NOURISH
required to vanquish microbes inevitably
also alter the food’s original flavor, texture,
and appearance. The introduction of wide-
spread, on-demand refrigeration changed
all of that, overturning thousands of years
of dietary history.
The earliest mobile mechanical cooling
units were patented in 1939 by Frederick
McKinley Jones, the first African American
to receive the National Medal of Technol-
ogy. Like Dearman, he was a high school
dropout and self-taught engineer. Prior
to his invention, perishable foods such
as meat, dairy, and produce had to be
entombed beneath a thick layer of hand-
shoveled ice for transportation. In the early
decades of the 20th century, a railcar full
of California-grown cantaloupes des-
tined for New York City would be packed
in 10,500 pounds of ice—and re-iced with
another 7,500 pounds several times during
its multiday journey. Even then, shipments
experienced considerable shrink. Indeed,
the impetus behind Jones’ invention was
the loss, by his boss’ golfing buddy, of an
entire cargo load of raw chicken. It had to
be tossed when the truck carrying it broke
down and the ice protecting it melted.
During World War II, the Defense Depart-
ment quickly seized on Jones’ diesel-
powered devices, sold under the brand
name Thermo King, to supply troops with
everything from blood plasma to frosty
Coke. In the years afterward, refrigerated
trucks transformed the American foodscape.
Regional distribution networks gave way to
national ones. Slaughterhouses and process-
ing facilities grew increasingly enormous
and more remote, driving down the cost of
meat and making it an everyday staple. Agri-
culture became concentrated in those places
where a particular crop could be cultivated
most cost-effectively, with the result that
California now grows half of the fruits and
vegetables eaten in the United States.
Today, in fact, more than three-quarters
of everything on the average American
plate is processed, packaged, shipped,
stored, and sold under refrigeration. It is
the reason orange juice, stockpiled in giant
tank farms, tastes the same year-round,
like soda. It is the reason many tomatoes,
genetically tuned to maximize cold toler-
ance rather than flavor, taste like nothing
at all. Refrigeration has made us taller and
heavier; it has changed the composition of
our gut microbes; it has reshaped our kitch-
ens, ports, and cities; it has reconfigured
global economics and politics. In 2012, six
years before the Royal Society feted Dear-
man and his engine, the academy’s distin-
guished members declared refrigeration
the most important invention in the history
of food and drink—more significant than
the knife, the oven, the plow, and even the
millennia of selective breeding that gave
us the livestock, fruits, and vegetables we
recognize today.
But as the cold chain has expanded, dis-
tributing artificial perpetual winter across
the world, it has wreaked havoc on the nat-
ural cryosphere, the glaciers and icebergs
and frozen swaths of tundra that help keepEarth’s climate system in check. Refriger-
ation already accounts for about a sixth
of humanity’s electricity usage, and the
demand is only expected to grow as coun-
tries such as China and India busily build
US-style systems of their own. In the next
seven years, analysts predict, the global
refrigeration market will quadruple in size.
More cooling—of the conventional kind,
at least—means more warming, and not just
because of runaway power consumption.
Refrigerant leaks are a problem too. Once
released into the atmosphere, many of these
chemicals contribute to climate change. The
most up-to-date domestic refrigerators lose
less than 1 percent of their refrigerant every
year, but commercial refrigerated ware-
houses can leak up to 35 percent. Differ-
ent systems use different refrigerants, some
of which, like ammonia, have a negligible
effect on the climate. But others, like hydro-
fluorocarbons (HFCs), are known as “super”
greenhouse gases because they are thou-
sands of times more warming, molecule for
molecule, than CO 2.
Although HFCs are gradually being
phased out under the terms of a global
agreement signed in 2016, their use is still
on the rise in developing countries. That’s
partly why Project Drawdown, a climate
change mitigation initiative founded by
the environmentalist Paul Hawken, lists
“refrigerant management” as the single
most effective solution to global warm-
ing. (The category includes those chem-
icals used to chill people as well as food:
Air-conditioning and refrigeration rely on
the same technology, and their usage is ris-
ing in lockstep.)
And if we do nothing? Suddenly the slo-
gan of the American Society of Heating,
Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engi-
neers begins to sound more like a threat
than an assurance: “Shaping Tomorrow’s
Environment Today.” Preserving food for
a planetary population of 9 billion using
existing technology would deliver on that
promise in the most disastrous manner. And
yet, in the 81 years since Jones patented the_Solar panels can be placed over lettuce crops, producing gigawatts of energy
without killing the salad.ChartgeistBYJon J. EilenbergEATING HABITS
Americans Fake Meat