Frostbite

How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves

By: Nicola Twilley

Narrated by: Nicola Twilley

Winner of the James Beard Award for Literary Writing

"Engrossing...hard to put down." — The New York Times Book Review

“Frostbite is a perfectly executed cold fusion of science, history, and literary verve . . . as a fellow nonfiction writer, I bow down. This is how it's done.” — Mary Roach, author of Fuzz and Stiff

An engaging and far-reaching exploration of refrigeration, tracing its evolution from scientific mystery to globe-spanning infrastructure, and an essential investigation into how it has remade our entire relationship with food—for better and for worse

How often do we open the fridge or peer into the freezer with the expectation that we’ll find something fresh and ready to eat? It’s an everyday act—but just a century ago, eating food that had been refrigerated was cause for both fear and excitement. The introduction of artificial refrigeration overturned millennia of dietary history, launching a new chapter in human nutrition. We could now overcome not just rot, but seasonality and geography. Tomatoes in January? Avocados in Shanghai? All possible.

In Frostbite, New Yorker contributor and cohost of the award-winning podcast Gastropod Nicola Twilley takes readers on a tour of the cold chain from farm to fridge, visiting off-the-beaten-path landmarks such as Missouri’s subterranean cheese caves, the banana-ripening rooms of New York City, and the vast refrigerated tanks that store the nation’s orange juice reserves. Today, nearly three-quarters of everything on the average American plate is processed, shipped, stored, and sold under refrigeration. It’s impossible to make sense of our food system without understanding the all-but-invisible network of thermal control that underpins it. Twilley’s eye-opening book is the first to reveal the transformative impact refrigeration has had on our health and our guts; our farms, tables, kitchens, and cities; global economics and politics; and even our environment.

In the developed world, we’ve reaped the benefits of refrigeration for more than a century, but the costs are catching up with us. We’ve eroded our connection to our food and redefined what “fresh” means. More important, refrigeration is one of the leading contributors to climate change. As the developing world races to build a US-style cold chain, Twilley asks: Can we reduce our dependence on refrigeration? Should we? A deeply researched and reported, original, and entertaining dive into the most important invention in the history of food and drink, Frostbite makes the case for a recalibration of our relationship with the fridge—and how our future might depend on it.

Very good book, narration distracts

Narration sounds like an automaton… I’m not sure I believe this is the author. Regardless, I almost couldn’t finish this good story because of the terrible listening experience.

So interesting

Great book! Highly recommend to those who love learning about food and history. Enjoyed the performance as well.

Delightfully written history of food across history

This well-researched book describes many aspects of attempts to preserve food across centuries. It contains history, individual stories, chemistry and the author’s personal experiences while doing her extensive investigations. It is written with humor and does not bore despite the detail.

Wow, this narration is bad

What a great book! So interesting, so well reported, so well written! What a shame about the narrator. I agree with other reviewers that the voice sounds robotic and not at all like a real person. It claims the author is the narrator, and maybe so, but I expect it's a voice print of her rather than her own voice. Regardless, this book is an object lesson in the power of a professional narrator. If you are sensitive to the quality of narration, I'd suggest you read the book in paper instead.

It was OK. Could’ve been better.

Not too bad. Was OK. Went too much into political DEI stuff. I like history, but not when it’s biased.