Today we take a journey into eternal winter, a place so cold that everything slows down,

microbes, metabolic processes, the human body,

but we are not going to some trench deep

in the abyss of the ocean or some far-flung planet or even Antarctica. We are staying very close to home.

We are walking into the kitchen and opening the refrigerator.

It is astonishing the miracle of having domesticated cold.

When you think about it, humans domesticating fire, people say that's sort of what made us human.

We domesticated cold incredibly recently.

This is Nicky Twilly.

She's one of my favorite thinkers and writers about the strangeness of our

modern world. She's the co-host of the Gastro Pod Podcast and she's the author of a new book called

Frostbite. How how refrigeration changed our food, our planet, and ourselves.

And man, for a topic that at first might not seem super sexy, boy, is it a wild ride?

A fridge wasn't standard in American households until the 30s and 40s, ice-making ability later

still. And so this domestication of cold is very recent and I think equally

transformative and important to take a look at.

Cold is a big business these days,

and refrigeration has come a very long way

since the icebox.

It is transformed into something we call

the cold chain.

I'm Delan Thuris and this is Atlas Obscura,

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