Today, Explained - Is your refrigerator running?

Episode Date: July 29, 2024

Fridges are our go-to way of storing food, but they’re not good for the planet or even good for a lot of our food. Gastropod’s Nicola Twilley, author of a new book on refrigeration, says there are chiller options for our cold storage challenges. This episode was produced by Peter Balonon-Rosen, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Miles Bryan, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

99.5% of Americans have a refrigerator, but we can't agree on what goes in it. It took me having roommates to actually figure out what goes in the fridge, apparently, because I've been doing it wrong my whole life. Let me show you the things I thought go in the fridge. Starting with bread, and I mean all bread. Muffins, bagels, regular loaf of bread, all of it goes in the fridge. Never put potatoes in the fridge. It'll turn the starch into sugar. So place them somewhere cool and dry and in a very dark spot.

Scallions. Butter. It's one of the few dairy products that doesn't need to be refrigerated. Canned pasta. Anything with pasta. Coffee. It's likely to pick up other fridge flavors, so keep it in a sealed container in the pantry. Peanut butter. She's wrong about the coffee, but that's my opinion and that's the point.

Who is the expert here? Coming up on Today Explained, an actual fridge expert gives us a chill history of the one appliance we can't live without and tells us why we all may be using it incorrectly. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. Today, today explained.

I'm Nicola Twilley. I am co-host of Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. And I am the author of Frostbite, How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. Okay, so this is going to sound, this is, it's not going to sound like a basic question. It is a very basic question. What is the point of the refrigerator? Just to provide a low-level hum for the background of your life. No, the point of the refrigerator is to preserve food. One of humanity's longest and most sustained struggles is to keep our food good and stop the bacteria and the fungi that want to eat it before we can. For fruit and vegetables,

when you harvest fruit and vegetables, they're still alive. It's still breathing. It's still metabolizing. It only has a certain number of breaths left before it dies, like us. And so the trick is, if you can get it to breathe more slowly, then you can extend its life. And so that is literally what is happening in your refrigerator. And so that's what it's doing. It's slowing time. It's literally a time machine. For meat and dairy and things like that, what it's doing is slowing down how fast the bacteria and fungi are metabolizing. And so they reproduce more slowly. And so again, your milk stays good longer.

Okay, so based on this, Nikki, it sounds like everything we eat should be refrigerated. I recently became fixated on this Instagram account where this man tells you what should be in the fridge and what shouldn't. And it is shocking. It is shocking to me. There are things I have always put in the fridge, and he's like, no, put them in a paper bag. What, from your point of view, belongs in the fridge and what doesn't? Oh, this is America's most controversial question. You might think we're split on politics.

No, nothing. We get along, actually, compared to the views on what should be in the refrigerator. I've had a Google alert on fridge and refrigerator for more than a decade now, and I can report that the internet, apart from being cat videos, is basically people piling on to each other about what they do put in the fridge and what they don't put in the fridge. And is my boyfriend a psychopath because he does put ketchup in the fridge? Onwards like that. Never put these fruits in the refrigerator. Otherwise, you wouldn't even know how you die. Hot sauce. There's plenty of vinegar and salt that you don't need to

refrigerate it. I set foot in this area with a certain sense of trepidation. But here's the deal. For some things, your fridge is not best. The classic is stone fruit or tomatoes or things like that. If you put them under 50 degrees for a length of time, you literally disable the genetic machinery inside the fruit, inside the tomato, that can produce flavor. So that is a terrible idea. Scientists call the fridge the stone fruit killing zone.

Because it is... Scientists? Don't put your stone fruit in the fridge. Don't put your tomatoes in the fridge. They will be tasting worse in the fridge. The other thing about the fridge is the kind of cold in there is dry. And so bread, for example, yes, you're slowing down how quickly the molds and the bacteria are metabolizing, but you're also drying that bread out. It will go stale. The things people get worried about, like, oh, should I put my ketchup in my fridge or should I not? Listen, ketchup was originally invented as a way to make first small fish and then tomatoes last for longer. So it doesn't need to be refrigerated. But if you're the kind of person who eats ketchup once a year, put it in the fridge and just don't tell people because they'll get upset. You, in the course of your reporting, you spoke to people

who are looking for ways to not use a refrigerator, but to get the same results that a refrigerator gives you. Who are these people? And what are their ideas? You know, human history has been this history of sort of advances in food preservation technology. Then when we got the fridge, we sort of just downed tools and were like, great, problem solved. And actually, some people didn't. Some people said, well, this doesn't have to be the only way we preserve food.

There are other ways to keep food good. And one person that I came across is a guy called James Rogers. He's based in California in Santa Barbara. And he has gone the coatings route. Every plant on the planet has a protective barrier on the outside of it. So we take that material and we recycle it back into a barrier that we apply back to the surface of the produce. And that allows the fruit to slow down the rate that it ages by a factor of two, three, or four times. So basically, one of the ways you can slow down how fast your produce is breathing

is not just cold, but you can actually tweak the atmosphere. So if you give them very, very low levels of oxygen, the oxygen in the atmosphere normally is about 21%. If you take that down to 0.5%, 1%, then again, you slow down the breathing. It has the exact same effect. If you do that at the level of each individual fruit item by putting on a coating that keeps that perfect little atmosphere inside the bell pepper or inside the lime or lemon or cucumber,

then you are basically keeping the perfect atmosphere for the fruit or vegetable to just breathe really slowly, to metabolize really slowly, and to burn through less of its internal nutrients and resources. The great thing is it's made from food waste. It's made from food. The skins from tomato canneries and the leftover stuff from when you're making guacamole and things like that. It's not some weird chemical coating. It just happens to, using physics, assemble in the right way to make this barrier membrane that lets only a certain amount of oxygen in. I love when people come up with new things, especially when they're cool and they're useful. But I wonder about the practicality of this. I have a fridge. I don't have to spray anything on my fruits and vegetables in order to at least keep them relatively healthy.

Do you envision this being something that is in widespread use at any point? I do, and in fact, it is. This gets sprayed on at the packing house. The cucumbers come off the vine, they go get washed and cooled, and you spray this on. It's not something you have to have in your home, and it is already being used at scale. You can go to Walmart right now and buy produce that has been sprayed with this. Why is this something that people are looking into?

What, I mean, we do have fridges. You're saying there are better ways though, Noelle, and I get that, but in order for this to make any sense, it's gotta be profitable and it has to like fill some gaps in the market or solve some big problem. What are the big problems? Yeah, so refrigeration has been good enough for a long time, right?

I'm saying it's not perfect, right? It's actually bad for peaches. It removes the flavor. This is why your grocery store tomato tastes of nothing. But listen, we can live with that. We have lived with that. We do live with that. But now we are facing a much bigger problem. We have

woken up to the fact that refrigeration is a huge contributor to climate change. And it does that in two ways. One, there's the energy required for cooling. You cannot move all this heat around out of something without putting it somewhere else and using a lot of energy to do that. And here's the thing, Noel, like we have a cold chain, we have refrigerated warehouses and trucks and grocery stores. Much of the world is building that right now. Now residents of Lamu at the Canyon Coast have for decades depended mainly on two industries for their livelihood, tourism and fishing as a county government we've taken this opportunity to try and tap into the areas that before were non-existent

like cold chain storage which is very very critical for fisheries places like sub-saharan africa much of southeast asia india they don't have this. And they are looking to build it right now. And if they build it right now, that will be such a huge increase in power required to run it that one expert said to me, listen, if we build a U.S.-style coal chain for the entire world, there won't be a harvest to put in it because climate change will have made sure of that.

And that's just the power. The other big piece with refrigeration and climate change is the chemicals we use to create cold. They're called refrigerants. Many of them are what are called super greenhouse gases. So they have many thousands of times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide. So that is terrible. And that is why Project Drawdown, which was this group funded to sort of look at all the things we could do to mitigate climate change and which gave us the biggest bang for the buck, they ended up with refrigerant management as number one on their list.

And we were so disappointed. We wanted something really sexy, and it was refrigerant management. Oh, no. It's like refrigerant management. But it's true. It's, you know, 7, 8, 9,000 times more powerful than CO2 is the gases in our air conditioners and refrigerators.

And they're just big. Let me ask you briefly. A lot of electrical appliances have gotten more energy efficient as the years have gone on. We've seen real advances. Any advances in refrigeration that make that prediction maybe not as dire as we might assume? Yeah, all the time people are working on more sustainable technologies, better refrigerants. Unfortunately, the new generation of these refrigerating chemicals is harder to work with, more flammable, explosive, toxic, dangerous,

just less global warming potential. So the replacement is not easy, nor is it necessarily popular. People are working on making the actual process of refrigeration more efficient. There are people working on different ways of producing cooling. So you can use certain materials, produce a cooling effect if you use magnets. Magnets, how do they work? Einstein came up with a design for a new fridge at one point. No one can make it work. Apparently howls like a jackal every time you switch it on.

I know. one can make it work. Apparently howls like a jackal every time you switch it on. He was brilliant, but not at everything. And there's the Department of Defense briefly worked on a cooling device that was powered by acoustics, by sound waves. None of these are at commercial scale right now. That's not to say they couldn't get there if we put the money in. People are working on more sustainable cooling methods for sure. Nicola Twilley, she said, sustainable. Coming up, will a fight over fridges be the next dumb culture war? If we all work together, we can make it so. Support for today explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket.

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This Giving Tuesday, you can support the ACLU. With your help, they can stop the extreme Project 2025 agenda. Join the ACLU at aclu.org today. This is Today Explained. We're back with Nicola Twilley. She's co-host of Gastropod and author of Frostbite, How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. So Nicola, you said 100 years ago, most Americans didn't have refrigerators. Today, basically all of us do. If we want to tell the story of how the fridge took over, where do we start? We start with a high school dropout in Boston. His name was Frederick Tudor.

His family was relatively wealthy. They had an ice house on their estate. You would have your, you know, servants harvest blocks of ice from a local freshwater pond or lake, and you would stow it in an ice house where it would survive until summer. And then you could have ice cream, and you could have wine slushies and you could have chilled drinks. And it was this very elite, decadent, luxurious thing. Yes. And so Frederick drops out of school.

He's tasked by his father with taking his brother, who had tuberculosis, to Cuba for a little bit of sun, R&R, hopefully it would make him better. And these two New Englanders go to Cuba, and they are so hot and so uncomfortable. They're like, imagine if only we had some of our chilled ice house cool drinks right now. And then Frederick thinks, you know what? Cubans would love this. They would kill for this. And so he comes up with his latest get-rich-quick scheme,

and he comes home and he says, I am soon going to have more money than I know what to do with. It is a whole saga because super relatable guy, he hasn't thought anything through. He hasn't thought about the fact that when he gets to Cuba, everyone's just going to look at this stuff that is melting and be like, you want money for this? He hasn't he hasn't counted on the fact that there isn't a natural appetite for cold. Most people take their first drink of an icy drink and someone are like, what? What is this? Notebooks, which still exist.

He has one page that just has the word anxiety in block caps repeatedly. It's a struggle, but he eventually figures it out. He figures out the practical side of things, how you store ice, how you harvest it most efficiently. And then he also figures out the business side of things. And it eventually works. And the ice business takes off to the extent that he becomes the ice king. Millions of imitators get in on this. North America's freshwater and cold winters is suddenly seen as like the equivalent of Saudi

oil. It's like this great natural resource. American ice is shipped around the world and people start to realize you could use it to, I don't know, keep your fish cool. You could use it if you're a farmer, if you're bringing butter or cheese milk to market. And with this huge amount of ice, people suddenly start to realize, oh, if we could keep our food cold, this is actually a very useful way to preserve food. We should get on it. And that is what inspired, eventually,

engineers to figure out how to make cold. All right, so how do we get from Frederick Tudor to a fridge in every home? Various engineers take chemicals that evaporate very fast to create mechanical cold. And this is amazing to me. It's really recent. It's 1850s where we get the first machine that's capable commercially of producing ice artificially. There was this sense that, what is this new technology? Previously, if you had seen a chicken that looked, you know, fresh, well, then you knew it had to have been slaughtered less than 48 hours ago and really within an 80-mile radius, because that was the only way it could have got to you. Now you have this technology where a chicken can be slaughtered

six months ago, a year ago, and then stored in the cold. And that's freaky. People are genuinely afraid of it. How do they know it's fresh? How do they know it's good? All the old certainties have been disrupted and they had no way of telling what was truly fresh anymore. And so what ultimately changes people's expectations about what makes something fresh? The federal government hired a woman called Polly Pennington. Mary Engle Pennington was her full name, and she made refrigeration scientific. She did the research both in the lab and traveling around the country on the refrigerated rail cars, sampling the chickens and figuring out where things were going wrong.

She did the research to say, here's how you store a chicken safely. And she, by making refrigeration scientific and doing the research to say, this is how you keep food safe, by the end of her life, she gave a speech just before the Second World War at MIT, and she was like, when I started, Americans didn't think food was fresh if it had been refrigerated. Things have changed so much that now they think food isn't fresh if it hasn't been refrigerated. That's the 180 flip that she managed to do.

Let me move us more into the present day. Recently in the U.S., there's been a push against gas stoves. And depending on what your politics were, you may have gone a little bit wild during that fight. Is there the same kind of culture war-themed conversation happening around refrigerators? Unfortunately, there is. This was shocking to me, but sadly true in the world we live in.

Just the other week, the House Republicans passed a bill called the Refrigerator Freedom Act. No. The Refrigerator Freedom Act will protect American consumers from unaffordable and unrealistic standards from the Department of Energy. It's called the Refrigerator Freedom Act because what you are free to do is pollute. Remember I mentioned these refrigerants, the chemicals that we use to create cold that are the things that make sort of the machinery work and how polluting they are.

Well, the Biden administration had introduced legislation to just phase out the most polluting. You were still allowed a refrigerants that had 700 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide. You just weren't allowed the ones that were like over a thousand times more polluting than carbon dioxide.

And so that was the bill. It was introduced. My bill, the Refrigerator Freedom Act, prohibits the Department of Energy from enforcing unrealistic energy standards for refrigerators that are not energy inefficient. The House Republicans responded with this Refrigerator Freedom Act, which passed. It's not going to pass the Senate, but it is a sign of just like how politicized this has become. So what do you think the future of refrigeration is?

Well, it depends on whether you catch me in an optimistic mood or not. What I would like and why I wrote this book is I think, listen, refrigeration, we invented it. It has many benefits. It has brought us a lot of great things. A cold beer is a beautiful thing. But that doesn't mean it isn't without costs. And having implemented it and just accepted it into our lives in this way, we have never really accurately assessed the costs. And now there's this big wake up around climate and, you know, the developing world building their own refrigeration

systems. My argument is, let's have a step back here let's say what has refrigerating our food system done to our food system do we like it does our food taste better have more nutrients is the are there environmental costs that are unacceptable if so can we do something about them? This is the history of humanity, is figuring out ways to store our food better. Let's turn our brains to this again and do it with an idea of some of the downsides of refrigerbite, host of Gastropod. Peter Bellinan-Rosen produced today's episode and Matthew Collette edited it. Laura Bullard and Miles Bryan fact-checked.

Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristen's daughter are our engineers. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. you