Lately I’ve been in a rabbit hole exploring the topic of infrastructure. While there, I found my way to Nicola Twilley’s Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves.
I had naively assumed that fresh fruit year-round was a product of improved transportation and logistics. It has much more to do with the complex network of organizations, technology, and hard-won knowledge that constitutes the “cold chain.” Turn out that “fresh” has become a very slippery term. Twilley systematically unpacks that complexity as she walks through the history of this segment of modern infrastructure. For one example, consider the banana, which Twilley tells us has become the “most popular fruit in the world” She goes on
What enabled this transformation? Steamships, trains, exploitative plantation culture, and even CIA machinations—but most of all refrigeration. Bananas are harvested while green and hard; this phase of their existence, preripening, is known to fruit physiologists as the banana’s “green life,” and extending it through thermal and atmospheric regulation is the secret to the fruit’s commercial success. This story—the transformation of a perishable exotic fruit into a high-volume, mass-market, standardized commodity—is emblematic of an entire century’s worth of unceasing efforts, creative experimentation, expensive failures, and increasingly sophisticated solutions that lie behind the standard supermarket produce aisle and its seasonless abundance.
Bananas, apples, orange juice, chicken, and beef all have stories to be told. Stories that most of us are content to remain ignorant of.
This book has stuck with me for reasons I continue to sort out. For one, it reminds me that what seems simple can mask deep complexity. My fascination with infrastructure in general lies at the intersection of its invisibility and its centrality.
Frostbite offers an extended case study of how knowledge accretes, accumulates, and drives complex systems. All while being largely ignored by those who benefit.