It's a book about food preservation.
It's mostly about refrigeration; that's because in recent decades, developed countries concentrated on refrigration, setting aside research into other methods. When refrigeration first came along, consumers didn't really trust it: Who would dare to drink old milk just because it'd been stored in one of those newfangled noisy boxes? Generations later, we have the opposite problem. If someone figures out another way to preserve some kind of food, consumers might not trust that food to stay good if it hasn't been kept cold. It doesn't make sense for a grocery store to sell soy milk from its dairy case—until you consider that a considerable fraction of consumers balk at the idea of room-temperature "milk."
Our refrigeration system is pretty impressive. Reefer trucks haul things between refrigerated warehouses. Specialized workers have learned to get things done in cold storage; but not try to do too much as the cold is bad for bodies, bad for brains, bad for reaction time to avoid crashing. Cold is bad for our defenses against disease; our noses don't defend as well against diseases if those noses are nearly freezing.
The book covers a lot of ground. Some bits that struck me:
A lab where they develop suits for working at extreme temperatures.
In a test chamber with us, suspended from a sturdy metal frame, was a life-size gray manikin wearing a black woolen hat, a navy-blue turtleneck, dad jeans, Velcro sneakers, and a pair of mittens.
"Here's one of our thermal sweating manikins," said [North Carolina State Univeristy Thermal Protection Lab deputy director Shawn] Deaton. "This one has a breathing mechanism, so we call him Darth Vader. The other one is Anakin the Manikin, and of course we have Hand Solo for gloves."
(The book didn't explain the difference between a mannequin and a manikin, so I had to look it up. If it's for displaying fancy clothes, it's a mannequin, spelled like "quinceañera gown." If it's in a lab to measure what happens if, say, clothes are set on fire, it's a manikin, spelled like "kindling.")
The logistics of food transport get weird:
In nonpremium brands, a pint of ice cream is, on average 50 percent air. This leads to all sorts of logistical complications. National brands of ice cream have to use different formulations for different regions to take into account the thinner air at higher elevations. "You can't truck it from Washington to Georgia," Espinoza told me. "The Rockies, he explained, shaking his head.
Why do Americans put so much corn syrup/sugar in everything? Probably partly because we drink so many ice-cold beverages.
At least three of our basic taste receptors—sweet, bitter, and umami, or savory—are extremely temperature sensitive. When food or drinks cool the tongue to below fifty-nine degrees, the channels through which these three taste receptors message the brain seem to close up, and the resulting signal is extremely weak. This is why a warm Coca-Cola or a melted ice cream is so sickly sweet: because they're intended to be consumed cold, they have to contain too much sugar to boost the signal and register in our brains as tasting sweet at all. In 1929, the president of Coca-Cola set up the Fountain Training School to ensure the drink was being prepared and served properly: salesmen were told, "It's gotta be cold if it's gonna be sold."
Those gross Jell-O/whipped cream "salads" may have started out as status signifiers, back when household refrigerators were novel.
Why is it a shame that developed countries went whole-hog for refrigeration, while letting other food-preservation methods languish?
Refrigeration contributes to rising greenhouse gas levels in two main ways. Generating the power to run cooling equipment, whether it be elictricity for warehouses or diesel fuel for trucks, already accounts for more than 8 percent of global electricity usage. (Cold-storage companies are currently the third highest industrial consumers of energy.) Using renewable sources to generate that power would help, but solar-, wind-, geothermal-, and hydro-power generation are growing much too slowly to keep pace with demand. …
The other problem is the refrigerants themselves: the chemicals that are evaporated and condensed by compressors in order to remove heat and thus produce cold. Some of that refrigerant leaks into the atmosphere as a gas—either a little (roughly 2 percent a year from thee most up-to-date domestic refrigeratrs) or a lot (a third, on average, from small delivery trucks). Different refrigeration systems use different refrigerants, some of which, like ammonia, have a negligible global-warming impact. Others like the hydrochlorfluorocarbons and hydrofluorocarbons (HCFCs and HFCs) that are popular in the developing world…are known as super-greenhouse gases because they are thousands of times more warming than CO2.
Before I read this book, I figured the best thing we could do for developing nations was help them set up a cold chain; now I wonder if we should work harder on other ways to preserve food. Pickles are nice. Who doesn't like pickles?
