Is it possible that we have had refrigerated food for only one hundred years? It is hard to picture anything else! In Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves, Nicola Twilley traces the development of a global refrigeration system that allows us to enjoy an abundance and variety of food year-round regardless of season.
Twilley teaches us about the cold chain – how food is super cooled within a couple of hours of harvest, or production, and stays at a precise temperature, with a precise mix of gases, until it is displayed on the grocery shelf. Those soft fluffy rolls that were baked this morning? Think again – they’ve been in the freezer for months. Those juicy kiwi and avocados? In the refrigerator equally long. When they travel, it is on a refrigerated truck, boat, or train in a series of highly mechanized and controlled steps. This is business as big as it comes.
An early chapter details the work of the invisible people whose jobs, all day long, are in those warehouses where temperatures are near freezing or below zero, moving and storing pallets of tater tots and pot pies for dinner.
After giving the history of cold storage, starting with cut blocks of river ice, and ending with state-of-the-art home refrigerators, Twilley asks if it is worth it. Is our food as good as we think? Or have taste, variety, and nutritive value been lost more than we realize? What about the environmental cost of creating a permanent freeze system at the expense of melting the natural one?
This book had one interesting fact after another. I used sticky notes to mark them and finished with a rainbow of forty or so. Here are just a couple:
“There are approximately 22.7 billion broiler chickens on earth at any given moment compared with just half a billion house sparrows or a quarter of a billion pigeons…a combined mass (of chickens) that exceeds that of all other birds on Earth.” (There’s a follow-up discussion about chicken bones.)
“Many of the most peculiar recipes of the 1920s…peanut butter salad (green peppers, celery, whipped cream, and pb) are best understood as status signifiers…they demonstrated refrigerator ownership.” (I actually found this recipe online in an old pamphlet distributed by Kelvinator.)
Twilley’s book would be of interest to anyone who eats, shops in a grocery store, or owns a refrigerator.
How is it that people make money by posting on social media? Who pays them? If you have ever wondered, then Extremely Online by Taylor Lorenz is the book for you. She documents the history of influencers and creators and takes us through the various systems that have been tried to enable people to earn a living online. The one-word answer is advertising.
First the person must establish herself online and amass hundreds of thousands of followers. How? Have you watched any cat videos lately? It is incredible to me what people will post and what others will watch. Once a certain threshold is reached, advertising becomes a possibility. People are paid to incorporate ads into their videos. If you are ready to make your fortune, Lorenz will tell you what you are up against.
For many, being able to create a popular video (film their pets, bake a cake, play a prank) and get paid is a dream job. Is it any wonder young people would rather do that than get up at five to serve McSandwiches? “Google has enabled millions to earn a living…build a business…sell merchandise.”
People feel a sense of validation for their lifestyle choices and a connection with others when they get clicks and followers. They are noticed. Lorenz lastly wonders if people have become more interested in taking pictures of themselves doing things than doing the actual thing itself. This is an informative provocative book about a new world that has been created in our lifetime.
Then there is Elizabeth Strout and her totally different presentation of transparency in life and personal relationships. Quietly, one on one, she tells a slowly evolving story. We become entranced with her ordinary characters and the unfolding of their non-ordinary lives.
In Tell Me Everything, a book about connections, she brings together two of her most famous characters, Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton, who become friends. Lucy visits Olive in her retirement home and they tell each other stories about the people who have touched their lives.
There are two plots. Lucy, and Bob Burgess (also found in her previous books), both married to others, have a close friendship that may – or may not – develop into something more. Second, Bob, a criminal lawyer in his previous life, has agreed to represent a man accused of murdering his mother. These two plots move the story forward but are only the backdrop for the main event.
Lucy wants to know what life is about. What is the point? What is the point of our individual stories? It is a hard answer to discover when the truth about ourselves, never mind others, is so well hidden. And our feelings are complicated. Even the people we love most can be so annoying.
Strout’s characters, who have become our friends, experience the common but not trivial things of everyday life: love, friendship, work, aging, death. Traumas from the past resurface in feelings of sorrow and rage, but sometimes there are different memories of warmth and joy.
I like Frank Bruni’s description of himself in his New York Times opinion column from October 10. “I’m a childless dog laddie.”
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