99% Invisible - 180- Reefer Madness

Episode Date: September 9, 2015

There are around 6,000 cargo vessels out on the ocean right now, carrying 20,000,000 shipping containers, which are delivering most of the products you see around you. And among all the containers are a special subset of temperature-controlled units known … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Cars, house paint, fertilizer, look around you. Pretty much everything was delivered in a shipping container. There are 20 million shipping containers now in the world, carried by 6,000 container vessels, all moving literal tons of stuff back and forth over the ocean. And it all started in 1956 when a trucker by the name of Malcolm McLean had an amazingly good idea. What if there was a container that could come off a ship full of goods and attach to a truck or a train? No need to move the goods from one container to the next. Goodbye to all the time and labor spent loading and unloading.

McLean believed the shipping container could revolutionize the way goods moved around the world. Malcolm McLean became a very, very wealthy man. By 1982, he was actually one of the 400 richest Americans. Because, of course, the shipping container did revolutionize the way goods move. That's reporter Nicola Twilly. New, deeper ports were built for new, deeper ships,

carrying more products. A cargo vessel in the late 1960s needed a crew of 50. A container ship five times the size needed just 18 people. Meanwhile, on shore, roughly three quarters of the hundreds of thousands of dockworkers who were needed to move goods on and off ships ended up losing their jobs. It only took one guy to operate the crane that lifted these big boxes. McLean's idea had created an incredibly more efficient global shipping industry,

but there was still one major problem. Actually, there were a lot of problems, but none as grapes, cheese. The shipping container worked well for dry cargo, like paper and cans and plastics, but perishable products were transported the same way they had been for decades, as bulk cargo in the hold of specially designed

refrigerated ships. And in these refrigerated boats, the one giant cargo space could only be kept at one temperature. And the thing is that different products need different temperatures. Bananas need to be at a higher temperature than apples, and apples need to be kept warmer than, say, frozen meat. So most ships were limited to carrying one thing at a time. United Fruit's fleet of banana boats was perhaps the most famous example of these one item ships. The result of sending massive amounts of produce in one ship like this was that when a ship arrived

in port, it flooded the area with thousands of pounds of a single commodity. So it was like bananas for days and days and days, and then the next week bushels and bushels of apples everywhere. The market was flooded, food was wasted. Plus, while these refrigerated ships were delivering all the produce, the shipping container industry was missing out on a lot of business. However, by the 1970s, the container industry had started to build refrigerated containers, which it is my great pleasure to tell you

are referred to within the industry as reefers. Dude. I know. And with an entirely straight face. But the reefers they had designed weren't working very well. Food would show up at the destination Rotten or Moldy and no one understood why. The container industry had a refer problem and they needed help.

My name is Barbara Pratt. Reefers meet your master. I'm the director of Refer Services for Mersecline today. That's Barbara Pratt and Mersecl is the biggest shipping company in the world. But back in the 1970s, Barbara was just a college kid. And so this professor at Cornell knocked on my door and said, Hey, Barbara, would you like to do some research? Barbara was about to graduate from Cornell with a degree in physics. She'd been planning to go to grad school.

But she agreed to defer for a year or two to work alongside her professor and a team of researchers on a project for general foods. Their mission was to understand what was going wrong with all these shipments. Basically, the whole industry was blind to what was happening in transit. They would place 30 to 40,000 pounds worth of produce into a container, put it on a ship, and then see what happened at destination. It was like, now behind door number one, will the pizzas be rotten or underripe? If only 50% of the produce ended up in good shape, that's what would be consumed and the rest would be thrown in the trash. Barbara and her team decided the only way to see

what was happening to the produce inside the containers was to follow the containers from farm to truck to train to ship. They'd need a lab, but it would have to be a mobile lab, one that can move with the shipments. And so of course, Barbara's research team would build their lab in a shipping container. It's really the only thing that made sense. Whether it was in the various terminals, in the fields, or even on board the ship, to then connect up to the other refrigerated containers that were moving on the ship to monitor what was going on inside the transit. And that's how at 22 years old, Barbara began traveling the world, working and sometimes sleeping in a 40-foot shipping container.

We converted this container to basically a laboratory, a self-sustained laboratory, so that we could repeat our science while we were in transit. They worked with the company in Southern New Jersey that made mobile homes to outfit their ship and container. You know, make it a little cozier. And we would have the front section which had some bunk beds in case we needed to stay overnight. There was a microwave, a shower, and of course a refrigerator. It actually looked pretty cool with black and white checkered floors in a window. A small, bulletproof window, you know, ports are not known for being super safe. But it was fairly pleasant. But at the heart of the mobile research lab was the computer.

And what's really funny about it is we had a computer which was the latest and greatest at the time, but it was about two feet square by three feet square by about eight feet tall, and that basically gave us the computing capability that a laptop has today. Attached to the lab computer were 150 sensors connected to all the other adjacent containers by long, grey, salt-resistant wires. These wires were sending back all kinds of information

about what was happening in the containers. Temperature, humidity levels, air flow, concentrations of different atmospheric gases. Starting in 1978, Barbara, along with a small research crew, went with the mobile research lab to trail produce from its harvest on the farm to its arrival in their destination ports. We were in different countries in the Caribbean, we were in Asia, we were on the US West coast, US East coast, we were over in Europe. So remember, Barb was only going to do this for

like a year or two? What happened basically is I got hooked in the industry and I just stayed there. I hooked in the industry and I just stayed there. She kind of got hooked on reefers. For the next seven years, Barb traveled back and forth across the globe with the shipping container lab. She got the adventure she wanted, but she didn't have much time for sightseeing. We ran our tests and we were conducting our research

in analyzing data as we could during the days. When they were on land, out in the fields and orchards, they'd sleep in hotels. But one person would usually stay behind and sleep in the bunk beds in the lab to keep an eye on the computer. When they were aboard the boat, Barbara would pass the time doing some embroidery.

Safe to say, Barb was the only one embroidering on the cargo ship. She was kind of a rarity, a young 20-something woman on the high seas. I found out about 15 years later that someone senior in the organization had told the people that were around me when I was working, that I had a black belt in karate so that they would know that I could defend myself. But you didn't have any actual martial arts skills. No, I did not at all.

But Barb had plenty of other skills. She and her colleagues were the first to map Airflow in a reefer. And the first to figure out how much produce could be stuffed in before air circulation started to suffer. With frozen oil, you really need to do is keep it cold. With produce, what you need to do, or with most of the produce, it's breathing and respiring product. And so what you need to do in order to preserve its shelf life is to slow down the breathing and respiration that's going on.

Based on their findings, the standard ventilation system of a standard refore unit was completely redesigned. Air used to enter the container from the top. In the improved design, cooler air entered the container from the bottom. And then the air basically got forced up through the cargo, which then allowed it to remove the heat, which is what the whole focus of the air flow was. Their research also influenced the ways the growers would dry, prepare, and pack their products to be shipped. All to ensure that fruits and veggies could last two weeks on the ocean inside of a refrigerated tin can.

In short, the work that Barbara Pratt and her rotating cast of colleagues did during their seven years at sea, led to a world where Peruvian asparagus can reliably be found in American grocery stores. And New Zealand Kiwi Fruit are readily available on British supermarket shelves. So you still work in shipping, you've stayed in shipping ever since you got sucked in. What happens nowadays if you want to figure out what's going on inside of a reaper? You don't have to be on the boat, right? Not necessarily. Today the reaper units are all run by microprocessors, so we can see the digital recordings of those units

internally once they get to their destination. And these high-tech reapers are so reliable and so finally calibrated that they are now taking business away from air cargo, even for extremely fragile products such as fish and flowers. And they're basically affordable today whereas in the past they were not, is because they move via ocean. If they all had to move via air they would be very expensive for all of us. But we can bring in Italian grapes.

We can bring in persimmons. We can bring in other products into this country that are not typically grown here. Even bananas are shipped in containers now. Chiquita, which is a descendant of United Fruit, recently sold off the last of its banana-only ships. And now Merisk is beginning to experiment with controlled ripening en route, inside the reaver, rather than in special facilities at distribution centers.

All hail the reaver, the liverer, a perfectly ripe bananas! The global shipping industry, like it or not, is an undeniable part of modern existence, and of course, it's rife with its own problems. Yes, products are not as fresh after they've been at sea for two weeks, and all this refrigeration is really environmentally inefficient, and it's forcing small farmers to compete in the cut-throat global economy. Reefers seem to embody everything the local food movement is fighting, and you'd think that it would be Barb versus the local farmers.

I grew up and actually I'm still farming the same family farm, and we grow a variety of different products, mostly fruits and vegetables. Barbara is no stranger to the realities of running a small farm today, but she likes that small farmers can have an opportunity to access a global market. Barb is well aware of the value of eating local. But she defends the importance of just eating more fruits and vegetables.

Yes, it's important to eat local, but in January and February, there are no local fruits and vegetables that we can eat. What has happened over the years is that people are eating more fruits and vegetables in general, because they have access to more products and higher quality products year round. It's thanks in part to Barb's research that we can eat blueberries or tomatoes whenever we feel like which bar bar Use will make us eat them more and it's all because of reefer That's never not gonna be funny to me I would just care to. What people read for the refus? Yeah, man. Meena Chessha,

Taylor, Taylor, Lightly. Oh, have you ever met that funny dream for me? This man! Have you ever met that funny dream for me? This man! If he says it walks the ocean and in time he takes notes and does talk to you, people may may. 99% Invisible West Produced This Week by Nikola Twilly and Avery Trouffleman, with Sam Green's

fan Katie Mingle and me Roman Mars. Our new digital director is Kurt Colstapp. Nikola has her own excellent podcast about food and the history and science of food. It's called Gastropod. You can get it at www.gastropod.com. 99% of us will celebrate our five year anniversary this week. Which is really hard to believe. Thank you for listening and telling people about the show that's the only marketing we've

ever had and supporting us so that we can remain independent and growing from year to year. Your dedication to this program has really meant the world to me. We are a project of 91.7 KALW, San Francisco, and produced of the offices of Oxide, an architecture in interiors firm, in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find this show and like the show on Facebook, we're all on Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and Spotify, and you can download every episode of 99% of visible at 99pi.org. Radio Tapio. From PRX.