In Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves (Penguin Press, 2024), journalist Nicola Twilley, AM’01, traces how the development of a “cold chain”—in Twilley’s words, “the network of warehouses, shipping containers, trucks, display cases, and domestic fridges that keep meat, milk, and more chilled on their journeys from farm to fork”—has changed how and what we eat. This interview has been edited and condensed.

How did you first come to write about food?

I tried a lot of different things after leaving UChicago. My husband, Geoff Manaugh, AM’01, who I met at UChicago, was writing about architecture and had really built a niche for himself. I looked at him and was like, “Huh! This is interesting. The way to build an audience and a voice and a platform is to find a beat.” I’ve always loved food, and it’s a great lens to write about all sorts of other things, but with focus and productive constraint. It also turns out to be our most intimate relationship with the planet other than breathing.

What made you want to write about refrigeration?

I got the idea when farm to table was the hottest new trend, which shows you how long ago it was. Writers like Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser had written these amazing books taking us behind the scenes of the “farm” aspect of “farm to table.” But I just got hung up on the “to.” How does the food get from the farm to the table? And then I realized, there’s this entire network. It’s a distributed, permanent winter that we’ve built for our food to live in. What would it be like to see it as a whole?

Hands-on reporting is a hallmark of your work. Why is that approach important to you?

I could tell you it’s because it’s good journalism, because you see perspectives that you would never get any other way. Those things are true. By working in a refrigerated warehouse, I had a much more visceral relationship to cold and an entirely different perspective on the labor of this aspect of our food system. I knew cold enables us to have stockpiles of food, but when you see it all in a refrigerated warehouse, you have an entirely different understanding of what it means to have a year’s worth of frozen pizza. But really, it’s because I want to do it. I’m a genuine sucker for a novel experience.

Did you have a favorite place that you visited in reporting for Frostbite?

I really loved the subterranean refrigerated warehouse Springfield Underground in Missouri. A lot of the Ozark region, because it’s all caves and limestone, has been mined out and turned into cold storage. But you have these enormous pockets of cold underneath the middle of the country that can’t be defrosted because the ground will collapse around them. Springfield Underground has been the subject of a documentary about whether it's the headquarters of the Illuminati. But no, really, it’s just where Kraft stores most of its cheese, which I also like, because, you know, cheese and caves go way back. And it’s great that American cheese has a cave too.

Do you have a favorite protagonist in the history of refrigeration?

Polly Pennington. What a badass. I mean, she is the mother of refrigeration. As a woman, she couldn’t be hired by the civil service, so she went by Dr. M. E. Pennington, and no one realized. She just blasted through all the obstacles. She is the person who made refrigeration safe, and she made Americans trust refrigeration. And she succeeded to the extent that the attitude became, if it’s not refrigerated, it’s not fresh and not safe. But she was also really clear-eyed. Only half the job was done. Refrigeration, yes, it could keep food safe, but it wasn’t making food any better. She said that at the end of her life, but we left the job half finished.

The US cold chain is extensive. But how much is this an American story?

A lot of the early work on refrigeration was done in the United Kingdom, because the UK, as really the first industrialized country in the world, had this enormous population and no way of feeding itself without regular shipments of imported food. The United States is the first and most refrigerated country in the world, but the impact of that is a global phenomenon. Now, as much of the rest of the world builds a cold chain, will the same transitions play out? In China right now, for example, food waste is shifting from between the farm and the market to the consumer end. What people eat is changing and vegetables are being bred to be shipped rather than for their local resilience or deliciousness. You can see all that happen in real time.

How did you balance the benefits of refrigeration against its negative impacts?

A friend of mine was reading the book and he was like, “So are you against refrigeration?” No. Where I ended up was, it seems really foolish to have become dependent on a technology and not have done a full accounting of its costs as well as its benefits. Why would we do that? We routinely think about the technologies we’ve adopted and their costs, as well as their benefits, and yet refrigeration has somehow been given this free pass. Let’s just have that conversation about refrigeration. And then we can have a conversation about how we mitigate those downsides.

You write about a number of efforts to improve refrigeration, or maybe to get away from it altogether. What are you most excited about?

One example that I focus on in the book is a coating called Apeel. With this coating you don’t have to limit yourself to the varieties of fruit and vegetable that are bred to tolerate refrigeration and shipping. Suddenly those delicious tropical fruits that we never get to eat, or the apples that don’t do well in cold storage, you can preserve them too. It transforms biodiversity, it transforms what can be grown where. Because it’s a cheaper product—you don’t need the infrastructure of refrigeration, you can just spray this white powder onto your produce—it has different impacts on the scale at which you have to grow things to make them into a globally tradable commodity. Whether or not that’s what’s going to revolutionize our food system, I don’t know.

One of the things I didn’t do in the book, and I am sad about this, is describe the resistance that Apeel has since faced. I thought it was going to be people saying, “I don’t want chemicals on my food.” But it’s not actually that. It’s people being upset that their food will last longer. They don’t want to eat a six-week-old cucumber. And I was like, “Oh, hello, people! Let me introduce you to how old your cucumber actually is already.” That speaks to something that I had not fully registered when I was writing the book, which is, in making itself so invisible, the cold chain has really elided how old our food is, and that’s been intentional.

How has your personal relationship to refrigeration changed since you began working on this book?

I used to be less viscerally aware that when you have produce in your fridge, it is losing nutrients. The idea that you want to have it there in case is very hard to resist, because it feels convenient to have things on hand. This is also to do with where you live. I live in a super walkable part of a city with abundant opportunities for me to pick up food, so why stockpile? Your fridge encourages that way of thinking, and I don’t think it’s a good way of thinking. It leads to food waste, it leads to the food you’re eating not being as delicious and as rich in nutrients as it could be, and it leads to the kind of cities where you don’t walk and pick up things on a daily basis. So it has definitely made me more conscious about what I’m supporting when I do a weekly shop and fill my fridge, and what I’m supporting when I am a little more flexible. All of that is said with a huge grain of salt. People are busy, and people have very limited time to cook and shop, and people need to do what works for them, but it is something that I have really tried to shift a little in myself.

What do you hope that readers take away from this book?

First of all, I just hope they enjoy it. But what I want people to actually take away is a sense of, first of all, how recent this transformation is, and second of all, that it is not a fixed reality. I want a sense of the redesignability of it. We have to rethink our relationship with refrigeration to have a harvest in the future. And I want people to be excited about that, because it could be better. Refrigeration has been implemented in pursuit of profit and safety. It hasn’t been implemented in pursuit of deliciousness or sustainability or equality or advancing opportunity. I hope people take away a sense of optimism from it, because oftentimes you can read books about our food system and think, “This is such a mess! I guess I can only eat tomatoes I grow myself now.”

This is not a scolding book. We have built this system, and we should take a look and think to ourselves, these parts are not ideal, and then redesign them.