Refrigeration Is Changing the World in a ‘Global Cold Rush’

It’s a mid-July morning in the Bronx, just outside the sprawling Hunts Point Produce Market, which keeps millions of New Yorkers in fresh fruit and vegetables. Early sunlight radiates around the warehouses and trucks, while a few fallen oranges lost in the predawn rush slowly bake on the roadway. It’s going to be another hot day in another excessively hot year. But I’ve come here to visit one of the final links in an almost unbroken chain of perpetual cold.

Nicola Twilley is like the Ernest Shackleton of the planet’s artificial cryosphere. She views engineered cold space as akin to a third polar region consisting of climate-controlled warehouses, refrigerated shipping containers and trucks, chilled air cargo cases for prized sushi-grade tuna and, of course, our home appliances. Twilley, a Los Angeles-based food journalist, spent a dozen years exploring the farthest reaches of this globalized network, making her perhaps the only outsider to travel so extensively through the ­refrigeration-industrial complex.