The cold, hard truth about refrigeration

Outside/In

NHPR

Society & Culture, Documentary, Natural Sciences, Nature, Science

4.7 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 19 September 2024

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In the early 1900s, people didn’t trust refrigerated food. Fruits and vegetables, cuts of meat… these things are supposed to decay, right? As Nicola Twilley writes, “What kind of unnatural technology could deliver a two-year old chicken carcass that still looked as though it was slaughtered yesterday?” But just a few decades later, Americans have done a full one-eighty. Livestock can be slaughtered thousands of miles away, and taste just as good (or better) by the time it hits your plate. Apples can be stored for over a year without any noticeable change. A network called the “cold-chain” criss-crosses the country, and at home our refrigerators are fooling us into thinking we waste less food than we actually do. Today, refrigeration has reshaped what we eat, how we cook it, and even warped our very definition of what is and isn’t “fresh.” Featuring Nicola Twilley. SUPPORT Outside/In is made possible with listener support. Click here to become a sustaining member of Outside/In. Follow Outside/In on Instagram or join our private discussion group on Facebook. LINKS You can find Nicola’s new book “Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet and Ourselves,” at your local bookstore or online. CREDITS Our host is Nate Hegyi. Reported and produced by Nate Hegyi and Taylor Quimby. Mixed by Nate Hegyi Editing by Taylor Quimby Our staff includes Justine Paradis, Felix Poon, Kate Dario and Marina Henke. Executive producer: Taylor Quimby Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio Submit a question to the “Outside/Inbox.” We answer queries about the natural world, climate change, sustainability, and human evolution. You can send a voice memo to outsidein@nhpr.org or leave a message on our hotline, 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, you're listening to Outside End. I'm Nate Hedgy. I am happily married now, but I remember almost a decade ago when I was single, and man, it is hard to find a partner.
0:15.0	I mean, you might spend hours at a bar every week,
0:18.0	maybe go on a couple of blind dates,
0:20.0	then you spend your nights flipping endlessly through Tinderinder, hinge, bumble. And maybe if you are
0:26.8	particularly desperate you might reach out to a refrigerator dating guide.
0:33.0	His stick is to match people based on the contents of their fridges.
0:38.0	That's Nicola Twilly. She's co-host of the podcast Gastropod.
0:42.0	You can either submit pictures of the you can either submit pictures of the fridges of someone you've just started dating and and say listen any red flags
0:50.0	or if you submit your fridge he can suggest a match.
0:55.0	Nixelow wasn't looking for a partner.
1:00.0	She's married. She was actually doing research for a book about refrigeration.
1:07.0	So does he give you like a score on your fridge?
1:10.0	Well, you don't get a score, but you do get feedback, and I will say the first words out of his mouth were,
1:16.5	this chick is awesome when he saw my fridge.
1:20.0	So again, you can tell, you can tell how hungry I was for this but yes he I think was being was
1:28.2	being well more generous than I would be. I have a lot of Tupperware. I have an unseemly amount of alcohol. I have a lot of condiments.
1:47.4	This matchmaker, he started his refrigerator dating service as a kind of joke.
1:56.3	But the truth is, fridges really do tell you a lot about a person. Our lives revolve around refrigeration. They are a necessary and intimate part of our lives. But it wasn't always this way.
2:04.0	Today on the show, a conversation with Nicola Twilly, whose latest book, Frostbite, covers the absolutely bonkers history of refrigerated foods.
2:18.0	Over a hundred years ago, cold storage was considered unnatural.
2:21.7	This is immoral. It's going against the natural
2:24.9	progression of like death and decay like we're intervening in the natural order of
	...

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