{ "item_title" : "Frostbite", "item_author" : [" Nicola Twilley "], "item_description" : "Engrossing...hard to put down. -- The New York Times Book ReviewFrostbite is a perfectly executed cold fusion of science, history, and literary verve . . . as a fellow nonfiction writer, I bow down. This is how it's done. -- Mary Roach, author of Fuzz and Stiff An engaging and far-reaching exploration of refrigeration, tracing its evolution from scientific mystery to globe-spanning infrastructure, and an essential investigation into how it has remade our entire relationship with food--for better and for worse How often do we open the fridge or peer into the freezer with the expectation that we'll find something fresh and ready to eat? It's an everyday act--but just a century ago, eating food that had been refrigerated was cause for both fear and excitement. The introduction of artificial refrigeration overturned millennia of dietary history, launching a new chapter in human nutrition. We could now overcome not just rot, but seasonality and geography. Tomatoes in January? Avocados in Shanghai? All possible. In Frostbite, New Yorker contributor and cohost of the award-winning podcast Gastropod Nicola Twilley takes readers on a tour of the cold chain from farm to fridge, visiting off-the-beaten-path landmarks such as Missouri's subterranean cheese caves, the banana-ripening rooms of New York City, and the vast refrigerated tanks that store the nation's orange juice reserves. Today, nearly three-quarters of everything on the average American plate is processed, shipped, stored, and sold under refrigeration. It's impossible to make sense of our food system without understanding the all-but-invisible network of thermal control that underpins it. Twilley's eye-opening book is the first to reveal the transformative impact refrigeration has had on our health and our guts; our farms, tables, kitchens, and cities; global economics and politics; and even our environment. In the developed world, we've reaped the benefits of refrigeration for more than a century, but the costs are catching up with us. We've eroded our connection to our food and redefined what fresh means. More important, refrigeration is one of the leading contributors to climate change. As the developing world races to build a US-style cold chain, Twilley asks: Can we reduce our dependence on refrigeration? Should we? A deeply researched and reported, original, and entertaining dive into the most important invention in the history of food and drink, Frostbite makes the case for a recalibration of our relationship with the fridge--and how our future might depend on it.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers1.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/0/73/522/328/0735223289_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "30.00", "online_price" : "30.00", "our_price" : "30.00", "club_price" : "30.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "30.00" } }

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When the farm-to-table concept became widely popular 15 years ago, Nicola Twilley “got stuck on the conjunction. What about the to?” Her deeply researched and highly engaging second book, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves, invites the reader on a quest to understand “what happen[s] between the farms and the tables.” Twilley—co-author of Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine, regular contributor to The New Yorker and co-host of the award-winning Gastropod podcast—spent a decade tracing the history and contemplating the future of artificial cold. In Frostbite, she considers how we got where we are today: enjoying whatever food we want when we want it, but with unintended consequences for our health and environment. Twilley notes that “Artificial, or mechanical, cooling . . . wasn’t achieved until the mid-1700s, it wasn’t commercialized until the late 1800s, and it wasn’t domesticated until the 1920s.” Now, the “cold chain” is so ingrained in our way of life that we take it for granted. From hard science to fascinating history, major machinery to quirky theories, Frostbite explores seemingly every aspect of our refrigeration-dependent existence as the author visits banana-ripening rooms in New York City and cheese caves in Missouri; travels to China to learn about its booming pork industry; has coffee in California with “the world’s first and only refrigerator dating expert” and much more. While refrigeration reduced dependence on salt as a preservative, Twilley notes, it reduced consumption of fermented foods and “everyday exposure to microbes,” too, thus increasing gut inflammation. It has also increased food waste, released toxic substances into the environment and altered our connection to the natural world. She contends that “refrigeration was implemented, for the most part, in order to optimize markets rather than human and environmental health.” What’s a concerned refrigerator-user to do? After all, the appliance is “an underappreciated engineering marvel . . . a reliable, relatively simple box that, without fuss or fanfare, harnesses the powers of nature to supernatural effect, performing the daily miracle of delaying matter’s inevitable decomposition and death.” Frostbite, a decidedly interesting and insightful book by an impressively intrepid reporter, offers compelling food for thought about the role of cold in our lives, for better or worse, now and in the future.