuce is notably not that green.
0:22:55 And I mean, as I read the book, it just takes off as lettuce because it’s the lettuce that
0:22:59 you could send across the country in a rail car full of ice.
0:23:00 100%.
0:23:03 And that happens again and again with refrigeration.
0:23:04 It happens with apples too.
0:23:09 The apples we have on our grocery store shelves are the apples you can store in controlled
0:23:10 storage.
0:23:16 Lots of very tasty heirloom varieties do not do well in controlled storage.
0:23:17 They can’t be kept that long.
0:23:20 And so we don’t see them on supermarket shelves.
0:23:25 It’s just a, it’s sort of an ecological filter where things that cannot be stored in this
0:23:32 mass market industrial refrigerated way no longer make it onto the grocery store shelves.
0:23:38 But people are figuring out ways to store more things in this mass market industrialized
0:23:40 way, which is what happens with lettuce, right?
0:23:44 Which is why we can get so much lettuce now.
0:23:51 So like, and in particular, bagged lettuce, to my surprise, turns out to be like a wild
0:23:53 technological breakthrough.
0:23:54 I know.
0:23:57 This is the thing where you just think, oh, it’s convenient, whatever it’s a plastic bag,
0:23:58 that’s nice.
0:24:00 Maybe they washed it, big whoop.
0:24:04 And actually it turns out that that bag that you just kind of crumple up and throw away
0:24:10 is the super high tech respiratory apparatus for the lettuce leaves.
0:24:13 And it all came about surprisingly recently.
0:24:19 And what it really is, is that the bag is essentially a miniature plastic version of
0:24:22 a big controlled atmosphere Apple warehouse.
0:24:25 It’s the same idea.
0:24:28 The plastic is actually not just plastic.
0:24:35 It’s several layers of what is called differentially permeable membrane, which is basically just
0:24:41 plastic with different kinds of holes in it to let different gases through at different
0:24:47 rates that you have designed when you specified the plastic and manufactured the plastic.
0:24:55 And you glue all that together, minimum kind of seven layers as many as 12 to get exactly
0:25:00 the atmospheric blend you want in that bag of lettuce.
0:25:04 So at first it was just chopped lettuce, and the idea was just keeping that in a controlled
0:25:05 atmosphere.
0:25:09 Then it was like, you know what, people want a salad, not just one kind of lettuce.
0:25:13 So we need to throw some arugula in there and some baby spinach.
0:25:19 And to do that, you have to calculate how fast each of those leaves are breathing.
0:25:20 And they breathe at a different rate.
0:25:25 The baby spinach, because it’s so young, it’s breathing very, very fast.
0:25:29 Endive is like kind of sturdier, more chill, breathing more slowly.
0:25:38 You have to mix your leaves in the correct ratio to get an even kind of breathing pattern.
0:25:43 So the spinach breathing super fast, you put enough endive in to kind of chill things down
0:25:46 and take the overall bags metabolism down.
0:25:51 So it’s this entirely, you think, oh, they put in too much endive, I don’t like that.
0:25:56 No, it’s all engineered.
0:26:01 And when they’re like different, you can buy a bag of baby spinach.
0:26:07 Is the plastic bag for the baby spinach different than the plastic bag for whatever, the premixed
0:26:08 coleslaw or whatever?
0:26:13 Yes, 100% because they’re delivering a different atmospheric ratio.
0:26:20 I mean, this is the most high, it’s using cold war era submarine technology, which is
0:26:26 when people started spending so long under the water that people had to figure out how
0:26:28 to deliver controlled atmospheres.
0:26:34 It’s like a submarine, it’s like a submarine for greens, basically.
0:26:35 Exactly.
0:26:41 And the guy who invented it, who’s still alive, has anyone heard of this man?
0:26:42 No.
0:26:43 Say his name.
0:26:44 I haven’t even said it.
0:26:45 Say the name.
0:26:48 Jim Lug, James Lug.
0:26:53 It’s like this bold step forward for a salad that has been completely forgotten.
0:26:58 And I’m guilty of this as anyone else, like you bring a bag of salad home, if it doesn’t
0:27:02 fit in your crisper drawer, you kind of open it to squish out some of the air and put it
0:27:03 in there.
0:27:08 Now that I know the effort that has gone into creating that little atmospheric bubble, I’m
0:27:11 like, I am so sorry.
0:27:13 Sorry, Jim.
0:27:17 What about the … So the soft plastic bag is what we’re talking about.
0:27:21 They also sell salad now in the hard plastic clam shell.
0:27:24 Is that some crazy technology that I don’t even know about?
0:27:30 No, that’s been … There’s actually less effective, but it’s been flushed with more
0:27:35 of an inert gas to the best of my knowledge, but it’s actually not as high-tech.
0:27:38 The bags are more high-tech.
0:27:39 And do the bags work better?
0:27:43 Do the bags preserve the greens longer than the hard shell?
0:27:44 Yeah.
0:27:45 Huh.
0:27:46 Not intuitive.
0:27:47 I know.
0:27:48 Now you know.
0:27:57 So one of the things that’s interesting to me in the book is you seem ambivalent about
0:27:58 refrigeration.
0:28:05 You spent 10 years on the book and clearly you admire a lot of the people who figured
0:28:06 things out.
0:28:12 Do you seem … Yeah, do you seem ambivalent about the effects of refrigeration on humanity
0:28:13 in the world?
0:28:16 How do you weigh the effects of refrigeration?
0:28:17 Well, yeah.
0:28:21 So first of all, I think the important thing is to weigh it.
0:28:26 And here’s … One thing I came to realize as I worked on this book is that refrigeration
0:28:32 is just so taken for granted as a central sort of … This is how we eat.
0:28:37 It doesn’t get evaluated for its costs or benefits.
0:28:38 It just is.
0:28:42 It’s one of those things like air where it’s like, “Is air good or bad?
0:28:45 We need it.”
0:28:50 So I actually thought it was important to say, “Well, you know what?
0:28:53 It’s a very recent technology, extremely recent.
0:29:00 It wasn’t commercialized until just over 150 years ago, wasn’t commonplace until a century
0:29:02 ago, if that.”
0:29:06 This is a very recent transformation of our food system.
0:29:11 Why are we assuming that it has to be, that it is inevitable?
0:29:14 When you’re starting to write a book, you go and look and see, “Has anyone else written
0:29:15 about this?”
0:29:20 And I went to the New York Public Library and I looked at the most recent book on refrigeration
0:29:23 and it was from the 1950s.
0:29:28 And it said, “Well, like refrigeration is great and human progress continues and note
0:29:32 out the next food preservation thing will be along shortly.”
0:29:39 No one at the time thought refrigeration was the end and yet it has sort of become the
0:29:40 end.
0:29:45 It’s interesting because I feel like mid-century was that with a number of things.
0:29:47 With air travel comes to mind famously.
0:29:55 The 50 years from whatever, 1900 to 1950, 1910 to 1960 were like this incredible thing.
0:29:59 And then we basically got the same thing now that we had then.
0:30:04 Yeah, a little better, but like moderate iterations, but the same thing.
0:30:11 And the reason I think it’s important to look at, I mean, there are a few different reasons.
0:30:16 One is the super pressing one, which is refrigeration actually turns out to have a huge climate
0:30:18 change impact.
0:30:22 The refrigerants themselves are super greenhouse gases a lot of the time.
0:30:30 The power to make things cold, the energy required to make things cold is a huge burden.
0:30:36 And if the rest of the world refrigerates like America does, which it doesn’t right
0:30:44 now, the US is sort of Europe as well, but unique in having a cold chain of the scale
0:30:45 we have.
0:30:46 Right.
0:30:50 It’s sort of a microcosm of the broader like, “Oh, there is a developing world.”
0:30:53 And inevitably, everybody wants to have the same standard of living we do.
0:30:57 But if that happens, we’re screwed in terms of climate change, among other things.
0:30:58 Completely screwed.
0:31:01 In the absence of other innovations, at least.
0:31:03 Exactly.
0:31:07 And whereas people sort of seem to recognize that with like, “Oh, hey, if everyone has
0:31:13 a car in Africa, we’re screwed,” they aren’t talking about it when it comes to, “Well,
0:31:16 if the entire food system is refrigerated.”
0:31:19 If the cold chain that we have in the developed world becomes global.
0:31:20 Yeah.
0:31:21 Exactly.
0:31:22 Okay.
0:31:23 Well, let’s do this.
0:31:24 Way it.
0:31:25 You wrote a book.
0:31:27 You spent 10 years.
0:31:29 What has happened has happened on balance.
0:31:35 You think we’re better off or worse off for refrigeration?
0:31:43 I think better off as long as we figure out what to do about the climate change aspect
0:31:44 of it.
0:31:49 So let’s talk about what comes next, what people are trying to figure out.
0:31:56 It is an excellent point that 70 years ago, everybody was like, “Surely the next cold
0:32:02 making, surely the next refrigeration breakthrough is imminent and nothing,” right?
0:32:04 So what are people working on?
0:32:07 What is the frontier of refrigeration?
0:32:08 It’s very underfunded.
0:32:13 And that’s also before you think about, you know, there’s cooling things more sustainably
0:32:17 or there’s preserving food differently.
0:32:23 When refrigeration was first introduced, people were thinking that the big preservation
0:32:29 breakthrough that people needed to feed cities was not going to be cold.
0:32:33 Cold was, you know, this fleeting natural ephemeral ice thing.
0:32:36 There was no way it would work at scale.
0:32:44 So they were looking into all sorts of, you know, fumigation, coatings, shredding things
0:32:46 and drying them.
0:32:51 You get the invention of the bullion cube as a way to say, “Oh, how do we kind of extract
0:32:55 the nutritional value of meat and at least preserve that?”
0:33:01 So at the time, people were aware that, you know, preservation could take many forms.
0:33:05 And I think that’s one of the things I look at in the book is, like, what if the future
0:33:08 of, you know, some things have to be cold.
0:33:10 Ice cream has to be cold.
0:33:14 Beer has to be cold in my book.
0:33:19 But you know, an apple doesn’t actually have to be cold, it just has to be preserved.
0:33:23 Most of refrigeration is not keeping things cold so that we can eat them cold, it’s so
0:33:25 that they don’t spoil.
0:33:26 Exactly.
0:33:33 So if there are other ways for them not to spoil, well then you could have a vastly slimmed
0:33:40 down cold chain or, listen, we’ve built our system in the U.S., it is what it is, you could
0:33:45 say, “Well, hey, in countries that haven’t built their cold chain yet, maybe they could
0:33:50 build this leaner-meaner model in the same way that, you know, they didn’t get checkbooks,
0:33:54 they went straight to digital banking on their phones and they didn’t get landlines, they
0:33:56 went straight to cell phones, et cetera.
0:34:03 So could we find better preservation solutions if what we’re trying to do is keep food fresh,
0:34:06 but don’t require a cold chain where possible?
0:34:11 What are people working on in terms of preserving food without cold?
0:34:18 So some people are working on high pressure processing, so if you can just apply enough
0:34:26 pressure, you can sort of squeeze out the bacteria and fungi, this works with meat apparently
0:34:31 quite well, it’s expensive right now, it’s very much at the experimental stage, this is
0:34:37 not something that is done commercially right now, whereas the one that I went to see is
0:34:39 done commercially right now, which is a coating.
0:34:44 And so it’s funny, it’s like what goes around, comes around, all of these, you know, pressure,
0:34:52 coating, fumigation, like all of these things were things that were thought of in the 1750s
0:34:57 and now are being tried again and coatings is one of them.
0:35:03 Unfortunately the trick with this one coating company appeal is they’re taking the same
0:35:09 logic of the apple warehouse and the salad bag, they’re just putting it on to the produce
0:35:15 item as a nano scale coating that is made out of food particles.
0:35:24 So it is exactly the semi permeable membrane that your salad bag is, it’s just not plastic,
0:35:28 it’s just sprayed directly onto your cucumber and it’s controlling the cucumber’s breathing
0:35:29 that way.
0:35:33 I mean, it seems cool, but as you describe it, it sounds like a thing one does not want
0:35:34 to eat.
0:35:41 That’s where you’re wrong, I licked the produce with this on, I’m here to tell a tale.
0:35:44 So what is actually going on, what are they doing?
0:35:48 It’s a different formulation for each fruit or vegetable because you’re trying to create
0:35:55 a different modified atmosphere and you create this formulation, there’s a lot of trial
0:35:59 and error, you spray it on, it’s nano scale.
0:36:04 Part of how it works is people think of it as like wax or something like it’s a thick
0:36:07 layer that’s blocking things, no.
0:36:12 It came out of research into solar panels that was all about how if they dry at different
0:36:18 rates, they assemble slightly different at the nano scale and have different, a solar
0:36:24 panel can be twice as efficient if you let it dry two times more slowly.
0:36:30 So this is the similar, it’s out of this same thin film polymer physics and you just have
0:36:35 to spray it on and dry it a certain way, it assembles with these properties, it’s nano
0:36:36 scale.
0:36:43 It’s undetectable, made out of food waste and what it’s doing is the exact same thing
0:36:49 that the salad bag is doing, which is slowing down how fast that piece of produce breathes
0:36:54 so that it takes its allotted number of breaths over a longer time.
0:37:02 And it’s kind of astonishing, I went in as a skeptical journalist and then I saw the
0:37:06 bell peppers that had been sitting out for eight weeks at room temperature.
0:37:11 And I feel we all know that after eight weeks at room temperature, a bell pepper is not
0:37:12 in great shape.
0:37:16 It’s no longer something you want to eat.
0:37:25 These bell peppers with the nano scale coating, they weren’t crudité board ready, but they
0:37:29 were definitely stir fry worthy.
0:37:33 They were a little sad looking, but they hadn’t gone.
0:37:35 And eight weeks at room temperature.
0:37:40 Yeah, two months a long time for a bell pepper to sit on the counter.
0:37:44 So are they out in the world now?
0:37:48 Are there fruits that you can buy that have this coating on them?
0:37:49 There are.
0:37:53 In fact, Walmart just announced that it’s ditching plastic on its English cucumbers
0:37:57 in favor of appeal, this coating.
0:37:58 Okay.
0:38:01 So which cucumber they sell that, that’s the like the hot house, the long, I think far
0:38:05 more tasty cucumber that it is like shrink wrapped, right?
0:38:08 It has like, yeah, it’s basically shrink wrapped when you buy it.
0:38:13 And so Walmart’s going to start selling it with this lipid coating instead of plastic.
0:38:14 Exactly.
0:38:17 And it works better.
0:38:20 It like keeps the product fresher.
0:38:24 And this is one of the fascinating things about it because over time, refrigeration has totally
0:38:26 changed our understanding of what freshness means.
0:38:31 It used to mean something that had been harvested or slaughtered really recently and really
0:38:32 nearby.
0:38:35 It was something to do with time and distance.
0:38:39 Then refrigeration changed all of that because suddenly it could have been slaughtered six
0:38:41 months ago and looked like it was slaughtered yesterday.
0:38:44 So the definition of fresh changed.
0:38:47 And what appeal does is sort of say it could change again.
0:38:52 It could be fresh doesn’t have to mean refrigerated.
0:38:57 It could just mean with more of the nutrients and the flavor that it had when it was on
0:38:58 the plant.
0:39:04 It could be a chemical definition, not something that we, at the moment, the definition of
0:39:07 fresh is it needs to go in the fridge, right?
0:39:09 I mean, that’s or it comes from the fridge.
0:39:11 That’s how people think of freshness.
0:39:17 It could be, it could be to do with the actual youth relatively of the fruit of vegetable
0:39:18 itself.
0:39:24 How few breaths it’s taken.
0:39:36 We’ll be back in a minute with the Lighting Round.
0:39:40 Want to understand exactly how interest rate rises will impact your mortgage?
0:39:43 Or how New York City gets fresh produce?
0:39:48 Or exactly what on earth was going on over at FTX before the whole thing collapsed?
0:39:51 Twice a week, we sit down with the perfect guest to answer these sort of questions and
0:39:56 understand what’s going on with the biggest stories in finance, economics, business and
0:39:57 markets.
0:39:58 I’m Tracy Allaway.
0:40:00 And I’m Joe Weisenthal.
0:40:02 And we are the hosts of Bloomberg’s All Thoughts Podcast.
0:40:04 Look us up wherever you get your podcasts.
0:40:13 The All Thoughts Podcast from Bloomberg.
0:40:16 Let’s finish with the Lighting Round.
0:40:27 In the book, you cite a number of publications with amazing names, including but not limited
0:40:35 to food engineering magazine, container management magazine, palette enterprise magazine, and
0:40:39 food technology magazine.
0:40:45 If I am going to read one trade publication, any trade publication, which one should it
0:40:46 be?
0:40:50 There have to be one that’s still in print because the old school ice and refrigeration,
0:40:59 which was in print from like the 1880s to the 19, I want to say 2030s is, I could spend
0:41:01 all day reading that.
0:41:02 It’s incredible.
0:41:03 Tell me more.
0:41:06 Who is the John McPhee of ice and refrigeration?
0:41:08 None of the articles are signed.
0:41:11 All of them are delightful.
0:41:16 Their entire articles about how cold affected Napoleon’s army, for example, it’s just a
0:41:21 much more wide-ranging look at cold as this phenomenon.
0:41:22 I love it.
0:41:25 It’s the magazine for people who are into cold.
0:41:26 Exactly.
0:41:28 I’d say start there.
0:41:34 What’s your favorite thing that you can eat because of refrigeration?
0:41:44 Well, I mean, this is a hard call between, I mean, if it’s eat, ice cream, obviously,
0:41:52 although if it’s drink, then think of all the world of cocktails that previously didn’t
0:41:56 have ice in them and are now so, so good.
0:42:00 I mean, there’s even things that aren’t cold, but like mangoes.
0:42:05 I live in New York and theoretically in the world, I could eat a mango without refrigeration,
0:42:11 but the idea that a mango could be like a quasi-stable fruit in my house is amazing
0:42:13 and great, I think.
0:42:16 Like yes, I know there are costs, but like, I love mangoes.
0:42:17 Yeah.
0:42:22 I think one of the sad things that’s happened to me as I’ve researched this book and made
0:42:28 my podcast is I’ve realized how much worse things taste when they are refrigerated.
0:42:31 I mean, but it’s not worse than no mango.
0:42:36 I’m sure the best mango in the world is amazing, but I love the mangoes that I get.
0:42:39 It depends if you’ve had the really good mangoes.
0:42:40 Once you’ve had them.
0:42:41 Well, then I’m glad that I haven’t.
0:42:42 Yeah.
0:42:43 There you go.
0:42:47 What’s the most surprising detail you learned working on the book?
0:42:49 Oh, man.
0:42:56 I mean, just because it’s the most recent thing we were talking about, ice cream, the non-premium
0:43:01 brands are 50% air and you can’t truck them across the country because they’ll explode
0:43:03 as you go over the Rockies.
0:43:04 Really?
0:43:12 So, the companies have to come up with different formulations for the higher altitude parts
0:43:19 of the country and you can’t bring, you can’t truck your ice cream from your factory in
0:43:21 Georgia to sell in Denver is not going to work.
0:43:27 So basically, as you go up in altitude, the atmospheric pressure declines and the air
0:43:31 inside the container expands and blows the lid off.
0:43:32 Yep.
0:43:37 When you say non-premium, it’s like the old school, like pre-Haggendahs, pre-Benningerries,
0:43:40 where you get the big half-gallon, not the little pint.
0:43:41 Yes, exactly.
0:43:45 So, like, Haggendahs and Benningerries are dense enough that you can take those over
0:43:46 the Rockies.
0:43:47 Yeah.
0:43:53 They are less air by volume and thus, yes, they still expand a little, but not enough
0:43:56 to blow their lids off.
0:44:00 So they’re not as much more expensive than the cheaper kind once you account for the
0:44:03 fact that the cheaper kind has more air.
0:44:04 Yeah, exactly.
0:44:05 Okay.
0:44:09 But some people like the air, you know, it gives a different texture.
0:44:10 Fair.
0:44:14 What’s one thing that people refrigerate that they should not refrigerate?
0:44:15 So much.
0:44:19 I mean, for example, never put stone fruit in your refrigerator.
0:44:22 It is the stone fruit killing zone.
0:44:29 It literally disables the genetic machinery that the fruit uses to make flavor.
0:44:30 So just don’t do it.
0:44:34 Eat the peach or make the peach into a pie.
0:44:37 Do not put the peach in the fridge.
0:44:38 There’s a ton.
0:44:42 Onions and potatoes, I mean, potatoes actually become toxic in the fridge.
0:44:44 Never do that.
0:44:49 A lot of people have this idea that the fridge is just this miraculous box that keeps everything
0:44:51 safe, and that is not the case.
0:44:55 It’s not the ideal environment for a lot of things.
0:44:59 It’s something that people don’t refrigerate that they should.
0:45:00 Nuts.
0:45:01 Nuts.
0:45:02 Yeah.
0:45:05 This is news I can use.
0:45:11 If you don’t go through, you know, nuts that you’re going to go through on a relatively
0:45:16 quick basis, like if you just grab a handful of almonds every day and you go through the
0:45:19 bag pretty quickly, fine, doesn’t need to be in the fridge.
0:45:24 But if you have, say, some pine nuts or some macadamia nuts that you only use in certain
0:45:29 recipes, they will go rancid out of the fridge and they will last longer.
0:45:35 I actually keep my macadamias in the freezer.
0:45:40 Nikki Twilly is the author of the book Frostbite and the host of the podcast, Gastropod.
0:45:42 Thanks for listening to the show.
0:45:45 You can email us at problem@pushkin.fm.
0:45:49 We’re going to take a couple of weeks off for a summer break, but we’ll be back soon.
0:45:52 Today’s show was edited by Lydia Jean Cott.
0:45:56 It was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang and engineered by Sara Bruguere.
0:46:15 I’m Jacob Goldstein.
0:46:19 Want to understand exactly how interest rate rises will impact your mortgage?
0:46:22 Or how New York City gets fresh produce?
0:46:26 Or exactly what on earth was going on over at FTX before the whole thing collapsed?
0:46:30 Twice a week, we sit down with the perfect guests to answer these sort of questions and
0:46:35 understand what’s going on with the biggest stories in finance, economics, business and
0:46:36 market.
0:46:37 I’m Tracy Allaway.
0:46:39 And I’m Jill Weisenthal.
0:46:41 And we are the hosts of Bloomberg’s OddLots podcast.
0:46:43 Look us up wherever you get your podcasts.
0:46:45 The OddLots podcast from Bloomberg.
0:46:48 (upbeat music)
0:46:50 (upbeat music)
0:00:22 York City gets fresh produce or exactly what on earth was going on over at FTX before
0:00:23 the whole thing collapsed?”
0:00:27 Twice a week, we sit down with the perfect guest to answer these sort of questions and
0:00:32 understand what’s going on with the biggest stories in finance, economics, business and
0:00:33 market.
0:00:34 I’m Tracy Allaway.
0:00:35 And I’m Jill Weisenthal.
0:00:38 And we are the hosts of Bloomberg’s All Thoughts podcast.
0:00:40 Look us up wherever you get your podcasts.
0:00:49 The All Thoughts podcast from Bloomberg.
0:00:55 The late 20th and early 21st century, this era we’ve just been living through, has obviously
0:00:59 been this period of incredible technological change.
0:01:06 But in terms of technology transforming everyday life, our era is not unprecedented, which
0:01:09 is to say our era is precedented.
0:01:15 I would argue, in fact I have argued, that in terms of everyday life, there was an even
0:01:21 bigger technology driven transformation in the period 100 years earlier, in the period
0:01:24 of the late 1800s and early 1900s.
0:01:30 That period saw the coming of cars and planes, the spread of telephones and the electric grid,
0:01:34 and the spread of refrigeration.
0:01:39 Refrigeration allowed us to preserve and transport food like never before, and in fact wound
0:01:45 up really completely transforming the way people eat, the food we eat every day.
0:01:51 I recently interviewed a journalist named Nicola Twilly, who just wrote a book on refrigeration
0:01:53 and how it changed us.
0:01:57 The book is called Frostbite, and one of the things the book really made clear is how
0:02:03 refrigeration changed daily life in this really profound way.
0:02:09 Nicke describes this transformation in microcosm via the work of this husband and wife sociologist
0:02:10 team.
0:02:17 The husband and wife visited a town in Indiana, first in 1890, and then again in 1925.
0:02:21 And they talk about the different ways life has changed in this town.
0:02:26 And Nicke focuses on the way refrigeration changed the way people eat.
0:02:31 In 1890, what they found is that the city had two diets.
0:02:34 It had a winter and a summer diet.
0:02:40 And then the winter diet was just really meat, starches, carbs, pastry, potatoes, things
0:02:42 like that.
0:02:47 And the only sort of vegetables to enliven it were either root vegetables, turnips,
0:02:53 cabbages, apples you could store in the root cellars, or things you had pickled or preserved
0:02:55 from summer.
0:03:02 But fresh fruit, green vegetables, leaves, berries, none of that.
0:03:06 And you talk about how people would be sick, essentially, like everybody in town would
0:03:08 get sick by the end of winter.
0:03:11 Yeah, they called it spring sickness.
0:03:15 Today, we’d call it sort of a pre-scorbatic syndrome.
0:03:18 So like about to have scurvy.
0:03:19 Like about to have scurvy.
0:03:21 Not full-blown scurvy, but you know.
0:03:26 It’s a mild scurvy that everybody got every winter.
0:03:27 Exactly.
0:03:35 And so then these academics, these sociologists come back in the 1920s once refrigeration is
0:03:39 clearly not ubiquitous by that point, but it’s in the world.
0:03:44 And how do they find the diet in this town has changed?
0:03:46 It has changed utterly.
0:03:53 They can buy oranges and lettuce shipped from California and bananas shipped all the way
0:03:55 from Central America.
0:04:01 All but the very, very poorest are beginning to be able to enjoy some of the sort of what
0:04:05 I call the supermarket in the US today, permanent global summertime.
0:04:08 You can have anything you want at any time.
0:04:11 Spring sickness has been alleviated.
0:04:17 No one speaks of spring sickness anymore and it’s totally a, you know, the older generation
0:04:19 remember it, the younger don’t.
0:04:27 I’m Jacob Goldstein and this is What’s Your Problem.
0:04:29 My guest today is Nikki Twilly.
0:04:33 Her new book Frostbite is full of useful insights into science and markets and technological
0:04:34 change.
0:04:40 Also, the book has just a bunch of good stories, including, but not limited to, the central
0:04:46 role of beer in human history, the shockingly complex technology that goes into the bags
0:04:51 of salad greens on the shelf at the grocery store, and why the technological frontier
0:04:57 in refrigeration may mean that we don’t need to keep so much stuff so cold.
0:05:02 My conversation with Nikki started more or less at the beginning.
0:05:07 Humans have been able to control fire since before we were even modern humans.
0:05:09 That goes way back.
0:05:11 What we got, he came early.
0:05:12 All over it.
0:05:16 And some people argue that’s what made us human, you know, the ability to cook and then feed
0:05:19 our big brains, et cetera.
0:05:21 Cold, much trickier.
0:05:29 All the great minds, you know, Newton, Galileo, Robert Boyle, all of the scientists that you’ve
0:05:37 heard of, Leonardo da Vinci, tried to figure out where on earth cold came from.
0:05:44 But yeah, in 1755 a Scottish doctor, almost as a party trick, figured out how to freeze
0:05:54 water, a pupil of his had noticed that if you put a thermometer in ether, which evaporates
0:05:59 very quickly, and when something evaporates, it pulls heat away.
0:06:04 The energy of turning that thing, that liquid into gas, pulls heat away so you get a cooling
0:06:05 sensation.
0:06:08 He used a bunch of different liquids to try and make this work.
0:06:15 He used chili oil, he used brandy, he used menthol, you know, he was going for all the
0:06:23 sort of ones that give you a tingly sensation, logic, but in the end he did manage to create
0:06:28 a setup that froze water for the first time.
0:06:34 This was the first time, 1755, that humans were able to make cold on demand.
0:06:37 And he was just like, “Well, this seems kind of interesting, but I don’t really know what
0:06:39 to do with it, so others should investigate.”
0:06:43 And no one did anything for 100 years because it was like, “What are we going to do with
0:06:44 this?
0:06:45 It’s a party trick.”
0:06:46 Yeah, that part is wild, right?
0:06:52 It’s like, “Here’s this giant breakthrough, we’re ready,” and then crickets.
0:06:58 You know, I quote a line from Robert Browning in the book, “Humanity’s reach had exceeded
0:06:59 its grasp.”
0:07:04 We had figured out how to do something, but we didn’t know what to do with it, you know?
0:07:09 It just, the picture of what you could do with cold wasn’t there yet.
0:07:12 Right, and you write about that, right?
0:07:18 You point out that in the 1800s, the first kind of industrialization of cold that emerges
0:07:23 is not from this new technology, but from a guy just selling ice, just like cutting
0:07:27 ice out of frozen lakes and putting it on ships and sending that around the world and
0:07:29 selling that.
0:07:35 And it’s not until like 100 years after that Scottish doctor inventing refrigeration that
0:07:42 this guy in Australia, James Harrison, who you write about, he’s like, “Oh, maybe refrigeration
0:07:45 could be, you know, a business.”
0:07:46 So tell me about that piece of it.
0:07:48 Tell me about James Harrison.
0:07:52 So as with many things with technology, a few different people are fiddling about with
0:07:57 this at the same time and making prototypes, and it’s to do with who actually gets it going.
0:08:04 But James Harrison, son of a Scottish salmon farmer, emigrated to Australia as many British
0:08:07 people did at the time, worked as a printer.
0:08:13 He was actually a journalist, wrote and printed the local newspaper near Brisbane.
0:08:20 And he, printing an Australia summer heat, he noticed that if he wiped ether over the
0:08:24 type, then the ink didn’t smudge.
0:08:27 Because of that cooling effect, again, it would evaporate off.
0:08:32 And at the time, natural ice was reaching Australia, but it was expensive.
0:08:35 The amount that had melted by the time it had got to Australia and the distance, et cetera,
0:08:37 it was expensive and it was rare.
0:08:42 He was like, “I bet I could use this ether thing and build a refrigeration machine.”
0:08:45 I mean, he blew himself up several times.
0:08:48 There was many sets of eyebrows were lost.
0:08:55 But he ended up with a functioning machine and he was the first one to sell a refrigeration
0:09:01 machine, something that was capable, at first, not of cooling things, but of cooling water,
0:09:02 of making ice.
0:09:06 This is another funny thing, like humans didn’t think, “Oh, we could just cool a room.”
0:09:09 They thought they were only used to natural cold.
0:09:10 Ice is cold.
0:09:14 If we want something to be cold, let’s freeze water and make it ice, right?
0:09:15 That’s like step one.
0:09:16 Exactly.
0:09:19 And who is his market?
0:09:20 Who’s he selling ice to?
0:09:23 Brewers, 100% brewers.
0:09:29 Some people credit beer with being why humans got into agriculture and domesticating grain
0:09:34 and settling down, forming civilization because we wanted to drink.
0:09:35 Yeah.
0:09:37 You mentioned that in passing in the book.
0:09:39 That’s like one sentence in the book.
0:09:41 And I read it and I thought, “Is it true?”
0:09:44 I mean, nobody knows if it’s true, but how plausible is that theory?
0:09:46 It’s a pretty plausible theory.
0:09:53 This is a theory that is subscribed to by many archaeologists and reasonably backed
0:09:56 up by residue in pots.
0:10:02 People were definitely making alcohol, almost the first thing they did with their grains.
0:10:08 The Homer Simpson line, beer, the cause of and solution to all of our problems?
0:10:09 Pretty much.
0:10:11 Like perhaps historically true, right?
0:10:17 If you think of the rise of agriculture as the creation of many, many problems and then
0:10:20 the solution to many, many problems.
0:10:21 Exactly.
0:10:22 And ditto refrigeration.
0:10:28 So, yeah, so why are brewers the first market for artificial refrigeration?
0:10:33 So you can make beer without refrigeration.
0:10:39 It’s just, and if you can drink it warm, I grew up in England and people do still.
0:10:41 It’s not my taste, but you know.
0:10:44 Technology, 100 years of technology, not withstanding.
0:10:46 Not withstanding.
0:10:47 You know why?
0:10:49 It’s actually a flavor thing.
0:10:53 Loggerings taste more bitter when they’re warmer.
0:10:57 And if you are looking for that taste in your beer, as British people are, like, oh, I’ll
0:11:01 have a pint of bitter, they say, well, then warmer is better.
0:11:07 But the point is that lager was having a boom in popularity, in particular, because Germans
0:11:12 were emigrating everywhere and bringing with them their love for lager and lager yeast
0:11:16 doesn’t really function particularly well above 50 degrees.
0:11:22 And so in the lagering caves in St. Louis and Brooklyn, it was getting too hot in summer
0:11:23 to make beer.
0:11:28 And I mean, summer is when beer tastes best.
0:11:31 So this was a crisis.
0:11:37 And the brewers were huge consumers of natural ice, but then, you know, there would be natural
0:11:38 ice famines.
0:11:43 If there was a warm winter, there wouldn’t be enough natural ice to go around.
0:11:44 The price would go up.
0:11:52 And also, increasingly, as cities got bigger and in an era before, you know, sanitation,
0:11:55 the natural ice was getting polluted and really dirty.
0:11:56 So you see that?
0:11:57 It’s nasty, right?
0:12:03 You think of ice in a cave in a basement in Brooklyn in 1870, like that is nasty.
0:12:04 There was a certain–
0:12:05 In the summer?
0:12:06 Super nasty.
0:12:07 Certain funkiness.
0:12:08 Certain funkiness.
0:12:09 Let’s put it that way.
0:12:14 They were the early adopters of this refrigeration technology.
0:12:20 The first refrigerating machines ever sold were both to breweries, one in London, one
0:12:22 in Australia.
0:12:27 And they are the ones who also pioneered the whole idea of, like, wait, we don’t have
0:12:29 to make ice.
0:12:31 We could just cool the cellar.
0:12:34 And that was actually a brewer in Brooklyn, figured that out.
0:12:36 Sort of cutting out the middleman, right?
0:12:37 Exactly.
0:12:41 Which is kind of beautiful in a history of technology way, where they’re like, we want
0:12:46 the room to be cool, we know ice is cold, we’ve got this machine.
0:12:48 And it just takes, what, years?
0:12:52 How long does it take before anybody figures out that you don’t actually need to melt
0:12:56 water into ice, put the ice in the room, you can just cool the room?
0:12:57 About 20, 25 years now.
0:12:58 Wow.
0:12:59 Yeah.
0:13:00 Like a generation.
0:13:01 Yeah.
0:13:02 The technology is right there.
0:13:03 It’s just like an insight problem.
0:13:04 Exactly.
0:13:10 It’s just, I mean, if you’re used to thinking of cold as a property of ice, then seeing
0:13:14 it as not, it’s sort of a leap.
0:13:17 No one in history has ever used a machine to cool air.
0:13:18 Exactly.
0:13:19 Until, yeah.
0:13:25 Until, you know, this brewer in Brooklyn came along and did that.
0:13:26 And it was a huge improvement.
0:13:30 You can imagine, like, ice melts, it’s funky, it’s disgusting.
0:13:36 Now you have this clean, dry refrigeration machine just cooling the room.
0:13:40 The only problem was these were all prototypes.
0:13:41 They’re massive.
0:13:46 They use very explosive chemicals and they’re steam powered, so they’re constantly blowing
0:13:47 up.
0:13:48 They’re uninsurable.
0:13:49 They’re unreliable.
0:13:53 Every single one is unique because they’re all prototypes.
0:13:58 So it just took, whenever I sort of look back at this history, I have to remind myself,
0:14:02 it took a long time because there was a lot to figure out.
0:14:07 It was a French monk who eventually figured, oh, if we put the compressor, the thing that
0:14:12 sort of compresses the refrigerant so that it can evaporate again, if we put that in
0:14:18 an enclosed container, that’s going to work much better because then it won’t, you know,
0:14:19 keep breaking down.
0:14:23 And he did that because he wanted to, you know, to chill the communion wine in the south
0:14:24 of France.
0:14:25 Beer adjacent.
0:14:27 It’s all alcohol in the end.
0:14:34 And by the way, that, you know, that insight that the monk had of using a hermetically
0:14:39 sealed compressor, like, that’s basically the way refrigerators work today, right?
0:14:42 Like that’s the basic idea still.
0:14:48 Everything about the early refrigerator is basically the same as the refrigerator we
0:14:52 use today, except we’re using electricity rather than steam.
0:14:56 And the chemicals we use are, you know, we’re not using ether anymore.
0:15:01 We’re using various things with extremely long names.
0:15:04 But otherwise the principle, the mechanics, identical.
0:15:09 So you write about the way people take this technology and extend it so that you can keep
0:15:13 trucks cold and you can keep ships cold, right?
0:15:17 And then we get this world, this thing that becomes called the cold chain, which is a
0:15:21 world where we can keep food cold from the moment, you know, a vegetable is picked or
0:15:27 an animal is slaughtered basically until the time I pull it out of my fridge or my freezer
0:15:28 to cook it.
0:15:34 And once we have this cold chain, people start to to kind of rethink food in a bigger way.
0:15:38 And there’s a few pieces of that, of that kind of rethinking that I want to talk about
0:15:40 from the book.
0:15:45 So so tell me about this thing called the low temperature research station.
0:15:50 No one had any clue what temperature things should be at to last the longest, but not
0:15:54 freeze and not, you know, or not turn brown or whatever.
0:16:00 No one had any clue like what should be stored with what and for how long it all of that
0:16:02 had to be figured out.
0:16:06 And so the low temperature research station was really the first attempt to do that.
0:16:10 It was set up by the British government post World War One.
0:16:14 Britain is a very small little island filled with a lot of people.
0:16:18 And even back then it imported most of its food.
0:16:24 And as German new boats were sinking ships, bringing food from the colonies, the British
0:16:28 government were like, huh, we should figure out how to keep a supply on hand sort of
0:16:30 a reserve.
0:16:32 This is a matter of national security.
0:16:37 We can’t just do a just in time system, you know.
0:16:43 And so they set up this low temperature research station where a bunch of scientists tackled
0:16:44 everything.
0:16:45 I mean, they looked into meat.
0:16:51 In the book, I spend most of my time looking at how they studied apples.
0:16:53 Apples were a huge fruit at the time.
0:16:57 This is before the rise of the banana, so to speak.
0:17:05 And the apple was kind of it and apples would come from the colonies and need to be stored.
0:17:12 And there was, you know, a whole set of research going on into how do you store apples?
0:17:15 And it’s not just a matter of temperature as it turns out.
0:17:18 It’s also a matter of what the apple is breathing.
0:17:21 And this is a thing I didn’t really realize until I wrote this book.
0:17:25 But when you harvest produce, it’s still alive.
0:17:27 It’s still metabolizing.
0:17:29 It’s still breathing.
0:17:34 And like us, it has a certain number of breaths left until it dies.
0:17:37 When you say breathing, it’s taking in what?
0:17:39 I mean, it’s not, is it?
0:17:40 Oxygen.
0:17:43 Oh, so it’s not the usual, it’s not photosynthesis.
0:17:44 It’s not photosynthesis.
0:17:45 No.
0:17:49 So what is it taking in and what is it putting out?
0:17:52 It’s taking in oxygen and putting out carbon dioxide.
0:17:53 Just like us.
0:17:54 Just like us.
0:17:55 Yeah.
0:17:57 Apples, they’re just like us.
0:18:02 And just like us, they have a certain number of breaths before they die.
0:18:06 We know this about ourselves, although we don’t tend to think about it very much.
0:18:10 We think about it a lot, to be honest, but whatever.
0:18:16 So what do they figure out about apples at the low temperature research station?
0:18:21 Well, they figure out that you can make an apple breathe much more slowly if you reduce
0:18:23 the oxygen levels.
0:18:31 And they figure this out by putting apples in a vaseline-lined coffin, they call it,
0:18:34 sitting them in there.
0:18:35 You suck out the oxygen.
0:18:38 And there’s this sort of, it’s a finely-tuned thing.
0:18:42 You can’t remove all the oxygen because then the apples will just ferment, and then it’s
0:18:43 all over.
0:18:44 Oh, interesting.
0:18:45 New York Cider.
0:18:46 Yeah.
0:18:52 So you need to get it low enough so that they’re still breathing, just breathing as slowly
0:18:54 as possible.
0:18:57 And that actually varies by apple species.
0:19:04 So you might be able to take a pink lady down to 0.5% oxygen, but a red delicious only down
0:19:05 to 2%.
0:19:11 But the point is you’re sort of putting the apple into almost suspended animation.
0:19:15 It’s just breathing as slowly as possible.
0:19:21 And it’s sort of like if you play the podcast on half speed, it takes twice as long while
0:19:26 the apple that is breathing at half speed lives twice as long.
0:19:31 And so they figured this out, put it into commercial practice, and this is how apples
0:19:32 are stored today.
0:19:36 It’s why you can go to the store right now, which is before the apple season starts, and
0:19:42 buy a Washington State apple and it will be juicy and fresh and also nearly a year old.
0:19:47 And is temperature also a part of that formula to sort of induce this hibernation?
0:19:48 Oh, yeah.
0:19:52 You have to bring the temperature down, and again, that varies based on the species.
0:19:59 But cold’s main method of preserving things is to slow things down.
0:20:05 We know we are slower in the cold, bacteria and fungi are slower in the cold, apples are
0:20:08 slower in the cold.
0:20:12 You’re just adding the atmospheric effect to it as a sort of additive, so it’s slowed
0:20:16 down even more.
0:20:22 Still to come on the show, the technological marvel that is, a plastic bag full of lettuce.
0:20:32 .
0:20:36 Want to understand exactly how interest rate rises will impact your mortgage?
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0:20:58 And we are the hosts of Bloomberg’s All Thoughts Podcast.
0:21:00 Look us up wherever you get your podcasts.
0:21:09 The All Thoughts Podcast from Bloomberg.
0:21:11 So apples are a good one.
0:21:17 I mean, there’s a lot of specific innovations for different foods, but another one I want
0:21:21 to talk about is lettuce.
0:21:23 Tell me the lettuce story.
0:21:29 For a long time, lettuce had to be grown near where it was consumed.
0:21:36 And then once ice, you know, ice making machines came along, well, that’s when California
0:21:38 got into the lettuce business.
0:21:46 And the Salinas Valley became the largest ice producing area of the world, second only
0:21:50 to New York City and the amount of ice they made there because they were icing down all
0:21:52 the lettuce.
0:21:59 And that meant the lettuce itself had to change because, you know, the soft Boston bib type,
0:22:01 they don’t do so well when they’re iced.
0:22:09 You need something sturdy, like, oh, an iceberg, which gets its name supposedly from the fact
0:22:16 that when these crisp head lettuces were jammed into rail cars and topped with a load of ice
0:22:22 and re-topped, you know, every couple hundred miles along the railway, it would look like
0:22:29 icebergs were coming, you know, like a train car set of icebergs was coming towards you.
0:22:30 Yeah.
0:22:34 You wrote that before this time, the kind of lettuce that we call iceberg was called Los
0:22:35 Angeles, right?
0:22:36 Yes.
0:22:37 Los Angeles lettuce.
0:22:38 Yeah.
0:22:44 And like kind of, I mean, I guess people like it, but like not a real lettuce lettuce, right?
0:22:51 If you want your like green vegetables, iceberg lettuce is notably not that green.
0:22:55 And I mean, as I read the book, it just takes off as lettuce because it’s the lettuce that
0:22:59 you could send across the country in a rail car full of ice.
0:23:00 100%.
0:23:03 And that happens again and again with refrigeration.
0:23:04 It happens with apples too.
0:23:09 The apples we have on our grocery store shelves are the apples you can store in controlled
0:23:10 storage.
0:23:16 Lots of very tasty heirloom varieties do not do well in controlled storage.
0:23:17 They can’t be kept that long.
0:23:20 And so we don’t see them on supermarket shelves.
0:23:25 It’s just a, it’s sort of an ecological filter where things that cannot be stored in this
0:23:32 mass market industrial refrigerated way no longer make it onto the grocery store shelves.
0:23:38 But people are figuring out ways to store more things in this mass market industrialized
0:23:40 way, which is what happens with lettuce, right?
0:23:44 Which is why we can get so much lettuce now.
0:23:51 So like, and in particular, bagged lettuce, to my surprise, turns out to be like a wild
0:23:53 technological breakthrough.
0:23:54 I know.
0:23:57 This is the thing where you just think, oh, it’s convenient, whatever it’s a plastic bag,
0:23:58 that’s nice.
0:24:00 Maybe they washed it, big whoop.
0:24:04 And actually it turns out that that bag that you just kind of crumple up and throw away
0:24:10 is the super high tech respiratory apparatus for the lettuce leaves.
0:24:13 And it all came about surprisingly recently.
0:24:19 And what it really is, is that the bag is essentially a miniature plastic version of
0:24:22 a big controlled atmosphere Apple warehouse.
0:24:25 It’s the same idea.
0:24:28 The plastic is actually not just plastic.
0:24:35 It’s several layers of what is called differentially permeable membrane, which is basically just
0:24:41 plastic with different kinds of holes in it to let different gases through at different
0:24:47 rates that you have designed when you specified the plastic and manufactured the plastic.
0:24:55 And you glue all that together, minimum kind of seven layers as many as 12 to get exactly
0:25:00 the atmospheric blend you want in that bag of lettuce.
0:25:04 So at first it was just chopped lettuce, and the idea was just keeping that in a controlled
0:25:05 atmosphere.
0:25:09 Then it was like, you know what, people want a salad, not just one kind of lettuce.
0:25:13 So we need to throw some arugula in there and some baby spinach.
0:25:19 And to do that, you have to calculate how fast each of those leaves are breathing.
0:25:20 And they breathe at a different rate.
0:25:25 The baby spinach, because it’s so young, it’s breathing very, very fast.
0:25:29 Endive is like kind of sturdier, more chill, breathing more slowly.
0:25:38 You have to mix your leaves in the correct ratio to get an even kind of breathing pattern.
0:25:43 So the spinach breathing super fast, you put enough endive in to kind of chill things down
0:25:46 and take the overall bags metabolism down.
0:25:51 So it’s this entirely, you think, oh, they put in too much endive, I don’t like that.
0:25:56 No, it’s all engineered.
0:26:01 And when they’re like different, you can buy a bag of baby spinach.
0:26:07 Is the plastic bag for the baby spinach different than the plastic bag for whatever, the premixed
0:26:08 coleslaw or whatever?
0:26:13 Yes, 100% because they’re delivering a different atmospheric ratio.
0:26:20 I mean, this is the most high, it’s using cold war era submarine technology, which is
0:26:26 when people started spending so long under the water that people had to figure out how
0:26:28 to deliver controlled atmospheres.
0:26:34 It’s like a submarine, it’s like a submarine for greens, basically.
0:26:35 Exactly.
0:26:41 And the guy who invented it, who’s still alive, has anyone heard of this man?
0:26:42 No.
0:26:43 Say his name.
0:26:44 I haven’t even said it.
0:26:45 Say the name.
0:26:48 Jim Lug, James Lug.
0:26:53 It’s like this bold step forward for a salad that has been completely forgotten.
0:26:58 And I’m guilty of this as anyone else, like you bring a bag of salad home, if it doesn’t
0:27:02 fit in your crisper drawer, you kind of open it to squish out some of the air and put it
0:27:03 in there.
0:27:08 Now that I know the effort that has gone into creating that little atmospheric bubble, I’m
0:27:11 like, I am so sorry.
0:27:13 Sorry, Jim.
0:27:17 What about the … So the soft plastic bag is what we’re talking about.
0:27:21 They also sell salad now in the hard plastic clam shell.
0:27:24 Is that some crazy technology that I don’t even know about?
0:27:30 No, that’s been … There’s actually less effective, but it’s been flushed with more
0:27:35 of an inert gas to the best of my knowledge, but it’s actually not as high-tech.
0:27:38 The bags are more high-tech.
0:27:39 And do the bags work better?
0:27:43 Do the bags preserve the greens longer than the hard shell?
0:27:44 Yeah.
0:27:45 Huh.
0:27:46 Not intuitive.
0:27:47 I know.
0:27:48 Now you know.
0:27:57 So one of the things that’s interesting to me in the book is you seem ambivalent about
0:27:58 refrigeration.
0:28:05 You spent 10 years on the book and clearly you admire a lot of the people who figured
0:28:06 things out.
0:28:12 Do you seem … Yeah, do you seem ambivalent about the effects of refrigeration on humanity
0:28:13 in the world?
0:28:16 How do you weigh the effects of refrigeration?
0:28:17 Well, yeah.
0:28:21 So first of all, I think the important thing is to weigh it.
0:28:26 And here’s … One thing I came to realize as I worked on this book is that refrigeration
0:28:32 is just so taken for granted as a central sort of … This is how we eat.
0:28:37 It doesn’t get evaluated for its costs or benefits.
0:28:38 It just is.
0:28:42 It’s one of those things like air where it’s like, “Is air good or bad?
0:28:45 We need it.”
0:28:50 So I actually thought it was important to say, “Well, you know what?
0:28:53 It’s a very recent technology, extremely recent.
0:29:00 It wasn’t commercialized until just over 150 years ago, wasn’t commonplace until a century
0:29:02 ago, if that.”
0:29:06 This is a very recent transformation of our food system.
0:29:11 Why are we assuming that it has to be, that it is inevitable?
0:29:14 When you’re starting to write a book, you go and look and see, “Has anyone else written
0:29:15 about this?”
0:29:20 And I went to the New York Public Library and I looked at the most recent book on refrigeration
0:29:23 and it was from the 1950s.
0:29:28 And it said, “Well, like refrigeration is great and human progress continues and note
0:29:32 out the next food preservation thing will be along shortly.”
0:29:39 No one at the time thought refrigeration was the end and yet it has sort of become the
0:29:40 end.
0:29:45 It’s interesting because I feel like mid-century was that with a number of things.
0:29:47 With air travel comes to mind famously.
0:29:55 The 50 years from whatever, 1900 to 1950, 1910 to 1960 were like this incredible thing.
0:29:59 And then we basically got the same thing now that we had then.
0:30:04 Yeah, a little better, but like moderate iterations, but the same thing.
0:30:11 And the reason I think it’s important to look at, I mean, there are a few different reasons.
0:30:16 One is the super pressing one, which is refrigeration actually turns out to have a huge climate
0:30:18 change impact.
0:30:22 The refrigerants themselves are super greenhouse gases a lot of the time.
0:30:30 The power to make things cold, the energy required to make things cold is a huge burden.
0:30:36 And if the rest of the world refrigerates like America does, which it doesn’t right
0:30:44 now, the US is sort of Europe as well, but unique in having a cold chain of the scale
0:30:45 we have.
0:30:46 Right.
0:30:50 It’s sort of a microcosm of the broader like, “Oh, there is a developing world.”
0:30:53 And inevitably, everybody wants to have the same standard of living we do.
0:30:57 But if that happens, we’re screwed in terms of climate change, among other things.
0:30:58 Completely screwed.
0:31:01 In the absence of other innovations, at least.
0:31:03 Exactly.
0:31:07 And whereas people sort of seem to recognize that with like, “Oh, hey, if everyone has
0:31:13 a car in Africa, we’re screwed,” they aren’t talking about it when it comes to, “Well,
0:31:16 if the entire food system is refrigerated.”
0:31:19 If the cold chain that we have in the developed world becomes global.
0:31:20 Yeah.
0:31:21 Exactly.
0:31:22 Okay.
0:31:23 Well, let’s do this.
0:31:24 Way it.
0:31:25 You wrote a book.
0:31:27 You spent 10 years.
0:31:29 What has happened has happened on balance.
0:31:35 You think we’re better off or worse off for refrigeration?
0:31:43 I think better off as long as we figure out what to do about the climate change aspect
0:31:44 of it.
0:31:49 So let’s talk about what comes next, what people are trying to figure out.
0:31:56 It is an excellent point that 70 years ago, everybody was like, “Surely the next cold
0:32:02 making, surely the next refrigeration breakthrough is imminent and nothing,” right?
0:32:04 So what are people working on?
0:32:07 What is the frontier of refrigeration?
0:32:08 It’s very underfunded.
0:32:13 And that’s also before you think about, you know, there’s cooling things more sustainably
0:32:17 or there’s preserving food differently.
0:32:23 When refrigeration was first introduced, people were thinking that the big preservation
0:32:29 breakthrough that people needed to feed cities was not going to be cold.
0:32:33 Cold was, you know, this fleeting natural ephemeral ice thing.
0:32:36 There was no way it would work at scale.
0:32:44 So they were looking into all sorts of, you know, fumigation, coatings, shredding things
0:32:46 and drying them.
0:32:51 You get the invention of the bullion cube as a way to say, “Oh, how do we kind of extract
0:32:55 the nutritional value of meat and at least preserve that?”
0:33:01 So at the time, people were aware that, you know, preservation could take many forms.
0:33:05 And I think that’s one of the things I look at in the book is, like, what if the future
0:33:08 of, you know, some things have to be cold.
0:33:10 Ice cream has to be cold.
0:33:14 Beer has to be cold in my book.
0:33:19 But you know, an apple doesn’t actually have to be cold, it just has to be preserved.
0:33:23 Most of refrigeration is not keeping things cold so that we can eat them cold, it’s so
0:33:25 that they don’t spoil.
0:33:26 Exactly.
0:33:33 So if there are other ways for them not to spoil, well then you could have a vastly slimmed
0:33:40 down cold chain or, listen, we’ve built our system in the U.S., it is what it is, you could
0:33:45 say, “Well, hey, in countries that haven’t built their cold chain yet, maybe they could
0:33:50 build this leaner-meaner model in the same way that, you know, they didn’t get checkbooks,
0:33:54 they went straight to digital banking on their phones and they didn’t get landlines, they
0:33:56 went straight to cell phones, et cetera.
0:34:03 So could we find better preservation solutions if what we’re trying to do is keep food fresh,
0:34:06 but don’t require a cold chain where possible?
0:34:11 What are people working on in terms of preserving food without cold?
0:34:18 So some people are working on high pressure processing, so if you can just apply enough
0:34:26 pressure, you can sort of squeeze out the bacteria and fungi, this works with meat apparently
0:34:31 quite well, it’s expensive right now, it’s very much at the experimental stage, this is
0:34:37 not something that is done commercially right now, whereas the one that I went to see is
0:34:39 done commercially right now, which is a coating.
0:34:44 And so it’s funny, it’s like what goes around, comes around, all of these, you know, pressure,
0:34:52 coating, fumigation, like all of these things were things that were thought of in the 1750s
0:34:57 and now are being tried again and coatings is one of them.
0:35:03 Unfortunately the trick with this one coating company appeal is they’re taking the same
0:35:09 logic of the apple warehouse and the salad bag, they’re just putting it on to the produce
0:35:15 item as a nano scale coating that is made out of food particles.
0:35:24 So it is exactly the semi permeable membrane that your salad bag is, it’s just not plastic,
0:35:28 it’s just sprayed directly onto your cucumber and it’s controlling the cucumber’s breathing
0:35:29 that way.
0:35:33 I mean, it seems cool, but as you describe it, it sounds like a thing one does not want
0:35:34 to eat.
0:35:41 That’s where you’re wrong, I licked the produce with this on, I’m here to tell a tale.
0:35:44 So what is actually going on, what are they doing?
0:35:48 It’s a different formulation for each fruit or vegetable because you’re trying to create
0:35:55 a different modified atmosphere and you create this formulation, there’s a lot of trial
0:35:59 and error, you spray it on, it’s nano scale.
0:36:04 Part of how it works is people think of it as like wax or something like it’s a thick
0:36:07 layer that’s blocking things, no.
0:36:12 It came out of research into solar panels that was all about how if they dry at different
0:36:18 rates, they assemble slightly different at the nano scale and have different, a solar
0:36:24 panel can be twice as efficient if you let it dry two times more slowly.
0:36:30 So this is the similar, it’s out of this same thin film polymer physics and you just have
0:36:35 to spray it on and dry it a certain way, it assembles with these properties, it’s nano
0:36:36 scale.
0:36:43 It’s undetectable, made out of food waste and what it’s doing is the exact same thing
0:36:49 that the salad bag is doing, which is slowing down how fast that piece of produce breathes
0:36:54 so that it takes its allotted number of breaths over a longer time.
0:37:02 And it’s kind of astonishing, I went in as a skeptical journalist and then I saw the
0:37:06 bell peppers that had been sitting out for eight weeks at room temperature.
0:37:11 And I feel we all know that after eight weeks at room temperature, a bell pepper is not
0:37:12 in great shape.
0:37:16 It’s no longer something you want to eat.
0:37:25 These bell peppers with the nano scale coating, they weren’t crudité board ready, but they
0:37:29 were definitely stir fry worthy.
0:37:33 They were a little sad looking, but they hadn’t gone.
0:37:35 And eight weeks at room temperature.
0:37:40 Yeah, two months a long time for a bell pepper to sit on the counter.
0:37:44 So are they out in the world now?
0:37:48 Are there fruits that you can buy that have this coating on them?
0:37:49 There are.
0:37:53 In fact, Walmart just announced that it’s ditching plastic on its English cucumbers
0:37:57 in favor of appeal, this coating.
0:37:58 Okay.
0:38:01 So which cucumber they sell that, that’s the like the hot house, the long, I think far
0:38:05 more tasty cucumber that it is like shrink wrapped, right?
0:38:08 It has like, yeah, it’s basically shrink wrapped when you buy it.
0:38:13 And so Walmart’s going to start selling it with this lipid coating instead of plastic.
0:38:14 Exactly.
0:38:17 And it works better.
0:38:20 It like keeps the product fresher.
0:38:24 And this is one of the fascinating things about it because over time, refrigeration has totally
0:38:26 changed our understanding of what freshness means.
0:38:31 It used to mean something that had been harvested or slaughtered really recently and really
0:38:32 nearby.
0:38:35 It was something to do with time and distance.
0:38:39 Then refrigeration changed all of that because suddenly it could have been slaughtered six
0:38:41 months ago and looked like it was slaughtered yesterday.
0:38:44 So the definition of fresh changed.
0:38:47 And what appeal does is sort of say it could change again.
0:38:52 It could be fresh doesn’t have to mean refrigerated.
0:38:57 It could just mean with more of the nutrients and the flavor that it had when it was on
0:38:58 the plant.
0:39:04 It could be a chemical definition, not something that we, at the moment, the definition of
0:39:07 fresh is it needs to go in the fridge, right?
0:39:09 I mean, that’s or it comes from the fridge.
0:39:11 That’s how people think of freshness.
0:39:17 It could be, it could be to do with the actual youth relatively of the fruit of vegetable
0:39:18 itself.
0:39:24 How few breaths it’s taken.
0:39:36 We’ll be back in a minute with the Lighting Round.
0:39:40 Want to understand exactly how interest rate rises will impact your mortgage?
0:39:43 Or how New York City gets fresh produce?
0:39:48 Or exactly what on earth was going on over at FTX before the whole thing collapsed?
0:39:51 Twice a week, we sit down with the perfect guest to answer these sort of questions and
0:39:56 understand what’s going on with the biggest stories in finance, economics, business and
0:39:57 markets.
0:39:58 I’m Tracy Allaway.
0:40:00 And I’m Joe Weisenthal.
0:40:02 And we are the hosts of Bloomberg’s All Thoughts Podcast.
0:40:04 Look us up wherever you get your podcasts.
0:40:13 The All Thoughts Podcast from Bloomberg.
0:40:16 Let’s finish with the Lighting Round.
0:40:27 In the book, you cite a number of publications with amazing names, including but not limited
0:40:35 to food engineering magazine, container management magazine, palette enterprise magazine, and
0:40:39 food technology magazine.
0:40:45 If I am going to read one trade publication, any trade publication, which one should it
0:40:46 be?
0:40:50 There have to be one that’s still in print because the old school ice and refrigeration,
0:40:59 which was in print from like the 1880s to the 19, I want to say 2030s is, I could spend
0:41:01 all day reading that.
0:41:02 It’s incredible.
0:41:03 Tell me more.
0:41:06 Who is the John McPhee of ice and refrigeration?
0:41:08 None of the articles are signed.
0:41:11 All of them are delightful.
0:41:16 Their entire articles about how cold affected Napoleon’s army, for example, it’s just a
0:41:21 much more wide-ranging look at cold as this phenomenon.
0:41:22 I love it.
0:41:25 It’s the magazine for people who are into cold.
0:41:26 Exactly.
0:41:28 I’d say start there.
0:41:34 What’s your favorite thing that you can eat because of refrigeration?
0:41:44 Well, I mean, this is a hard call between, I mean, if it’s eat, ice cream, obviously,
0:41:52 although if it’s drink, then think of all the world of cocktails that previously didn’t
0:41:56 have ice in them and are now so, so good.
0:42:00 I mean, there’s even things that aren’t cold, but like mangoes.
0:42:05 I live in New York and theoretically in the world, I could eat a mango without refrigeration,
0:42:11 but the idea that a mango could be like a quasi-stable fruit in my house is amazing
0:42:13 and great, I think.
0:42:16 Like yes, I know there are costs, but like, I love mangoes.
0:42:17 Yeah.
0:42:22 I think one of the sad things that’s happened to me as I’ve researched this book and made
0:42:28 my podcast is I’ve realized how much worse things taste when they are refrigerated.
0:42:31 I mean, but it’s not worse than no mango.
0:42:36 I’m sure the best mango in the world is amazing, but I love the mangoes that I get.
0:42:39 It depends if you’ve had the really good mangoes.
0:42:40 Once you’ve had them.
0:42:41 Well, then I’m glad that I haven’t.
0:42:42 Yeah.
0:42:43 There you go.
0:42:47 What’s the most surprising detail you learned working on the book?
0:42:49 Oh, man.
0:42:56 I mean, just because it’s the most recent thing we were talking about, ice cream, the non-premium
0:43:01 brands are 50% air and you can’t truck them across the country because they’ll explode
0:43:03 as you go over the Rockies.
0:43:04 Really?
0:43:12 So, the companies have to come up with different formulations for the higher altitude parts
0:43:19 of the country and you can’t bring, you can’t truck your ice cream from your factory in
0:43:21 Georgia to sell in Denver is not going to work.
0:43:27 So basically, as you go up in altitude, the atmospheric pressure declines and the air
0:43:31 inside the container expands and blows the lid off.
0:43:32 Yep.
0:43:37 When you say non-premium, it’s like the old school, like pre-Haggendahs, pre-Benningerries,
0:43:40 where you get the big half-gallon, not the little pint.
0:43:41 Yes, exactly.
0:43:45 So, like, Haggendahs and Benningerries are dense enough that you can take those over
0:43:46 the Rockies.
0:43:47 Yeah.
0:43:53 They are less air by volume and thus, yes, they still expand a little, but not enough
0:43:56 to blow their lids off.
0:44:00 So they’re not as much more expensive than the cheaper kind once you account for the
0:44:03 fact that the cheaper kind has more air.
0:44:04 Yeah, exactly.
0:44:05 Okay.
0:44:09 But some people like the air, you know, it gives a different texture.
0:44:10 Fair.
0:44:14 What’s one thing that people refrigerate that they should not refrigerate?
0:44:15 So much.
0:44:19 I mean, for example, never put stone fruit in your refrigerator.
0:44:22 It is the stone fruit killing zone.
0:44:29 It literally disables the genetic machinery that the fruit uses to make flavor.
0:44:30 So just don’t do it.
0:44:34 Eat the peach or make the peach into a pie.
0:44:37 Do not put the peach in the fridge.
0:44:38 There’s a ton.
0:44:42 Onions and potatoes, I mean, potatoes actually become toxic in the fridge.
0:44:44 Never do that.
0:44:49 A lot of people have this idea that the fridge is just this miraculous box that keeps everything
0:44:51 safe, and that is not the case.
0:44:55 It’s not the ideal environment for a lot of things.
0:44:59 It’s something that people don’t refrigerate that they should.
0:45:00 Nuts.
0:45:01 Nuts.
0:45:02 Yeah.
0:45:05 This is news I can use.
0:45:11 If you don’t go through, you know, nuts that you’re going to go through on a relatively
0:45:16 quick basis, like if you just grab a handful of almonds every day and you go through the
0:45:19 bag pretty quickly, fine, doesn’t need to be in the fridge.
0:45:24 But if you have, say, some pine nuts or some macadamia nuts that you only use in certain
0:45:29 recipes, they will go rancid out of the fridge and they will last longer.
0:45:35 I actually keep my macadamias in the freezer.
0:45:40 Nikki Twilly is the author of the book Frostbite and the host of the podcast, Gastropod.
0:45:42 Thanks for listening to the show.
0:45:45 You can email us at problem@pushkin.fm.
0:45:49 We’re going to take a couple of weeks off for a summer break, but we’ll be back soon.
0:45:52 Today’s show was edited by Lydia Jean Cott.
0:45:56 It was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang and engineered by Sara Bruguere.
0:46:15 I’m Jacob Goldstein.
0:46:19 Want to understand exactly how interest rate rises will impact your mortgage?
0:46:22 Or how New York City gets fresh produce?
0:46:26 Or exactly what on earth was going on over at FTX before the whole thing collapsed?
0:46:30 Twice a week, we sit down with the perfect guests to answer these sort of questions and
0:46:35 understand what’s going on with the biggest stories in finance, economics, business and
0:46:36 market.
0:46:37 I’m Tracy Allaway.
0:46:39 And I’m Jill Weisenthal.
0:46:41 And we are the hosts of Bloomberg’s OddLots podcast.
0:46:43 Look us up wherever you get your podcasts.
0:46:45 The OddLots podcast from Bloomberg.
0:46:48 (upbeat music)
0:46:50 (upbeat music)
Refrigeration is an underrated technology. It completely transformed what billions of people eat every day.
Today’s guest, Nicola Twilley, tells the story of refrigeration in her new book, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. Topics under discussion include: Why brewers were key drivers of refrigeration technology; the extraordinary technology inside a bag of lettuce; and why the technological frontier in food preservation may mean that we don’t need to keep so much stuff so cold.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.