Thermo King, there has been remarkably
little innovation in the cold chain—or there
wasn’t, anyway, until Peter Dearman.
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FOR A MOMENT LAST YEAR, IT APPEARED
that the curse of the liquid-air engine
might not be broken after all. The Dear-
man units were working well, but the com-
pany had burned through its investment
capital and was struggling to pay its bills.
By early December, it had entered receiv-
ership. All was not lost, however: In Janu-
ary, a Denver-based angel investor named
Thomas Keller swooped in and bailed the
company out.
According to Keller, the firm’s problems
were “standard issue” for a technology
startup. “Dearman had so many opportu-
nities—so many inquiries, so many ideas for
where the technology would be helpful—
that it ran off in many different directions,
all of which were costly,” he told me. His
plan now is to simplify. He intends to focus
entirely on finishing the next-generation
engine. “It should be available for Unilever
trucks this year,” he said.
Still, Keller seemed daunted by the chal-
lenges to come. Besides scaling up its man-
ufacturing operation, a huge obstacle in
itself, the company will have to hire a sales
force, establish maintenance facilities, and
develop a supply chain for spare parts.
That entails either raising enough capital
to build the infrastructure from scratch or
partnering with the competition—an old-
school refrigerated transportation com-
pany—in order to piggyback on its existing
networks. “We’re struggling a bit with that,
frankly,” Keller said. “And so we’re right
back where Dearman was, with just a lit-
tle pressure added.”
Toby Peters, who now works at the Uni-
versity of Birmingham, remains hopeful
that the company will navigate past its
latest financial roadblock. But he pointed
out that, even if all 3 million of the world’s
refrigerated trucks were retrofitted with
Dearman engines, that would not be nearly
enough to save the world from refrigera-
tion’s catastrophic climate impact. “We are
going to be deploying somewhere between
13 and 18 cooling devices per second for
the next 30 years, and we’re still not going
to deliver cooling for all,” Peters said. More-
over, he added, “we simply can’t green that
volume of electricity.” Consider refriger-
ation’s human analog: In 2017 and 2018,
enough new room AC units were installed
in the developing world that their com-
bined energy demand exceeded the total
amount of solar power generated globally.
Fortunately, the fix for the fossil-fueled
fridge isn’t limited to building a better
fridge. There are other methods of food
preservation waiting in the wings, some
new, some old. In Santa Barbara, Califor-
nia, a company called Apeel has devised
a high-tech edible coating that slows the
metabolism, and thus the decay, of fruits
and vegetables. Made from a waxy sub-
stance found in avocado pits, it extends
produce life by nearly the same factor as
refrigeration, while retaining more nutri-
ents and flavor. In Australia, engineers
recently announced an alternative to pas-
teurized milk, one of the most wasted foods
in the United States. By using high-pressure
processing—roughly 75,000 pounds per
square inch, or the equivalent of stacking
six elephants on a dime—they were able to
make milk stay good for four times as long,
without sacrificing taste. A Dutch designer
named Floris Schoonderbeek, inspired
by traditional root cellars, recently cre-
ated the Groundfridge, a naturally cooled
pod that can be buried in a backyard and
filled with 20 refrigerators’ worth of food.
In Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island,
agricultural warehouses are cooled with
last winter’s snow. Chefs in Tokyo say the
rice, asparagus, and beef that come from
the region taste sweeter than their conven-
tionally chilled counterparts.
All of these solutions offer improve-
ments over mechanical refrigeration, not
just in terms of climate impact but also infood quality and safety. But all of them are
also piecemeal. A coating that keeps room-
temperature blueberries plump and juicy
for a month does nothing for milk. The inge-
nious snow-cooled meat lockers of Hok-
kaido wouldn’t work in Santa Barbara, nor
would a city dweller have anywhere to bury
a Groundfridge. With conventional cooling,
the answer to the question “Will it work?” is
always a resounding yes. With these alter-
native methods, the reply becomes more
wishy-washy: “It depends.”
And “it depends” is not usually the
answer we’re looking for. There’s some-
thing reassuring about the one-shot solu-
tion, as opposed to the nuanced thinking
required to apply local, circumstantial
fixes. In some ways, mechanical refriger-
ation only became a problem because it
became the answer to perishability. Once
we had that particular hammer, every-
thing looked like a nail. This hegemonic
tendency—call it technological lock-in,
confirmation bias, or just convenience—
is understandable, but it’s worth resisting.
Given that single-solution thinking is what
got us into trouble in the first place, we
probably shouldn’t replicate it in our pre-
scriptions for the future.
It’s likely too late for a refrigeration redo
in the developed world, unless Peter Dear-
man can build a Nova capable of time travel.
But our blueberries, eggs, milk, and carrots
might yet stage an escape from the fridge, at
least along part of their journey from farm
to fork. In the meantime, we should work
to ensure that those parts of the globe not
yet bound by the cold chain approach food
preservation as a problem with more than
one solution. We can’t—and shouldn’t—
pull the plug on refrigeration altogether,
but it’s not the only weapon in our age-old
war on rot._More than 2,200 “climate victory gardens” have cropped up across the US, part of a Green America campaign
to promote regenerative agriculture and cut food transportation costs.NICOLA TWILLEY (@nicolatwilley) is the
cohost of Gastropod, a podcast that looks
at food through the lens of science and his-
tory. She is at work on two books, one about
refrigeration, the other about quarantine.