*Nicola Twilley* # Progressive Summary # Definitions # Chapter Notes ## Chapter 1 - Welcome to the Artificial Cryosphere > Our ancestors learned to control fire before modern humans even evolved, but our ability to command cold at will dates back little more than 150 years. Mechanical cooling—refrigeration produced by human artifice, as opposed to the natural chill offered by weather-dependent snow and ice—wasn’t achieved until the mid-1700s, it wasn’t commercialized until the late 1800s, and it wasn’t domesticated until the 1920s. > Today, a century later, nearly three-quarters of everything on the average American plate is processed, packaged, shipped, stored, and/or sold under refrigeration. The United States already boasts an estimated 5.5 billion cubic feet of refrigerated space—a third polar region of sorts. This is an almost unimaginably large volume: the tallest mountain on Earth, Everest, occupies only roughly two-thirds that amount of space from base to peak. > According to the most recent statistics from the Global Cold Chain Alliance, the world’s chilled and frozen warehouse space increased by nearly 20 percent between 2018 and 2020—a leap that still left most of the planet’s citizens provisioned using less than a sixth of the cold-storage capacity required to feed the average American. > For context, the average frozen food warehouse is held between five and twenty degrees below zero, although specialist facilities for storage of particularly delicate foods such as tuna can go as low as minus eighty; the South Pole averages minus seventy-four during its chilliest months; while the mean temperature at the summit of Mount Everest in winter is a comparatively balmy minus thirty-one degrees. > In the cooler, you have to make sure foods containing allergens—soy, nuts, dairy, wheat—aren’t touching; in the freezer, that’s okay. Organic products shouldn’t sit underneath conventional ones; raw foods mustn’t be stacked above cooked. “You have to think about odor,” added Espinoza. “Onions and seafood can be quite potent.” Pizza sauce and pepperoni are also disturbingly pungent: just a few hours spent picking Schwan’s Big Daddy’s Pepperoni and Freschetta Supreme sausage frozen pizzas was enough to make my woolen beanie and furry coat collar stink for days. Like natural fibers, bread and cheese have a tendency to absorb the odors to which they’re exposed, as does ice cream, which can’t even be stored in the same room as the pizzas. > Although the idea that working in the cold would lead to catching cold makes intuitive sense, scientists have only just discovered why. Until recently, the general uptick in respiratory illness in the winter was blamed on the fact that people spend more time indoors together, swapping viruses, in cooler weather. That’s likely a factor, but cold is also directly, not just indirectly, responsible for making us sick, thanks to a previously unknown immune mechanism: cells in our nostrils that are capable of detecting incoming microbes and releasing a swarm of tiny little antiviral bubbles to surround and neutralize them. According to the Boston-based team behind the breakthrough, at forty degrees, nostril cells release significantly fewer and less potent defensive bubbles than they do at seventy-five degrees, making it easier for viruses to stage a successful infection. > RefrigiWear products are also worn by Iditarod dogsled racers, New Mexican molybdenum miners, and the men who built the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, but the company’s core market remains refrigerated-warehouse workers. “We’re just trying to protect people that have to go to work in an environment that allows America to eat at scale,” said Silberman. ## Chapter 2 - The Conquest of Cold # Quotes # References