The Birth of Cool: How Refrigeration Changed Everything

So, I'd like to start with the easiest question, and that's if you can say your name and

to make sure I pronounce it correctly, and also how you'd like to be identified, like the host of what or the author of what.

Well, Cynthia, it's a pleasure to meet you, first of all.

And

I'm so honored to be on the show.

And you can call me Nikki.

Great.

I am, of course, the co-host of Gastropod.

You might have heard of it.

It's pretty awesome.

I've heard a little about it, yeah.

And so have you, dear listeners, because you are, in fact, listening to Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history.

And I am indeed Nicola Twilley.

And I'm Cynthia Graeber, and here it is at Long Last, the episode we've been waiting for.

Drumroll, please.

Nikki's refrigeration book.

Or as it is known online and in the bookstores, Frostbite, How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves.

It's coming out on June 25th, and you can and should pre-order it now.

Not that I'm biased.

But we've got a bunch of extremely delightful, limited-edition Frostbite fridge poetry magnets to give away to lucky listeners who email us with proof of purchase at contact at gastropod.com.

So this episode of Gastropod obviously isn't about everything in the book.

That would be impossible.

But I picked some of my favorite stories, and I got to turn the tables and interview Nikki about them.

That's Cynthia, she grilled me.

Now I need a nice cold beer.

But first, the scoop on frostbite.

Gastrobot is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Eater.

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Well, so let's dive in.

I have a lot of questions, and obviously we cannot cover everything in the book.

It is totally fascinating and everybody should go buy it.

But one thing is, it's hard to imagine refrigerators are such such a part of our everyday lives, but there was life before refrigeration.

So how recent an innovation is this in our lives?

Yeah, I mean, even though I have spent the past decade researching this book, this is always still surprising to me because...

I feel as though a refrigerator feels like, how could you live without one?

And yet, most people did until 100 years ago.

So most people still do on a planetary scale.

Most Americans still did until 100 years ago.

So yeah, it's just a weird thing.

Refrigeration is really pretty new.

It was commercialized in the late 1800s.

It was domesticated in the 1920s.

We haven't even known how to create cold at will for more than 150 years.

But people must have realized a long time ago, you know, back in evolutionary history, that cold was somehow preserving.

So when, how far back did people realize that cold could help make food last longer?

This is probably one of those things that that humans noticed, I mean, as early as humans started noticing things.

So, probably for millennia, definitely there are archaeologists who believe that in Neolithic times, humans were using like the natural cold of caves to store food, or, you know, ice in sort of pits in the ground to store mammoth meat and things like that.

The first written evidence goes back nearly 4,000 years to the Middle East, what is now Syria, on the banks of the Euphrates.

There were ice houses, apparently.

We don't know what they were using that ice for at all.

There's just a written reference to the fact they were there.

They were heavily guarded.

And they were so in demand that the ice would run out within three days of being brought down from the mountains.

That's all we know.

The Middle East wasn't alone in having these ice houses.

China had them thousands of years ago, too, but it took until the 1500 and 1600s before they became widespread in Europe.

What changed?

So this was a breakthrough.

At the time, like the 1600s, the late 1500s in Italy, it's the Renaissance.

So people are discovering all sorts of things.

And one guy in particular, Giambattista della Porta, he's sort of this polymath, and he figured out how to make ice cream, basically.

He was the first that we know of to notice that if you add salt to ice, it lowers the freezing temperature and that allows you to freeze water, it allows you to turn like a custard into an ice cream, it allows you to turn wine into a slushie delightfully.

And this was news you could use in 1600s Italy.

So all of a sudden the elite they have a new use for this ice.

You know, one of the things I love is what you said about ice slushies.

It's not like they were putting their chicken breasts in there.

They were actually like using the ice for frozes.

Oh, it was totally frivolous and hedonistic, the use of ice.

No one was using ice for practical reasons.

It was entirely for the enjoyment of something cold on a hot day.

And why not?

I mean, a wine slushy is one of humanity's greatest inventions.

Totally delicious.

To stay with ice, there's a really fun story about a guy on a quest who lived in my region of the world in New England.

So let's talk about Frederick Tudor and his role in the development of refrigeration.

Yeah, I love this story because also for a brief moment, New England was like the Saudi Arabia of the world, where because it had so much water and so much cold, it was like this vast resource like Saudi oil.

I love that

our weather, which is the thing that we New Englanders can't stop talking about and how cold it gets, like that was the selling point.

Exactly.

You had this brief window where it was like,

this is this key to wealth for New England.

That sadly is past.

Now you you just get to shovel out your cars.

Sorry to hear it, but let's get back.

So, how about Frederick Tudor?

What did he do with our cold?

He was a wealthy son of a Boston family.

They had a summer estate with an ice house on it, so he was familiar with, you know, harvesting ice and storing it to use to chill your drinks and wine and custards in the summer.

So far, okay.

He's a random, wealthy New Englander who had a country estate that had a lake, and when it froze over, they sought up ice and stored it in blocks.

You actually visited people doing that today, but what made him so unusual?

He's sort of a weird combination of delusional and genius.

He dropped out of school at 13.

He couldn't be bothered anymore and he just spent the rest of his life coming up with get rich quick schemes.

But what happened to him is he took his brother, who was an invalid, to Havana for some, you know, restorative sunshine.

And he was like, wow, it's really hot here.

I mean, he came from New England.

Oh my gosh, it's hot in the Caribbean.

Yes, it was more shocking than now, possibly.

So he was like, gosh, it's so hot.

Imagine how much they'd enjoy one of those, you know, wine slushies we can make back in Boston.

I bet if I could sell them ice, I'd make a fortune.

And so he goes home and starts writing letters to investors saying, you know, soon I will, you know, have made so much money, I don't even know what to do with it.

And investors thought he was out of his mind.

What does he have to do to get this project off the ground?

Well, he squeezes some money out of his brother-in-law, always handy to have some in the family, and he harvests some ice.

And then it turned out that he hadn't thought it through.

He hadn't thought through the fact that, for example, none of the Boston ship owners would carry his ice because they were like, dude, it's going to melt.

Seriously.

And then it will flood our ship, and that's a bad thing.

He hadn't thought about the fact that at the time of year that it's cold enough to harvest ice, Boston's harbor would likely be frozen over, and so no ships would be able to leave.

He hasn't thought through the fact that in Cuba, it's gonna melt.

And also, the Cubans, can you believe it?

Are just like, what is this?

What am I supposed to do with it?

This is probably my favorite part of the story with all of the things that he's doing wrong, is that he gets there and they're all like, why are you bringing me ice?

Yeah, they're like, I don't know what the point of this is.

I have nowhere to put it.

It's just going to melt.

Why would I buy a lump of frozen water that is going to melt on my way home?

So what finally made this a success?

Because it was a success.

It was not a get-rich-quick scheme, but he did eventually get rich.

What worked?

Yeah, it was get-rich slow.

I mean, there was a decade where he was arrested three times for debt.

He was jailed twice.

And his diary entries, he just has the word anxiety printed in block caps repeatedly.

That sounds kind of familiar.

I was going to say, so relatable.

And he writes himself these little pep talk notes, too, where he's like, don't worry, you're still young.

Give it another go, and then you can just get out of it and live a regular life.

It's not over yet, you know.

I love all the little attempts at like boosting himself up.

But it does seem like it worked out, right?

He did eventually succeed.

So how did he turn it around?

Well, he did a couple things.

He hired a really smart guy, Nathaniel Wyeth, who figured out how to store ice so that hardly any of it melted.

Frederick Tudor himself then worked on, like, how do you sell this?

So he came up with a subscription model where he'd delivered the ice.

He came up with his own design of a like ice-cooled water jug that he would give away for free.

He came up with these what he called little ice boxes that were basically early refrigerators cooled by ice.

So he figured out all that stuff.

And then the part I love the most is no one could figure out how to tax him because

they were like, well, it's not mining.

And even though it's called ice harvesting, it's not really farming.

So we don't know how to tax him.

So it's tax-free.

So that helped too.

That must have been a bit of a benefit for him.

But what was this ice that he was shipping from New England lakes?

Where did it go and what was it used for?

The ice could be taken all around the world.

There was a thriving trade in taking ice to Calcutta in India.

So it was being shipped everywhere.

And at scale, the American ice trade at its peak was 8 million tons of ice harvested a year.

I mean, given the population of the country at the time, that's a lot.

And what were people doing with it?

Well, so at first, as before, people used it to cool drinks.

It really kind of democratized this elite luxury.

So for the first time, regular people could enjoy ice cream.

But then it was so abundant that people did start to use it to cool food.

Fishermen started to use it to cool their catch.

Farmers would use it to keep their butter cold on the way to market.

Even people who were shipping meat started to use natural ice.

And actually, the biggest users were primarily brewers.

Smart.

Nice to have a way to keep your beer cold.

I love this aspect of refrigeration's history because, you know, one of the arguments is the reason we first started to farm is because we wanted to make beer.

Well, definitely the reason we got into large-scale cold is because we wanted to make lager beer specifically.

So in the 1850s, a lot of Germans, there was a huge wave of German immigration to the U.S.

Germans love lager.

Unfortunately, in a lot of the US, for at least six months of the year, it's often too hot for lager yeast to brew.

And so brewers were the largest consumers of natural ice in the whole of the US.

I love that.

So one thing that's really interesting is that somebody had figured out even before Tudor was around that there was a way to make things cold without ice.

But until Tudor showed that there was a demand for it, nobody was interested in that.

So when did somebody figure out that you could actually create a cold space without ice?

Yeah, again, not as easy as it sounds.

And a lot of people worked on it for a long time, but the first person to do it, yeah, it was sort of like a party trick, but it didn't really have a purpose.

It was a Scottish doctor called William Cullen, and it was in 1755.

He was a lecturer in medicine at Glasgow and Edinburgh Universities, and one of his students had noticed if you put a thermometer in wine and then you took it out, the temperature would fall.

We now know that's'cause the alcohol's evaporating off and evaporation kind of pulls the heat, the energy away from the bulb of the thermometer, so that's why you're getting a cooling effect.

But people didn't know at the time.

In fact, side note, most people don't know how cold is made today, including me, until I built a refrigerator for this book.

But anyway, William Cullen's intrigued, he does some experiments.

He sets up this system where he has a glass of water in a vacuum and a very fast evaporating liquid in another glass inside this vacuum chamber, and that's how he freezes the water.

And he did it, and he was like, bingo, wrote it up in a paper that I think no one read, and was like, This seems like a very curious thing.

Probably someone should look into it.

And that was that, because no one knew what to do with that until Frederick Tudor showed that if you could produce cold, as it were, at scale, then you could have all of these new industries and all of these new, like a beer supply chain, a food supply chain.

Until Tudor showed that at scale, cold was just like this luxury party trick thing that was like nice and fun, but not necessary.

So did folks then like find his research?

What happened?

So just as the natural ice trade is finally taking off and Tudor is making some money, that's when scientists, entrepreneurs really,

pick up on this observation that evaporation produces cold and start kind of tinkering with how would you build a machine to do that.

And as is always the case, I think in science, there's a lot of people kind of doing

this at about the same time.

It was an Australian journalist who, it was funny, he had started a morning newspaper in this town outside of Melbourne, Australia.

Obviously, it gets really hot, and said the ink would smudge on the type in the summer.

And he found that if he wiped them with ether, the evaporation again would make them cold enough to be able to print the paper.

So he's made this observation.

He gets to work on this steam-powered ether evaporating machine, and it takes him forever.

The cave he's developing it in blows up several times.

But he eventually came up with a working refrigeration machine, so he was the first to commercialize mechanical refrigeration in 1857.

He sold it to two breweries, one in London and one in Australia.

And here we are again with the mechanics.

Cheers to that, right?

Totally.

Well, and so they must have needed like, I imagine those early refrigerators were like room-sized for the beer makers.

Like, what were those early refrigerators like?

They were gigantic because they were steam-powered.

They were super dangerous.

They exploded all the time.

Great.

Sounds awesome.

Yeah.

They were uninsurable.

They were one-offs because they were all prototypes.

And also, the weird thing is that no one had made the conceptually

like, oh,

if we have a thing that produces cold we could just use it to cool a space we don't have to use it to cool water to make ice to cool a space so that that conceptual leap took a little minute again I have to say it was brewers who first realized oh wow like we don't have to use these machines to make ice to cool our cellars we could just cool the cellar and it was the brewer in Brooklyn who did it first.

So now in part thanks to all the beer brewers out there, we finally had mechanical refrigeration.

Was everyone else as quick to put these newfangled, potentially explosive machines in their home?

That's coming up after the break.

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So in the early 1900s, a bunch of things were changing that made people more interested in the potential of refrigeration.

Cities were starting to get electric grids, and so, you know, there was access to power for these refrigerators.

And then also in urban spaces, the natural harvested ice was actually kind of nasty because of pollution, so using that ice could make you sick.

But mechanical refrigeration still didn't catch on right away.

Oh, for sure.

People had zero trust that refrigerated food was safe to eat.

And again, that is one of those things where you're like, what?

Because nowadays, like, today, if you leave something out of the refrigerator, people will be like, oh, is it still good?

Even after a couple of hours out of the fridge.

But at the time, Americans were like, what is this weird, unnatural technology that can deliver me a chicken that was slaughtered six months ago, a year ago, and yet it looks like it was slaughtered yesterday.

It hasn't changed its physical appearance.

And you have to understand that before that, if you wanted to preserve food, you did things that changed the physical appearance of that food.

You had to turn your milk into cheese.

You had to ferment your cabbage into, you know, kimchi or sauerkraut or something.

Right, you had to turn your raspberries into raspberry jam.

You dried food, you know, you smoked it.

Exactly.

And here was this new technology that actually meant that the chicken looked like it had been slaughtered yesterday.

The apple looked like it had been picked yesterday, but had it?

And that uncertainty, like people just didn't know and they had to trust that it was fresh.

And they didn't, of course.

People weren't totally wrong to be afraid of it though, because nobody really knew how long to store food or at what temperature.

And so in fact, sometimes refrigerated food was making people sick.

Scientists needed to find a way to make cold food safe.

Now around that time, people were using chemical preservatives to keep food from going bad as it traveled into urban centers.

We did an episode about a guy named Harvey Washington Wiley.

He figured out that a lot of these preservatives were actually making us sick, and he spearheaded an actual law to make food safer for us to eat.

As we say in our episode, he had campaigned for this pure food law in 1906, and then he was in charge of enforcing it.

And being in charge of enforcing it meant figuring out

what actually was so bad about our food supply.

The thing to know as well, and we said this in the episode, is at the time more and more Americans were moving to cities and their food was traveling longer distances and it had to stay good over those longer distances.

One thing people were using were these toxic chemicals.

But the other thing people were using was this new refrigeration technology.

And Harvey

gets reports and questions from people, you know, and he realized he didn't know how to answer them.

Someone would say, well, this turkey has been in cold storage for 10 years.

Is it safe to eat?

No one knew.

No one had done the science.

So he decided the federal government needed to do the science.

And he outsourced it to one of my favorite heroes in your book, Polly Pennington.

Who is she?

And how did she get into science?

She is a rock star, really.

I mean, she is

like the mother of refrigeration in America, and she's totally forgotten, but she was awesome.

She grew up in Philly.

At the age of 12, she read a chemistry textbook in a library and fell in love with chemistry.

And then at the time, of course, the University of Pennsylvania wouldn't let women enroll to study chemistry, but she persuaded them.

Then when she got her degree, they actually were like, well, we don't really give a Bachelor of Science to a woman, so you can have a certificate of proficiency instead.

Oh, isn't that so kind of them?

it's nice.

It's nice.

I feel like that was a big gesture.

And then she was like, well, I'd like to do a PhD.

And they were like, absolutely not.

And she finagled her way in into that.

There was a university statute she dug up that covered exceptional cases and got her way in for that.

And then she graduated with a PhD in chemistry.

And I don't know if you can tell where this is going, but there weren't a ton of jobs for ladies with PhDs in chemistry.

I am shocked.

Totally shocked.

So she set up her own lab instead because she was like, well, if no one's going to hire me, I'm going to have to start my own business.

And she mostly did bacteriological samples for doctors.

And she was really good at it.

Of course she was.

In your book, you tell the story of how one of her early successes was cleaning up the city of Philadelphia's milk supply.

So based on that, Harvey Washington Wiley decided to hire her to kind of figure out refrigeration, but he wasn't allowed to hire women.

Yeah, it's amazing.

So again, not surprising if you're following the story this far, but yeah, the civil service didn't hire women.

So Harvey instead enters her for the civil service exam anyway and just sort of did it without asking her permission, just told her, I've entered you for the exam.

She was a little annoyed, but she decided to sit the exam anyway.

He also entered her for the exam as Dr.

M.

E.

Pennington.

Everyone called her Polly, but she was christened Mary.

But Dr.

M.

E.

Pennington, everyone assumed her first name was like Mark or Michael, Matthew.

I don't know.

No one knew.

So she's entered into take the civil service exam as Dr.

M.

E.

Pennington.

She took it, she got top marks.

And before anyone could notice she was a woman, the Harvey hired her, and she got to work as Dr.

M.

E.

Pennington.

You know, she put on a sensible, divided skirt and set off.

I love it.

The equivalent of putting on her pantsuit, which she couldn't do.

Exactly.

So what did she end up doing?

So she basically launched something called the Food Research Laboratory, and she hired a bunch of women to staff it with her, including her sister.

And they did a combination of lab-based experiments, so she would study how quickly a chicken decomposed at different temperatures and things like that in a lab, as well as real-world sort of field research.

So she traveled all around the country with refrigerated rail cars full of chickens, just sampling three random chickens at every stop to see what was going on, again, like in the actual food supply.

And basically, over the course of, I don't know, about 20 years, she made refrigeration scientific in America.

She came up with the guidelines for how you should store food, what temperature, how much cooling for how much meat, how long you could store it.

She redesigned the refrigerated rail car so it actually worked.

She made refrigeration scientific.

We've said that people were afraid of refrigeration and with good reason.

So did she turn things around?

She did.

And you can see how effective she was by the fact that when she started, there were headlines about refrigeration was going to kill people, it was deadly.

And by the time she was ready to retire in 1939, she was giving a lecture at MIT and she said to the students, things have changed so much that now Americans don't believe that something is safe unless it's being refrigerated.

So it flipped 180 degrees over the course of her career, and she was the one responsible for that.

So eventually, after all of these key developments, mechanical refrigeration spread across America, and not just in people's homes.

In the book, there are stories about how some of the most important changes were in refrigerated rail cars and refrigerated shipping containers and huge refrigerated warehouses.

And they helped create a world where we can have the same fruits and vegetables year-round, where meat is raised on huge feedlots in one place and shipped to consumers, where a salmon that's caught in Alaska might be deboned in China before coming back to a consumer in New York.

And the book is really about the implications of this.

The effects are far-reaching in many different aspects of our lives, including health, the flavor of what we eat, and the environment.

And in all of these, the ripple effects are huge, but also complicated.

It's not a simple, wow, that's awesome, awesome, or crap, what a nightmare.

You listeners will need to read the book to find out more.

But I wanted to focus in on climate change.

The first implication is in terms of food waste.

In America, we've cut down on waste that used to happen in transit because of refrigerated containers and warehouses.

But now people buy more food than they need, and then they don't eat it all and throw away about a third of perishable goods.

And there are major climate change implications in all that food waste.

But also, there are emissions issues when it comes to the energy for refrigeration and the chemicals themselves, because those chemicals have implications in terms of climate change.

Yeah, this is a sad irony where something we developed to make things cold is actually heating up our planet.

But

it also isn't discussed a lot because when I first started looking into this, I was like, wait, am I making a mistake?

Because everyone should be panicking about this.

And they're not, I think, largely because people think that the cold chain, you know, it's how we feed ourselves, so it's not optional.

So I guess we just have to live with these emissions.

But there are a lot of emissions, like you say.

So the energy required for cooling is currently 8% of global electricity usage.

Cold storage is the third highest industrial consumer of electricity.

So it's a lot of emissions from the power to run these, you know, refrigeration machines.

And that's not even the biggest problem, because the biggest problem is the chemicals you use in those machines, the refrigerants.

refrigerants.

And these are majority these days still, something called super greenhouse gases, which basically just means they're thousands of times more warming than carbon dioxide.

And they leak out to the atmosphere.

And that means that Project Drawdown, which is this project

designed to look at what we can actually do to try and contain climate change.

I guess stop at this point is moot, but

let's work on containing.

Exactly.

They list refrigerant management as the number one solution to global warming in terms of potential impact.

And they were surprised.

They were a bit like me when I first started looking into this.

They were like, what, really?

Refrigeration's a problem?

Turns out it really is.

And this is just with really only the developed world with a refrigerated cold chain for its food supply.

Well, that's actually what I wanted to talk to you about next, because another thing I think people might not realize is not everywhere in the world has refrigerated warehouses and a cold chain the way we do.

And if they build one, that has huge climate change implications.

So how quickly are things changing in the developing world?

Yeah, this is a, I mean, this is a cool time, so to speak, if you're into refrigeration, because refrigeration is spreading rapidly.

So right now,

the quote-unquote developed world has sort of a largely a built-out cold chain.

It's still expanding.

The U.S.

cold chain is still growing at a huge rate.

But the rest of the world, and by that I mean almost all of sub-Saharan Africa, large parts of Southeast Asia, doesn't have a U.S.-style cold chain, even India.

Obviously, everybody should have access to the same resources we do.

We shouldn't say we got here and now you can't, but there's huge climate implications.

So is anybody doing research on alternatives to our current system, the refrigerants, the electricity, all of that?

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, basically, if the rest of the world builds the same cold chain that we have here, it is a climate disaster.

One climate scientist just said to me, Well, listen, if everyone else builds the same cold chain that the U.S.

has, there won't be a harvest to store in that refrigerated warehouse because climate change will have made sure of that.

So,

on that happy note, people are doing research.

There are people coming up with prototypes for more energy-efficient cooling,

different methods of cooling altogether, magnetic refrigerators, acoustic refrigerators.

Even Einstein came up with an alternate method of refrigerating, although actually it's proven quite hard to make work.

But these are all pretty much prototypes.

They're in the lab.

They seem promising.

They're not commercial.

And the interesting thing is also, and almost everyone said this to me, refrigeration is like the Cinderella of engineering R ⁇ D.

Less than a tenth of 1% of engineering R ⁇ D is spent on refrigeration.

It is not something that the great minds are focused on.

So, of course, progress isn't happening very quickly, but there is a company doing something amazing that could help transform the cold chain without cold.

That's coming up after the break.

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This month on Explain It to Me, we're talking about all things wellness.

We spend nearly $2 trillion on things that are supposed to make us well.

Collagen smoothies and cold plunges, Pilates classes and fitness trackers.

But what does it actually mean to be well?

Why do we want that so badly?

And is all this money really making us healthier and happier?

That's this month on Explain It To Me, presented by Pureleaf.

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

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So you have an interesting story about something that could help make a change.

And it's a company that you and I have both been following the news about for years.

So I'm a little jealous you got to visit them.

It's called Appeal.

I did indeed get the chance to visit Appeal.

I'm James Rogers and we are at Appeal Sciences in Santa Barbara, California.

The interesting thing about this company is that if you think about it, all we want is for food to be preserved.

We don't actually need it to be cold.

And so Their whole thing is to come up with a different way to preserve fresh fruit and vegetables, keep them fresh for as long as a refrigerator would keep them fresh, but just using a totally different technique.

And to come up with that, he went back to square one.

What makes food go bad?

If you go online and do your research, immediately you learn that the leading causes of produce spoilage are water loss and oxidation.

Water evaporating out of the surface of the produce, oxygen it again.

Basically, once a fruit is harvested, it's still alive, it's still metabolizing.

This is a, it's respiring, not breathing.

Same difference.

It's taking in gases and breathing out gases.

It basically has a certain number of breaths left before it dies.

And so if you can slow down how fast it's breathing, it will last longer.

So how does refrigeration do that?

Everything happens more slowly in the cold.

The fruit just breathes and metabolizes more slowly, so it also dies more slowly.

But James was a PhD student.

His field was creating nanoscale coatings, and that gave him the idea that you could design a coating to go around a fruit or vegetable that would kind of do the same thing as refrigeration.

A coating that would slow down its breathing and water loss.

Every single living system needs to insulate itself from atmospheric conditions.

And so

this idea of creating a barrier around something is not at all novel.

In fact, you know, the original

lipid vesicles that developed were the cradles in which life was actually able to first develop on this planet.

So it's almost like a prerequisite for life that you're able to insulate and create these kind of more favorable little conditions in a particular system.

That sounds like a great idea in theory, but evolution had a long time to work out those barriers.

So what did James and his team have to do?

It's all about relaxation.

And you can see, if you wire up these fruit, you can see it having a panic attack when it's taken off the plant.

It's bananas.

It starts breathing really heavily.

And when it's breathing really heavily, it's not just aging.

It's consuming its internal resources.

So all of those vitamins and phytonutrients that we want to eat, it's burning them up in this sort of panicked attempt to stay alive because it's like, I've been cut off from the parent plant.

So what James had to do was figure out the exact conditions that would kind of sedate this panicky fruit and cause it to breathe as slowly as possible.

And that comes down to getting exactly the right blend of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and water vapor.

Okay, so now he knows the right conditions for a super relaxed piece of fruit.

How does he build the barrier to create that kind of crop anesthesia?

Well, so that's where his thin layer expertise came in because he knows how to design a barrier that will deliver exactly the right amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide.

So then what he has to do is figure out what to make this barrier from, and he wanted to make it from only from molecules that you you find in food, because that way it's FDA approved already, it's perfectly safe, we know it's edible and not going to cause any harm to anybody.

And so at the Appeal Labs, they have this entire search process for finding useful molecules in food, and what they do is they tap into food waste.

So they look at the leftover stuff from pressing grapes or olives, or they'll go to a guacamole factory and take the pits and the skins.

When I was there, they were analyzing a bunch of tomato skins from a canned tomato factory to see if there was anything useful in there.

And basically what that comes down to doing,

in a very crude analogy, is we basically pressure cook the hell out of this material.

Because inside of here, there are millions of different kinds of molecules, and some of those are really useful for our formulations, and some of them are not at all useful for our formulations.

So our job is first to get access to the molecular building blocks, and then we think about how we construct our formulations.

So he breaks down the tomato skins.

He isolates and analyzes molecules to find the ones that are useful.

He can create these super thin films made of a variety of them.

He kind of comes up with what he thinks will be just the right recipe and then he has to figure out if it works.

So what we'll do is we'll take an untreated piece of produce.

We'll measure the the characteristics of that produce without our treatment.

We'll treat it.

And then we'll measure the characteristics of that produce now with the treatment applied.

Basically, he takes a perfect avocado, freshly picked, he gives it a thorough checkup and measures all its vitals, how much vitamin E it has, how much of different fatty acids, how much of all the different flavor chemicals that make it taste like an avocado.

And then he sprays his coating on, leaves it for a while, and measures the avocado again to see how much of the good stuff is left.

But isn't each type of produce different?

Like a strawberry would be different from an avocado, would be different from a pepper?

What do they do to figure that all out?

Yeah, not even.

I mean, a different variety of avocado would be different from a different variety of avocado.

Everything has its own perfect little microclimax.

So when you visit Appeal, it's just this enormous playground of instrumentation.

They dunk avocados in these little water baths and sort of create this vacuum around them to sample the atmosphere.

They have multiple testing labs where they'll spray slightly different versions of the formulation that will dry at slightly different rates to see which does better.

And then they test each one to see, okay, which has higher levels of vitamin C still, which has, you know, higher levels of this chemical that was high when it was still on the plant.

So it has been a lot of trial and error and testing to arrive at different formulations for different fruits and vegetables.

that preserve them in as close to the state that they were on the plant as possible.

So how well does it work?

I saw the magic in action.

These are untreated lemons.

So, this is eight weeks old, and these are the same age.

So, these are treated, and these are untreated.

That's nuts.

I mean, look at them.

Pepper is the same thing.

So, untreated, and then these are treated, and they're both the same age.

You should feel it, actually.

I mean, they're solid.

Wow.

And does it still smell like a lemon?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Huh.

Let me just repeat that.

Bell peppers for eight weeks at room temperature.

we know what happens to that usually you don't even need to know they have bell peppers that are coated sitting next to bell peppers that are uncoated

for eight weeks at room temperature and the uncoated ones basically dissolved i mean they're moldy they're shriveled they're tiny and slimy and they i mean you would not eat them the other ones yeah they're past their prime but you would totally put them in a stir-fry you might not put them in your crudeté board but you would cook with them.

And so, does the coating taste like anything?

I did ask, you'll be proud of me, Cynthia.

I was like, can I lick this?

Of course.

Like the good investigative journalist I am.

And they were like, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that's the whole key.

What we do is we treat the produce with such a small amount of material that the result is you can't see it, you can't taste it, you can't feel it.

So if I licked that right now, I would not taste anything.

Go for it.

So I did.

I picked up an appeal-coated lime, and I licked it, and it tasted like a lime.

Like I said, it's a nanoscale coating.

It's totally imperceptible.

So is appeal, are these appeal-coated fruits and vegetables already on the market?

They are.

You can currently buy appeal-coated cucumbers, which is great because cucumbers in supermarkets go bad so quickly.

Appeal-coated lemons, appeal-coated avocados.

They have a few different formulations they're working through.

You might think, oh, they have the spray, they could do it.

No, they have to develop a new formulation for each thing, but they also have to develop a new kind of application system.

So whatever they do has to fit in a cucumber packing warehouse.

So they're designing sort of an end-to-end solution.

They're working with the growers and the packing house and then all the way along the food chain and the supermarket to figure out how to make this work.

So they're going one fruit or vegetable at a time.

This sounds amazing and it's easy to see how it could reduce food waste, obviously.

And if it's used to keep products out of the cold chain altogether, it could also save a lot of electricity and reduce emissions, which is great.

So is this kind of their target goal?

Yes, but it's just one of their target goals.

They also want to get produce to supermarket shelves with more of the things that make it tasty and good for us still in it.

Refrigeration is just a one-size-fits-all solution.

It's typically not optimized for each different species at the grocery store.

So it's possible that actually Appeal could work better to slow down how fast fruit is breathing and keep it in better shape.

James has even more ideas for what Appeal might be able to do.

The thing that actually makes me personally most excited about what we're doing is being able to bring a greater biodiversity of produce to retail shelves because the number one characteristic that people breed for today is transportability.

If it's not transportable, it's not economically viable.

And so the likelihood of doing doing a breeding experiment, getting something that's transportable and has great flavor, you know, and looks great is really, really low.

And so if we can come in with our technology and release or reduce the perishability constraint and solve the transportability problem, we can allow people to select for traits which are nutritional or flavor

or grow better in local growing environments.

This is exciting because there is a lot of amazingly delicious and nutritious and sustainable fruit and vegetables out there that you can't get in the supermarket because they can't be shipped and stored under refrigeration.

Appeal could get around that problem.

Maybe this is what will finally get pawpaws onto our grocery store shelves.

But Nikki, as we were talking about, a lot of the world is starting to create a cold chain and that's important for them, but also could have dramatic climate change implications.

Maybe Appeal could help them get some of the benefits of refrigeration without refrigeration.

That's right.

The same way that

Africa never had landline telephones, then they went straight to cell phones, we believe that by implementing this technology correctly, we could help sub-Saharan Africa in particular leapfrog the development of a cold chain and use that to develop a completely different food supply chain, which could help lift billions of people out of poverty.

Thinking about the implications of this is kind of amazing.

So, for example, in countries that don't have a cold chain already, well, now those farmers don't have to build one.

That's exciting because it's really expensive to build a cold chain.

This is less expensive, or at least has the potential to be.

I mean, when you're prototyping it, it's very expensive.

But as a commercial technology, it's made from waste food.

You buy the powder and spray it on, as opposed to the enormous cost of running a refrigerated warehouse.

When I visited Rwanda, no one, even places that had a refrigerated warehouse, they wouldn't run it because it was too expensive.

And the other thing is, it's too expensive for an individual smallholder in Rwanda to have their own refrigerated warehouse.

They have to scale up.

You just can't make the economics work at small scale.

But you could maybe make the economics of appeal work at small scale.

And maybe that means that some African farmers can stay on the land and we can have a different farming system here in the West.

You know, farms are massive and very few people farm.

Well, maybe that could be a different model elsewhere, you know?

I have to say, I am very excited to watch and see how things go with appeal, and I wish them a lot of success.

But now for the big picture.

Nikki, you have spent a decade of your life off and on obsessed with refrigeration.

Don't remind me.

If you had to give a big takeaway, if you had to give one, I know obviously the topic is really interesting, but kind of what's your big takeaway and like why should people care about it?

Well, I think the big takeaway is

cold revolutionized our food chain really recently in a lot of different ways.

And I take away from that the fact that we can revolutionize our food chain pretty quickly and that's something we clearly need to do.

But also I think

People should care about it now because we implemented this in a very sort of commercial way.

I mean, people just figured out how to make it work.

The government stepped in and figured out how to make it safe.

But no one said, well, is this giving us the food system we want?

Is this making our food system resilient?

Is this making our food system equitable?

Is this making our food tasty, healthy?

You know, what is this doing to labor?

What is this doing to the environment?

And it turns out to have negative effects in all of those areas.

And

if we never look at those and are instead just like, oh, we have to refrigerate because that's our food system.

Otherwise, food can't reach us.

I mean, why would we let it go unexamined?

We could design a different food supply chain.

So my feeling is the moment to look at this is now partly for ourselves, definitely because the rest of the world is building a cold chain, certainly because of the climate change impact and the fact that we have to reduce those emissions, but also just because it could be different.

And that's why I love the story of Appeal.

There's nothing there that says refrigeration is the only and best way to preserve food.

Thank you so much for joining me today on this episode of Gastropod.

Like I had a choice.

Nicola Twilley is co-host of Gastropod and the author of the new book, Frostbite.

I don't know the entire subtitle.

How refrigeration changed our food, our planet, and ourselves.

We just talked about my book for a whole episode and we barely touched the tip of the iceberg.

Pun intended.

There's so many more weird stories and fascinating history and science in there and if you'd like to buy it, I will be eternally grateful.

Plus, if you do and you want to send in proof of purchase to contact at gastropod.com, you might win the world's cutest fridge magnet.

Make sure to come and see me on Booktour 2.

All the dates and details are on gastropod.com.

We also have links to how to buy buy the book on our website, gastropod.com.

And thanks as always to our fantastic producer, Claudia Guib.

Thank you, Cynthia, for having me on the show.

And thank you also to the team at Appeal.

I loved my visit there.

We'll be back in a couple of weeks with a brand new episode.

Till then.

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