FROSTBITE

An oddly fascinating look at the world of refrigeration.

A chef may speak knowingly about every piece of food brought from farm and garden to table, writes New Yorker contributor Twilley, but may well draw a blank on details of the supply chain in between. The “missing middle,” she writes, is “a black box whose mysterious internal workings allow perishable food to conquer the constraints of both time and space.” If you want elucidation on those mysterious innards, Twilley has got you covered. In an account packed with accessibly delivered technical and historical detail, she explains the long quest to discover and develop the physical bases of cooling. Much of the food we eat in the U.S. arrives courtesy of refrigeration, an infrastructure that, Twilley estimates, amounts to 5.5 billion cubic feet of cooled space, “a third polar region of sorts.” We’ve come a long way from the ice caves of our distant ancestors—a long way even from the days of George Washington, who complained that the large haul of ice that he’d stowed away in his icehouse was completely gone by midsummer. Twilley’s book is a delightful mine of meaningful trivia: One learns from her pages, for instance, why pizza and ice cream are shipped separately and why baked goods are cooled gradually (because, as a cold storage warehouse manager told her, “bread will crystallize if it’s cooled too fast”). Throughout, the author’s historical reach traverses seemingly effortlessly from the Roman Empire to 19th-century America, when refrigeration essentially remade the livestock economy by allowing cattle to be raised on distant ranches in the West and their meat to be shipped east—“contributing,” she adds, “to the ongoing displacement of Native Americans and the near-extinction of the bison upon which they had depended.”

A literate treat for tech- and history-inclined foodies.