Episode description

Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves by Nicola Twilley

Prime Future Newsletter by Janette Barnard

The Great Beef Bonanza and the Fall of the Cattle Kingdom

"Our ancestors learned to control fire before modern humans even evolved. But our ability to command cold at will dates back a 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 and wasn't commercialized until the late 1800s, and it wasn't domesticated until the 1920s."

That is a quote from the book that we're gonna be talking about here today, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves by Nicola Twilley. I'm very excited to dive into this book. There's so much here on the history of refrigeration and we take for granted how much refrigeration has changed our food system and our world in a number of profound ways.

But I'm also excited to not be tackling this massive project by myself. Coming back for another episode is my good friend, animal agtech venture capitalist, and creator of the Prime Future newsletter, Janette Barnard.

Also from Twilley's book: "It's impossible to make sense of our global food system until you understand the mysterious logic of the all-but-invisible network of thermal control that underpins it. We overcame not just rot, but seasonality and geography as well."

Listen as Janette and Tim unpack their takeaways from this incredible book about the history of refrigeration.