How refrigeration took over the world
Planet Money
NPR
4.6 • 29.8K Ratings
🗓️ 26 September 2025
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The cold chain is the name for the end-to-end refrigeration of our food from farm to truck to warehouse to grocery store and ultimately to our fridges at home. And it’s one of the great achievements of the modern world.
On today’s show, Nicola Twilley, food journalist and author of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves, tells us the story of how our world got cold, and what that’s meant for the economy.
We’ll hear about two pioneers of cold: The cheapskate meat baron Gustavus Swift, and the train-hopping chemist Polly Pennington. And we’ll take a look at whether all this refrigeration might have created some new problems.
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Today’s episode of Planet Money was hosted by Nick Fountain and Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. It was produced by James Sneed and edited by Keith Romer. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Valentina Rodríguez Sánchez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Planet Money from NPR. |
| 0:08.4 | The other day, I donned a hair net and a very unfortunate beard net. |
| 0:14.7 | Hey. |
| 0:15.6 | Here we are. |
| 0:16.5 | And got to visit a place I'd wanted to for a very long time. |
| 0:20.6 | Shipping dock. |
| 0:22.4 | Smell of produce. |
| 0:24.3 | Palettes, racking, the whole thing. |
| 0:27.1 | This place is low-key, one of the wonders of the modern world. |
| 0:31.6 | It's an enormous refrigerated warehouse filled with enough food to feed an entire city. |
| 0:38.2 | My guide to this miracle is Nicola Twilly. |
| 0:42.0 | We're heading in. |
| 0:43.5 | It's noisy. |
| 0:44.9 | Food journalist hosts the podcast, Gastropod, an author of a recent book about |
| 0:49.5 | refrigeration called Frostbite. |
| 0:52.1 | Nikki has become obsessed with places like this. |
| 0:54.9 | She's spent the last decade visiting them |
| 0:56.9 | and even worked in some of them. |
| 0:58.6 | It's a cool. |
| 1:00.2 | It's a cool world. |
| 1:02.0 | The warehouse we're in today is enormous, |
| 1:04.9 | the size of two football fields. |
... |
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