Before Fridges: How Humans Learned to Control the Cold | Nicola Twilley

SPEAKER_00 0:03 One invention, above all else, has reshaped the course of human history. It's changed how we live, how we travel, how tall we are. It's even upended the very fabric of our planet and its ecosystem.

SPEAKER_01 0:17 And that invention is the fridge, whose history is more pivotal to human progress than you could ever imagine.

SPEAKER_00 0:26 As Nicola Twilley puts it, the control of cold unlocked godlike powers for the human species.

SPEAKER_01 0:34 For many thousands of years, humans have used the cold to store food and keep it fresh, but they were totally reliant on nature and the seasons. In the warmer months, they had to invent different ways of preserving the food.

SPEAKER_00 0:49 This historical battle has been an endless arms race of humans versus bacteria, until one day in the quite recent past, we figured out a way of harnessing cold's power, forever altering how we eat. But it has not been without its challenges, its twists, and its turns.

SPEAKER_01 1:10 Nicola Twille is the author of the book Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. And she's here to take us on the fascinating journey of mankind's obsession with keeping things cold.

SPEAKER_00 1:26 Nikki, welcome to what we did before. It is an absolute pleasure to have you on because your book is the idea that sparked this entire series. So I have you to blame for that. I'm so delighted.

SPEAKER_02 1:40 All the blame can be mine.

SPEAKER_03 1:52 I mean, it does sound a bit dramatic when you put it like that, but I would say that I am not the only person to have said that. As far back as 1931, when, you know, most people in the world didn't have a fridge. There was a journalist called Leonora Baxter who, you know, sort of di wrote a piece speculating on what the world would look like without refrigeration. And she was like, our present daily existence would become unworkable. Cities with thousands of inhabitants would fade away. You know, we would we would be sort of reduced to beasts struggling to survive. So she already went, you know, nearly a hundred years ago, said our present form of civilization is dependent upon refrigeration. And I think it's only become more dependent ever since. I mean, it's essential infrastructure, even if we don't think of it that way.

SPEAKER_00 2:46 So would you say then if we were like to snap and all fridges were lost, um, that society would it collapse or would it just have this fundamental shift? Like how what what would that look like unfolding?

SPEAKER_03 2:59 Well, there I mean, I I can't say it would work out very well for the UK, um, where most food is imported. And interestingly, actually, during at the very start of COVID, uh, I have you know friends who work at the Cold Chain Association do cold chain sort of planning, and they got a call from the government saying, uh, uh how many uh refrigerated warehouses do we have here in the UK? Because it's this essential infrastructure, but it's entirely private and commercial. And I do think that without it, at least countries that are reliant on food imports would find themselves in a bind quite quickly. And I think getting food into cities, getting it into people's homes, we just can't do that without refrigeration right now. So there are plenty of places on earth that would be absolutely fine, but there are a lot of places where society might actually collapse. I mean, you saw what people did with Lou Rolls. It's this is much worse.

SPEAKER_01 4:00 Well, such a good point. That's true. And um, I was wondering, is it kind of fair to say that um refrigeration in some ways has also shaped the economies of the modern world? So obviously, some count countries have been uh allowed to export and import perishable goods these incredible distances. So you know, you mentioned the UK, we import a lot of food. Um, but there's countries I think you've mentioned before, Kenya, for example. So yeah, but is it kind of that uh economies have been completely reshaped by this kind of uh revolution?

SPEAKER_03 4:37 Absolutely. And like you say, it does go both ways. I mean, when refrigeration for meat started being a realistic form of export, that actually sort of essentially saved the economy of New Zealand, you could say. The colonial enterprise there was failing. Um, no one, you know, the the colonizers did not have a way to make money. You could not do it on wool alone. Um, and they had no way of monetizing the meat on the sheep, and it just was absolutely economically not panning out as a colony. So, I mean, whether you think that's a good thing or a bad thing, it turns out that the ability to freeze meat and ship it to England is what made New Zealand viable as a British colony and allowed that colonization to sort of really become complete. So, and that's that's a historical example, but you see it today, you know, where as you mentioned, Kenya or in recent years, Chile and in South America has just absolutely transformed its economy into export of you know asparagus and um it's just uh w without the ability to do that, uh huge chunks of those countries' GDP would be gone.

SPEAKER_01 5:52 Okay, and um one thing that you've mentioned before is that um it's there's some parts to to this change, for example, with the Kenya example, where maybe the caveats are that it's not just simply you know it's enabled them to export things, but actually it's consolidated some wealth to kind of a few larger farms or um ones that are maybe already owned by global corporations, maybe it contributes to water shortages. So um do you think there are sort of caveats to this, you know, that it's part of the GDP? Maybe there are some negatives generally?

SPEAKER_03 6:33 Oh, definitely. Um yeah, I mean development professionals often sort of promote refrigeration, you know, sustainable goals folks, you know, Gates Foundation, they will promote refrigeration. The EU has grants for it as a way for a country to build its income, lift farmers out of poverty, etc. The trouble, uh, as you discover if you actually visit the countries and research this is that economically the smallholder farmers that are the really poor farmers in countries like Rwanda and Kenya, they cannot actually afford to refrigerate their food for export. And so what happens is when those, you know, Kenyan green beans are showing up in waitros, they are coming from one of eight mostly white-owned farms that can afford all the ri it's just and it's not just the equipment, which is really expensive, and keeping it running, which is really expensive and difficult. It's also, you know, the supermarkets in the West have very stringent quality control, very stringent, you know, safety procedures. And following all of those, that's not something you can do if you're if you're just a tiny small holder. So it is really hard to make work for the poorest of the poor, and as a result, it does sort of just lead to cheaper, you know, blueberries and green beans for us in the West and uh and a consolidation of wealth among the people who are already wealthy in in the countries that are exporting. And the environmental cost is huge, you know. You don't turn uh uh sort of half of your country into sort of an asparagus producing region without depleting your aquifer. It just, you know, there are a lot of things that need irrigation, you know, it's it's tough.

SPEAKER_00 8:22 I I want to sort sort of take us on a bit of a romp through history because you mentioned that uh refrigeration is celebrated now, and that certainly has not been the case throughout history. And uh, we're never going to do your entire book justice in this short conversation, but there are a few bits I would like to pick up on that were really fascinated me uh when I was listening to the audiobook. In fact, I'm I'm very um acquainted with your voice, so it's it's quite nice. It feels very comfortable to be listening to you again. Um but Nikki, you make a comparison early in the book about the size of the refrigeration sector in the US, and you you compared it uh to Mount Everest and also called it the artificial cryosphere, which I love. Um and and I think you described it even as the new arc a new Arctic. Um so can you guide us through that and that just how big it really is?

SPEAKER_03 9:12 Yeah, I mean, this I think was a it sort of blew my mind when I realized, and it is quite hard to find out how big it really is because most refrigerated warehouses are privately owned. These sort of data are just not publicly available. So I had to do quite a bit of sort of digging to try to get a good estimate of the size of what I started calling the artificial cryosphere. You know, the natural cryosphere is all the glaciers and the and the poles, naturally frozen regions. And this I thought was the artificial cryo cryosphere, artificially frozen regions. In the US alone, we're talking about 5.5 billion cubic feet, which is a larger volume than Mount Everest. It's growing 20% globally every couple of years at the current rate. So, you know, as we're talking, it's getting bigger. And what's interesting about that is of course the natural cryosphere is shrinking. So I really came to see that this artificial cryosphere at this point is becoming, you know, a third pole. As we sort of shrink down the, you know, the north pole, the artificial cryosphere is getting up to the same volume of frozen space, which is astonishing.

SPEAKER_00 10:23 The ice caps are melting, but it's fine because we're making our own ones.

SPEAKER_03 10:26 I mean, the control of nature, it's never not worked, am I right?

SPEAKER_00 10:31 No, exactly. It's always beneficial, isn't it? Always a good idea. Um, now I mean controlling the cold has been something that we've wrestled with as humanity for time immemorial, and it really is only recently that we've kind of come to grips with how to harness it in any sort of measurable, um tangible way, which has reshaped the world. You know, if you look, you you mentioned in the book some of the greatest scientific minds of the past just couldn't understand cold. You know, you had people like Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci. Uh, but you say uh Descartes came close.

SPEAKER_03 11:06 Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, first of all, it blows my mind that, you know, we've controlled heat with fire since before we were modern Homo sapiens. And some people argue that is how we became Homo sapiens. We have not had a handle on cold for more than a couple hundred years, really. And it it baffled people. People thought it was like a cold, it sort of maybe there was a cold spring at the North Pole that sort of filtered, streams of it filtered out. They thought there was something called frigorific atoms that maybe brought cold. Um, or maybe it was underground, stored underground and sort of leaked upwards. Who knew? Um, and so it was a complete mystery. And I was astonished when I read in Descartes, this is in the 1640s, a long time before the laws of thermodynamics in the 1800s, he was comparing cold to the existence of God, and he was, you know, trying to figure out is God real? And he said, Well, if cold is if people say cold is not real, it's it's just the absence of heat, then it's not something real and positive in itself. And he was using it as a sort of way to think about is is God real or is it, you know. But actually, he was right. There is no such thing as cold, it is just the absence of heat. And cooling is just this sort of sensation of loss of heat as that heat is transferred elsewhere. And I think it, you know, it's astonishing also in the 21st century, you know, 200 years after the laws of thermodynamics were formulated, how uh that's news still to a lot of people. I mean, I'm not a physicist, so I was like, oh right, yeah, it's not, it is just the absence of something else. And I think that's why it took us so long to get a handle on it scientifically.

SPEAKER_01 12:50 Okay, and um I was wondering sort of this is a little bit uh different to the Descartes point, but can you guide us through some of the um maybe some of the techniques that ancient humans or humans prior to the invention of fridges relied on? And how long did that last?

SPEAKER_03 13:09 Well, yeah, I mean, if you think, oh, civilization with the breakdown without fridges, it's like, well, we've had a lot of civilization without fridges. Um and for basically all of human history, uh, humans have had to work out what to do with food to make it last. Um, to we've been fighting this sort of war against, you know, microbes that want to eat our food before we can get to it. And so you have a huge range of techniques developed. Uh refrigeration is sort of really just one of the latest. It's a, you know, a new arrival. People have been drying food, so you get rid of water that way. And if you've got rid of water, then the microbes aren't happy. Um, soon after that, people start started salting and sugaring. Works the same way. You reduce water availability. The ancient Greeks were big fans of um using honey to preserve in that way. Apparently, Alexander the Great is uh mummified in honey because he wouldn't rot. Um I know. So so goes the story. I haven't, you know, I don't think we know where he's buried. So I would have been mummified in honey. I mean, the option is there. Um people make things very alkaline or very acidic, so you get sort of pickles or um more rare these days, using lye to sort of, you know, get very odd sort of scandy fish type things. You can take away the oxygen that the microbes need to survive using fat. So that's like a comfy. You can boil it to kill them. I mean, there's a huge range of ways to sort of fight this ongoing battle against bacteria, and oftentimes we would combine methods. Sometimes we'd also recruit uh microbial allies. So this is like cheese. You um put in the bacteria to sour the milk, and then you also use salt and physical pressure to get rid of the water. So you're using fermentation to fight off, you know, good bacteria to fight off the bad ones, and you're using physical and chemical methods to make it inhospitable to microbes. The the crazy thing about all of these techniques is they result in our most delicious and flavorful uh food. So nice side benefit, longer lasting, often more portable, and uh real flavor bombs, especially in a world where we would have been relying on a lot of grain and extremely boring food otherwise. So food preservation before refrigeration is just really one of the triumphs of human creativity.

SPEAKER_00 15:36 Yeah, I think more incredible though is that they would they had come across and you know, maybe stumbled across, maybe in intentionally invented these method methods of preservation before understanding what the bacteria were even doing. So they'd figured out that they're, you know, before they had the scientific method, um, what they had to do to make sure bacteria didn't thrive and that food didn't rot.

SPEAKER_03 15:58 Oh, absolutely. It's incredible. I mean, late Paleolithic, 12,000 BCE, they're already using sun and wind to dry meat, and no one's gonna even have a clue what a bacteria is for thousands and thousands of years after that. So it is amazing.

SPEAKER_00 16:16 And and also there's um something I I've read about is um they've unearthed something called bog butter. I don't know if you know anything about this, but um so the idea I think was that uh food would be stored in bogs and then pulled out later. Uh what was going on there?

SPEAKER_03 16:34 Well, it's getting rid of oxygen, isn't it? Um so it's this anaerobic environment where the microbes aren't happy. Um it work, I mean, that's how you get bog bodies too, which are essentially mummified in the in the bogs. Um and there's sort of lots of tannins in bogs, which are uh very powerful um antimicrobials in and of themselves. So yeah, it works to preserve.

SPEAKER_00 18:00 I I love the idea of the sort of first person who's like, right, do you want to try that or not? Or is it gonna be you? I don't fancy that looks disgusting.

SPEAKER_03 18:09 You know, there was uh thank goodness for the people who weren't picky eaters.

SPEAKER_00 18:13 Yeah, exactly. And uh at Royston Cave in England as well, um, you said that there was um overnight butter that was found there that could have been stored there by the Knights Templar, right?

SPEAKER_03 18:28 Yeah, so butter already has a slightly longer shelf life than milk. You've already done some work to you've salted it, you've got removed some water, you know, you've soured it slightly, particularly in the olden days. And so it already has a slightly longer shelf life, but it's gonna melt if it gets warm, even in England. And so I uh I love this story. Um there was it's a few miles south of Cambridge, and it's this sort of underground space with these very intriguing carvings. People thought it might be a pagan temple, they thought it might be a hermit hole. And this woman called Sylvia Beaman, who is sort of a hero in my story, she's a huge underground explorer, actually started something called Subterranean Britannica, which is an amazing, amazing kind of underground exploration and organization in the UK. She is the one who figured out it is likely a uh was a storage site for um the Knights Templar who sold butter at the Cambridge Market and had to store it overnight. You know, they bring it in. You need a district, it's like a waitress distribution center. Um and so uh she connected those carvings to a better documented uh French dungeon with uh similar carvings. It's not proven. Um no one's got a sort of smoking gun there, but that is the prevailing theory.

SPEAKER_01 19:42 So this one's maybe a bit more personal for me and Ollie at least. Um so we're both from the Channel Islands, actually, and one point in uh your book uh you say that Jersey um may be home to the oldest known ice cave, and it may have stored uh mammoth meat. So how could it be that an island like Jersey uh could have that accolade?

SPEAKER_03 20:07 I don't want you to think that you're special because actually these were probably in many other places too. But what happened is this one has really been researched because Sylvia Beaman, after she sort of got intrigued by this Royston cave, she act that started her down a path of studying archaeology. She went to Cambridge and her dissertation research was on this natural cave in Jersey, um, which she theorized was used for mammoth meat storage, you know, 140,000 years ago. And she did the experimental archaeology, she did other kinds of research. So that was her theory. I don't think it's that this is necessarily the world's oldest, it's just uh this is the one that has been studied. But carry on thinking you're special if you'd like.

SPEAKER_00 20:53 Oh no, no, that's fine by us because we're actually from Guernsey. So and we're we're quite competitive. So um we're we'd be quite happy to take that accolade uh off back off jersey. That's totally fine.

SPEAKER_02 21:04 I'm sure there's one on Guernsey too. I'm absolutely certain of it. Don't worry.

SPEAKER_00 21:09 You don't have any to hand, do you? Just to make us feel a little bit.

SPEAKER_02 21:12 Honestly, there's probably one on Alderney. You can all have them.

SPEAKER_00 21:16 Well, I'm just impressed that you know of Aldeny's existence, even so.

SPEAKER_02 21:21 I used to go on family holidays to Guernsey's. So definitely. Actually to home.

SPEAKER_01 21:28 Deep cut. Yes, definitely. So um on a sort of similar topic, I guess, can you sort of tell us um maybe about the uh the ice trade and how ice harvesting would have worked?

SPEAKER_03 21:41 Well, yeah, so the entire point of Sylvia's uh Sylvia Beaman's research was to say, listen, people knew that cold preserved food, that's another way to do it. Cold slows down how fast bacteria reproduce. So it's just another way of preserving food. And it's it just the same way we noticed that drying worked, we would have noticed that cold worked, and we would have used natural snow and ice to preserve food. And that what happened, I mean, quite early on is that people realized, oh, you could harvest this ice or snow and you could store it often in underground uh caves, and that would make it last longer, and then you'd be able to use it when it, you know, there was it was summer and there wasn't any natural snow and ice. Um, and so that that ice harvesting really started early in ancient Babylon, but it got going and organized in the 1800s in the US, and that's where you get all special tools being developed for it and people doing it like an industry and exporting it around the globe. And it's really it's really quite fun. Um there are a few places in the US where you can still go and harvest ice this way, and it you know, you put it in these little wooden ice houses, just look like you know, barns, and uh I mean they're very well insulated barns, and it lasts through the The summer, boiling hot. It's incredible. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:03 The only time I've ever uh seen this is at the start of the Disney movie Frozen. Um so I've watched it more times than I care to admit. Um I have two young I have two young daughters, five and two, so I have an excuse. Um and uh so in the opening scene, there's this group of men using picks and carts to harvest ice. And honestly, I I'll be honest here, I had no idea why they were doing that. It was a bit of a mystery to me, but I sort of just like rolled with it. Um and I I don't know when it dawned on me that this was a a trade that they were showcasing from the past. But anyway, it it kind of um you mentioned in the book that that frozen and this scene actually caused a surge of interest in this ancient tit technique, didn't it?

SPEAKER_03 23:47 Yeah, it's amazing when I actually went, you know, there's a lake in Maine where they still do the traditional ice harvest, and I went up to participate because I thought, oh, I should see what it's like to do this, really. And there are about 15 different little girls dressed as Elsa. So families have brought their kids along to I mean, it was it was a lot of fun. I mean, the ice harvesting itself is not something a uh a princess would do, but um, it was uh I mean and it was hard work, uh, but it was really, really fascinating. They had all the old tools there, and you just sort of slice up the pond and then into these giant ice cubes and move them along, and then and and there's a set of tools for breaking them off, piking them along the empty channels, getting them, you know, horses to get them up the uh up the ramp into the into the ice house, and then sort of storing them closely there. So it and it it is it was quite a fun day out.

SPEAKER_00 24:43 So you got like what like saws and like what what tools would they have used exactly?

SPEAKER_03 24:48 Yeah, there's saws, there's so you sort of grid it out into um with saws into into looks sort of like a an ice chessboard, and then you use these things called breaker bars to sort of snap off the big cubes. They're, you know, I don't know, uh let's say half a meter um in in all dimensions, and you just kind of then you use a sort of pike to kind of pull it, gently kind of nudge it along the open part of the water where you've already got out some ice cubes. So, and then there's a set of tools for sort of directing it into the right place in the ice house when it when it's coming down the chute. Um that part is for professionals only. You can break your ankle when the ice is coming at you.

SPEAKER_01 25:33 I can imagine, yeah. Um so actually, um I find it fascinating that um during this time of sort of shipping snow and ice around, there was actually because it was a commodity, this led to kind of criminal attacks, right? So it makes sense, but it seems quite bizarre the idea of um snow heists. But this is something you've written about, isn't it?

SPEAKER_03 25:55 Well, yeah, I mean, think about it. The only supply we had was a natural supply, so already it's limited. Then you're bringing it in from quite far away. So anytime you have something imported over a distance, it's a luxury and it costs a lot of money. And so uh, you know, only the wealthy have access to it. And at the same time, people want it because first of all, cold is lovely in the summer, and uh second of all, it's worth money. So you uh one of the things that I came across that I loved was a letter from a Medici cardinal in 1600s Italy writing to the chief of police in Rome this long angry letter about how his snow shipments were being stolen en route and how to keep the the snow um safe so that the Medici could have all the ice cream that their hearts desired.

SPEAKER_00 26:46 Wow. It kind of sounds like a joke now, but it but it it really was like important.

SPEAKER_03 26:52 Oh, yeah, it was it was a huge luxury. There's a an amazing letter from ancient Greece, Greece from Pliny being like, I got some snow for this dinner party and you ghosted me, and uh and I'm gonna charge you for the snow because it was expensive. He also got oysters and something of snails and something else, but why special wine? Well, that was all fine, but the snow he was really angry about.

SPEAKER_00 27:13 Yeah, it's now just really wet. Yeah. Doesn't last.

SPEAKER_01 27:20 Oh, that'd be so annoying. So um, can you uh talk to us about how uh ice tunnels may have been responsible for legends like Britain's hobbits?

SPEAKER_02 27:32 This is again Sylvia Beaman, who I love, but she she she went, yeah, she went down this rabbit hole literally.

SPEAKER_03 27:40 Um, and she spent more than a decade just kind of creating this gazetteer of ice houses. Like, where are all the ice houses in Britain? And she started off thinking there would be maybe, you know, a couple of hundred, and she ended up with thousands, most of which had been, you know, weren't on any maps or planning. So there were just hundreds and hundreds of them. And actually, you still see stories of, you know, they'll be digging something in in London and they'll come across an ice house, uh, a sort of hole in the ground. It sort of conjures up this picture of like England with all these sort of lost voids um like formerly used for storing cold underneath. And there's a um expert on uh Scottish vernacular architecture who wrote about this and he said, you know, this is probably where we get a lot of our myths of sort of hobbits and and forest creatures because these ice houses are set away from the house. Um they're often in a shaded sort of hilly area, and they and you know, you get these doors opening directly into the earth, and then a little tunnel down to a roundish room. That's perfect for a hobbit. Um, you can see Bilbo moving in, you know, prime real estate. So yes.

SPEAKER_00 28:54 Um, I want to sort of go to you mentioned this sort of the start of the ice trade and how it, you know, obviously snow and ice was being used, but really a trade emerged thanks to Frederick Tudor, right? He was he became known as the ice king.

SPEAKER_03 29:09 Another legend, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:10 A massive legend. I love the story, the backstory that you give uh of him throughout the book is you know, he he dropped out of school, he decided that he um well he had a few ideas, didn't he? But he decided he was going to pursue this ice thing. Um it didn't go well for a long time.

SPEAKER_02 29:25 Everything wrong. He did everything wrong, it was amazing. I love him.

SPEAKER_00 29:30 Um and eventually I think this was while he was trying to get his ice business going, he was on a trip in the Caribbean, I think, right? Um, and it dawned on him that, you know, if the locals there tasted the refreshing nature of a cool drink, that they would never want to go back again. And you know, this is obviously a place where they don't just get ice and snow. Um, and I never really thought of our love of cooled beverages as being an addiction, but actually it kind of is, isn't it?

SPEAKER_03 29:58 Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting looking at the history of this because at first people are often nervous um or unsure about cooled things and cold drinks. Um, and there's an amazing description of the world's first ice cream headache, um, or at least the first one written about, which is sort of a British naval officer in goes to Sicily where ice cream was common at the time, Britain didn't have it, and you know, puts this gigantic spoonful of ice cream in his mouth. No warning, absolutely loses his mind, starts beating the nearest servant. But once people had tried it, um, they didn't want to go back. You know, once they'd experienced the delight of something cool in summer, a cool drink, ice cream, they loved it. And so there's this letter from um in the 1840s, the middle-aged English woman who visited America. And at the time, I you know, ice was much more common, mainly because there's so much natural ice in the northeastern uh US. And she loved the ice. And and there's this amazing line: whenever you hear America abused, remember the ice. I mean, they we can do some bad things in here in America, but we've got ice. So yeah, people once they tried it, um, it was hard to go back, certainly.

SPEAKER_00 31:19 Yeah, like I I couldn't have a warm can of Coke now.

SPEAKER_03 31:22 Like it just That's just coke is formulated to only taste right if it's cold. I mean, when they first started selling it, the the tagline to they told all the soda fountain guys, you know, it's gotta be cold if it's gonna be sold because it tastes disgusting at room temperature.

SPEAKER_00 31:40 Yeah, that's so interesting. So without refrigeration, there would be no coke.

SPEAKER_03 31:44 Oh no.

SPEAKER_00 31:45 Yeah. I wonder how many um brands we could say that about uh without without refrigeration, their existence wouldn't. That's true.

SPEAKER_03 31:53 Well, the whole of uh you don't have any jelly without cold, so that's all round round trees, jellies, and all that, all gone. Angel Delight. Of course. Nope.

SPEAKER_02 32:04 Yeah, I know that's a big one for a lot of people. Yeah. And I'm showing my age. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:16 Um, I I also want to talk about uh well, this is another legend, um, because he has this incredible story where he uh so this is the story of canning, the history of of canned goods and how it was um first developed thanks to the growth of Napoleon's army in France, right? And the the the guy who invented it, he ended up dying a pauper, if I'm if I'm correct, if I remember correctly.

SPEAKER_03 32:39 Well, he gave away the technology, bless his sweetheart. Um so this is a guy called Nicolas Appear, he's a confectioner. And what happened is Napoleon puts together the largest army the world's ever seen. It's more than a million men. And so traditionally armies had fed off the land. They just eat whatever, you know, they they they march and they eat wherever they are. Um, some hardship for the locals, but it was fine. When you have more than a million men, that's not gonna work. And so Napoleon launches this cash prize in 1795, anyone who can figure out a better way to preserve food to feed his army. And Nicola Appere is a confectioner, he already puts, he stored sugared fruit in glass jars as a sort of delicacy, a treat. And he thought, well, maybe I could do that with savory food too, in glass jars. Would it work? Could I sort of jam them, as it were, you know? And um, so he starts out putting beef stew into champagne bottles and and wine. Well, if you have them lying around, you know.

SPEAKER_00 33:33 Yeah, why not?

SPEAKER_03 33:35 And um and sort of and boiling them and succeeds in inventing canning. Right. He thinks this is such a boon to humanity, I can't sort of sit on this information and so wrote a book explaining exactly how to do it and gave away the technology. His wife at some point left him, I think, probably disgusted at the he did die poor, but sounds like a lovely individual, so poor went out for him.

SPEAKER_00 34:02 It's sad because he, you know, he created something that we're still living with today, and yeah, uh he didn't sort of reap the the the benefits of the city.

SPEAKER_03 34:09 I will say it it didn't become useful until um a British person invented the can opener. So it was handled this food, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:19 How do we open it?

SPEAKER_03 34:20 Yeah, it's exactly a little bit of competition there. It was like it was honestly 30 years later, too.

SPEAKER_01 34:27 So And something so obviously we have confectioner that gave us the gift of canning, but something that you've discussed uh is that uh beer brewers often come up with the most uh innovations for the use of cold. So why do you think that is?

SPEAKER_03 34:44 I love this. It turns out that you know alcohol is responsible for all human progress, essentially, because um this is my master theory, but um you know it the it it's highly plausible that alcohol inspired agriculture in the first place, um and certainly for refrigeration, it was brewing that inspired mechanical refrigeration. The first working refrigeration machines were built for and sold to breweries, one to Truman's in London, one to a brewery in Australia. The brewers were the largest consumers of natural ice. And as sort of, you know, there would be ice famines, it was unreliable. As demand grew, they were like, we can't rely on this. And and that provided the impetus for um entrepreneurs and engineers to develop machines that worked. You know, there's a lot of RD that goes into building this entirely new technology, and it's the brewing industry that pays for that.

SPEAKER_00 35:45 It's really fascinating because uh, in uh an episode coming up in a few weeks, we're gonna be speaking to um a guy about the history of chocolate. So, sort of what came before the modern chocolate bar. That is a fascinating history, and actually, it turns out um that beer brewers are responsible in part for the discovery of chocolate as well. So um, yeah, I think beer and alcohol just has such an incredible uh part to play in everything that we have in modern civilization in some way, shape, or form.

SPEAKER_03 36:18 Innovation comes from motivation, and motivation is is to do with getting hold of some booze, apparently.

SPEAKER_00 36:25 So Exactly, it's as simple as that. We're really not complex as a species.

SPEAKER_01 36:29 Exactly. So obviously it's very different today, but um in the past you said uh that in London most carcasses could only travel about I think it was 80 miles before reaching their destination in the time before fridges. So was that the maximum basically, or was there any scope for that to change pre-fridge life?

SPEAKER_03 36:53 I mean, if you think about it, um we're talking about a time and the the this this it was in the 1850s when a British physician wrote this and said 80 miles is the farthest distance from which carcasses ever came. You were talking about a time before the spread of railways, let alone cars. So think about the speed at which things are moving. It's not far it's not fast. And things would go bad. So you actually had a really constrained um amount of time, which translated to a very constrained distance before that that you could move dead meat, which is why most meat came to cities alive, because it could, you know, and um that extended its shelf life essentially.

SPEAKER_01 37:36 Yeah, it sort of had to walk itself to slaughter, right?

SPEAKER_03 37:39 Exactly. Even an amazingly uh turkeys, they used to sort of herd them along the street, which I can't even imagine. It's sound that again sounds like a joke herding turkeys.

SPEAKER_01 37:51 Yeah, must have been quite sad to see, actually, seeing a line of them all being walked, you know why they're going, right? The marked of death, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:59 Only they don't know. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 38:00 Exactly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:02 What what I mean that's that to me feels quite sad. I mean, we're doing plenty of awful things to animals right now. The abuse of animals is is out of sight is the thing. Out of sight, exactly. Um, but back then, what were some of the sort of disgusting parts of pre-fridge life life? Because I you talk in the book about urban meat slaughter and some of the foul ways that meat was kept as well, don't you?

SPEAKER_03 38:26 Well, yeah, I mean, uh this is the interesting thing. I mean, now we I think we would find uh industrial meat slaughter equally revolting, to be honest, in a lot of ways. We just don't see it. It happens in the middle of nowhere. Um but of course it couldn't happen in the middle of nowhere if you're trying to feed a city. And so you get this, I mean, there's a it and it shows up in the uh most random of places like Dickens, Great Expectations. Pip complains about how disgusting Smithfield Market is. It's all a smear with filth and fat and blood and foam. But if you think if you're slaughtering enough cattle to feed the population of London in the middle of London, in the middle of summer, um, it's just going to be there's no way of gathering all that blood and the fat. The way we m you know monetize those byproducts now, those are just running into the sewers down the street, you know. So it was pretty grim, and I think there was definitely no way at the time you would have not known what it took to get meat onto your plate because you would have smelled it and you would have seen it.

SPEAKER_00 39:30 Well, we were in um were travelling, my wife and I, and we went through some of the markets in Cambodia and we saw some of the uh ways that the chickens had been kept, and I won't go into the gory details here, but um she was put off chicken for quite a while afterwards. It certainly didn't eat it while we were traveling. Um, and so as soon as it's out of sight, it is out of mind, and it's really fascinating to hear that it um it was on the streets in this way, and yet people still were happy for it to be served up on on their plates.

SPEAKER_03 40:00 Well, I mean, you know, there's a sort of certain aspect of it where you know how old it is, because it can't be any older than a certain amount of time because otherwise it would have completely gone rotten. So I think you know, we uh we're used to sort of this nice chilled, you know, plastic wrapped pack on sitting on its little sort of absorbent pad in the supermarket, and that feels safe to us. To someone who is not thinking in a sort of refrigerated way, you're thinking, Well, I know it must be safe because it can't be older than a certain amount of time, otherwise I'd physically be able to see it's it's you know, it's rotting. So there is a there is a weird sort of logic to that, but it is off-putting to uh if you're used to a refrigerated lifestyle, to just see sort of you know, someone gently waving a fan over um, you know, or sort of throwing a bucket of cold water over the slaughtered meat. It's always a bit like really.

SPEAKER_00 40:57 Wow. Um I I love this notion that you mentioned that there was there was a time before the average American diet, which is a whole episode in itself, but you say average Americans um would have eaten corn, oats, milk, and a lot of meat, actually, more meat than we eat today, including uh squirrels. So um yeah, you lovely thought. How uh recently were they eating like this? What you know, when was the diet kind of like that?

SPEAKER_03 41:25 Well, as late as 1800 in the in the US, um in the UK, because the Industrial Revolution came earlier and it's a smaller country, diets nationalized a little more quickly. But but before, you know, before you have railways, before you have refrigeration, you have to eat locally. And so that does mean what's available locally, and it means a very diverse selection of meat. So you're gonna be eating game birds and pigeons and such like, as opposed to it's seasonal, it's local, and and it's not the same as, you know, 300 miles away, but where the resources are completely different. And at the time, you know, cities were still tiny. In 1800, American cities were absolutely miniature. And so that you didn't have this issue of having to move food over long distances, so no one bothered.

SPEAKER_01 42:19 So moving a little further to, I guess, the uh inception of the kind of world that we know today. So uh can you talk to us about what the sort of first fridges looked like, the first invention of the fridge?

SPEAKER_03 42:34 Yeah, so the the scientific principle behind it was demonstrated first in 1755. The Scottish doctor um just sort of worked out you need vacuum pumps, you need to evaporate something that's very volatile. Um, he wrote it up and was like, this is interesting, someone should look into it. No one did. Um, it wasn't until the 1850s that the first commercial units were sold, and they were the size of houses. So they're steam powered. You're not plugging anything into the mains at that at that point in history. So it's a steam engine combined with this vacuum pump sort of evaporating the volatile fuel fluid, which is the refrigerant fluid that's drawing the heat out. Um, and so you've got both of those elements combined. So they are they were gigantic and they yeah, I mean, it looks like someone has glued a s a steam engine onto sort of a uh I don't know, the intestines of a diesel engine or something. It's really it they're they're quite terrifying looking machines.

SPEAKER_01 43:36 And um there was just generally a lot of fear around mechanical refrigeration in the early days, wasn't there? So there's rightly so. Yeah, there was um the death at the Chicago World's Fair showing the first fridge, wasn't there?

SPEAKER_03 43:52 Yeah, this is amazing. So um you get the first commercial machinery being sold in the 1850s, the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. Um, so you'd think, okay, maybe the technologies worked out the kinks. Absolutely not. Um so they had a refrigerated warehouse at the World's Fair. It was known as the greatest refrigerator on earth. It was sort of one of the spectacles in and of itself. You know, the fair also had the world's first Ferris wheel, the first movie theater, all kinds. But this was something that people wanted to come and see too. This is done up like a Venetian palazzo. And what happened was it uh caught light. Sadly, the firefighters climbed up the tall chimney stack and then realized they couldn't get down, and so they were dropping to the roof of the refrigerator warehouse, which was this sticky tar paper, and then they were getting stuck to that and being burned alive. The absolute nightmare. Um, the entire crowd at the World's Fair uh sort of is panicking, you know. So you have tens of thousands of people being held back. Um, the but the cowboys from Buffalo Bill's Wild West show did crowd control. Um, but it was it was a terrifying. Was on the front page of all the newspapers, terrifying. Lots of uh firefighters died, huge tragedy. And it's because you know these things were deadly, and the gases that were used to um act as the refrigerant gases, so there's a volatile liquid that evaporates and draws draws off the heat, they were using ammonia, and ammonia is deadly, still is today. If you uh actually get an ammonia leak, I mean one of the guys who ran a refrigerator warehouse that I work at, worked at said, if you see that, you're seeing death. It um it is it is actually quite deadly still. So in the early days when the machinery was not, you know, uh as as you know refined as today, they really were. The people they would blow up, people would lose eyes, limbs. It was it was uh a risky business.

SPEAKER_01 45:51 It's amazing, really, that we kind of continued with them in that in that case, right?

SPEAKER_03 45:57 Yeah. Oh yeah. That's another interesting thing where it's quite a you know, in the early days, there's it's not immediately that everyone sees the first refrigerators and is like, oh yes, this is what we've been waiting for. There was a lot of fear around them, and not just because of the fact that they were bound to explode, but also because uh people didn't think refrigerated food was safe.

SPEAKER_00 46:22 Yeah, and and people, I guess, got used to things like their ice boxes and their ice houses. You know, they were part of daily life. It was quite um known, it was a known quantity for them. It don't start giving AI advocates ideas um about oh, we think it's dangerous now, but it'd be fine in the future. So I think that's the the concern here that we're going down with the fridge. Um but actually to your point, you mentioned it was it was uh safety and health, which was a cause for concern as well in those early days. So I think you mentioned that gastrointestinal diseases uh were the third biggest killer of the time. Um so why were you know, you think cut uh refrigeration that brings about longer lifespan for the food, which means healthier, right? But why was it that there were health issues with early refrigeration then?

SPEAKER_03 47:08 Yeah, it's it's interesting. And so some of that um gastrointestinal disease, which really was, it was a huge killer. And you you don't think about it today. Some of that was the water. We didn't have water treatment. But some of it was refrigeration, and that's confusing because today we think refrigeration keeps food safe, right? This is what's gonna stop bacteria reproducing. But the problem was when you know these early machines were being built, we didn't know how to use it. We had no idea what temperature to store things at, how long you could store things at. They were very um, you know, rudimentary machines in the sense that they you would get a lot of temperature fluctuation. They would go in and out, they might fail, uh, and yet at the same time, you're using them to transport food over long distances and store it for long amounts of time. So that's a long time for bacteria to reproduce if anything does go wrong, which it did. So at the beginning, because of you know, refrigeration is sort of faulty, it actually turns out to make food less safe. And you get these incredible reports of cheese poisonings, ice cream poisonings, you know, people being it's is headline news. If you search the um newspapers of the era in the 1880s and 1890s, when this early form of refrigeration is starting to be used, you find people terrified and rightly so because they're dying from food poisoning. But it's because refrigeration has not been, you know, is being used, but not being used well enough.

SPEAKER_00 48:38 Yeah, it was almost like um see like used too liberally to like uh the expectation was you could just refrigerate anything no matter for how long and it would be safe, but actually you can't refrigerate a rotten egg and it suddenly turns unrotten. So it's still gonna be rotten.

SPEAKER_03 48:54 It's not magic.

SPEAKER_00 48:56 Exactly. And also you uh you discussed just to sort of add to the list of legends that you discussed was the uh Dr. Pennington and the important role that she played in making cold storage safer, right?

SPEAKER_03 49:10 Yeah, so it's really interesting. I mean, to use your AI analogy, at the start, people were like, oh, this stuff is magic. It can do everything. And it was clear that it absolutely couldn't. And what was needed were some guidelines, some guardrails, some regulation. And this is what Polly Pennington, who is an absolute legend, one of my favorite people in the book, a woman who made her way in this world when absolutely everything was against her. She basically spent her career figuring out okay, what temperature should chicken be stored at? What about eggs? How long can you store them? Um, what happens if it goes out of temperature? How long do you have to bring it back down? How quickly do you have to cool it after you've milked the cow or slaughtered the cattle or whatever? She did huge amounts of research seeing where the problems were. Like she rode trains round the country, uh, taking the temperature and seeing, you know, are these fluctuations dangerous? What do we need to do? Does there need to be more ice? Is the temperature, is the air circulating? She started work in 1907, and a measure of her success is by the 1930s, attitudes in America had flipped from being refrigerated food is dangerous to, well, if it isn't refrigerated, it's not safe. So she single-handedly sort of made that transformation happen by putting in place the regulations to make sure that refrigeration was done safely and uh wasn't putting people's health at risk.

SPEAKER_01 50:40 And could it be argued that sort of cold storage and refrigeration gave rise to the modern city as a as an idea or as the kind of thing that we see today?

SPEAKER_03 50:51 Oh yeah. I mean, you couldn't have a city of um the cities of the sizes we have and feed them without something as effective as refrigeration. I mean, I suppose it doesn't have to actually be a refrigeration. There are other forms of food preservation still being invented today. But without that, you can't feed a city. This is their fundamental sort of crisis, and really it's not a coincidence that refrigeration was invented at a time when London became the first city in the world to get to sort of two million, then three million people, the largest city the world had ever seen, and you run into a crisis. How do you feed it? And so that is that's really a yes, beer is a is the spur, but without that form of preservation, you can't feed a city.

SPEAKER_01 51:36 Yeah, and um fridges also kind of led to the death of uh being a butcher as a as the profession, well, not quite the deaf, but as we used to know them, and obviously the ice trade. So there are any other professions that kind of got the chop as a result of this?

SPEAKER_03 51:52 Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, a lot of professions became very geographically specialized. So previously you would have been able to um, you know, uh raise cattle anywhere where you were near a city. Suddenly, no, you have to um you because you can transport them, you have to go where you can raise them, where it's economically feasible to do it at scale. So it led to a lot of consolidation, uh, certainly. Death of the butcher, as we know it, death of the iceman eventually, once you have a mechanical refrigerator for sure.

SPEAKER_00 52:26 And how fragile is the global coal chain today? Like, how close do we operate to failure? Because we talked about what it would have what would happen if we did lose it, but um, is it quite precarious?

SPEAKER_03 52:39 Yeah, it's a great question. I almost don't want to know the answer. Um I think um, I do think we are very dependent on it. And I think, you know, this sort of panicked call from government officials to the cold chain association saying uh how many refrigerator warehouses are there gives you a sense that yes, uh this is essential. And if for some reason, you know, this is our stockpile, as it were, and and so without that, our food supply is cut off, and I think people would rapidly um go a little mad without, you know, the shelves are empty, you see what happens. So I do actually think that we operate closer to the edge than most people know, and I also think it's really interesting that this is not considered essential infrastructure, and it's not typically government sort of regulated, or it's it's offer operated privately and for profit, and so you don't have a lot of ban extra bandwidth because why would you? That wouldn't make you money.

SPEAKER_01 53:44 So it's it that's capitalism for real. Um but there are consequences of our conquest of the cold. You you say that the harnessing of the cold changed our height uh and the size of animals and the killing off of species, is that right?

SPEAKER_03 54:04 Oh yeah, I mean it's amazing. So I tried to track the impact of, you know, is refrigeration actually a good thing? And it's a hard question to answer. I mean, it's a really important question to answer if you're writing a whole book about it. But you know, what impact has it had on our health? And it's really hard to tease out because so many things happen at the same time. You do get water treatment, you get the uh, you know, the discovery of uh antibiotics and all sorts of things. One thing that one economist teased out at immensely painful, um, you know, immensely painful detail and a lot of scraping together of very obscure numbers is that yes, refrigeration actually added measurable height to the average American and presumably Britain as well, um, because they were eating so much extra protein. And so you can see that translate to a fraction of an inch of growth in height. Now, the context for that is that they had lost height before that due to urbanization and the Industrial Revolution. So they'd been eating better. Then they moved to cities. It's called the antebellum puzzle or something like that, where uh all measures of public health just go absolutely down the toilet, briefly, because people move to cities pre-refrigeration and don't, you know, their health measures and their nutritional standards go down the drain. And then refrigeration helps turn that around. I argue in the book it has a lot of extra costs on top of that, but it certainly did give us a little bit more protein.

SPEAKER_00 55:31 Yeah, well, we haven't been able to go through everything in the book. It is definitely well worth a read or listen to the audiobook, Frostbite. It is incredible. I just want to end on this final note. Um, uh what I really loved about your book is that it made me feel so fortunate and lucky to have been born in this era with all the hard work that was put in by our ancestors to make our lives so unbelievably comfortable now. You know, we live like kings and queens of the past, and I think for that reason alone it does pay to look back at history like this. So, Nicola Twille, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. Thank you very much for joining us on the podcast.

SPEAKER_02 56:07 Thank you so much. It's been delightful.

SPEAKER_00 56:10 A massive thank you to Nikki for joining us on the podcast. This is what we did before. I'm Ollie. And I'm Matt.

SPEAKER_01 56:16 Have you got any ideas for an episode? Please let us know in the comments, and we'll be sure to credit you in the outro if we use your idea.

SPEAKER_00 56:25 And do subscribe if you enjoyed the episode, it helps us out massively. And we will see you next time. See you next time.