Highlights
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2024-12-28 13:48 So, I mean, we could have had a very different world if those scientists had been like, we all need to eat lentils. It’s all a sort of misunderstanding. But it shaped our modern food system.
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2024-12-28 13:38 That’s because she’s the author of a new book about how refrigeration has shaped our food, ourselves and our planet. It’s called Frostbite, and it’s a really fun read, full of crazy trivia, like the fact that the Irish independence movement might have refrigerated beef from the US to thank for its success.
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2024-12-28 14:04 When you build a bigger motorway, you get more traffic is what actually happens. People think it’s going to be great and, you know, traffic. No, it’s the theory of induced demand.
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2024-12-28 13:40 And there was theories that, oh, it’s maybe, you know, these frigorific atoms or maybe it’s sort of a force that that gets distributed from the North Pole or rises up from the ground, down from the air.
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2024-12-28 13:37 That’s like 150 Empire State Buildings worth of freezers. And developing countries are starting to catch up. Between 2018 and 2022, the whole world’s chilled and frozen warehouse space increased by 20%.
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2024-12-28 14:08 That’s another great piece of trivia from Nicola’s book. And also check out Gastropod, her podcast about how we eat.
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2024-12-28 14:07 Yes, because, you know, the fat and the collagen has time to sort of solidify and then redisperse and it becomes silkier. But fruit and vegetables, no, don’t stockpile them.
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2024-12-28 13:41 And actually, even when the first person to sort of create cold artificially, a Scottish doctor named William Cullen, he sort of did it as a party trick because it wasn’t Something you could do it at scale.
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2024-12-28 14:05 And so I think I find keeping food out of the fridge, not milk and meat obviously, but fruit and vegetables actually reminds you that it’s there, it tastes better when you eat it.
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2024-12-28 13:39 If you think about it, humans have had control of fire since before we were modern humans, and yet we haven’t been able to produce cold at will until maybe 150 years ago, max.
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2024-12-28 13:46 And bringing meat from places like Argentina, New Zealand, Australia, where there was vast amount of land, not a lot of people, it lowered the price of meat immediately, I mean, by a quarter, at least.
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2024-12-28 13:53 So leaving aside those sort of knock on effects, cold storage companies are currently the third highest industrial consumers of energy.
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2024-12-28 13:54 And the industry was forced to find an alternative, which it did and was pretty effective, except it was chlorofluorocarbons, which turned out to not be poisonous, but created a hole in the ozone layer.