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This effect seems to hold true throughout the natural world: speed, agility, and mental acuity are directly correlated, via metabolic rates, with body temperature. Colder almost always means slower and dumber. One recent study showed that warm-blooded marine predators such as seals and whales tend to cluster in the coolest parts of the ocean, not because they find the chill congenial but rather because, under those conditions, their piscine prey is "slow, stupid, and cold"—and thus easier to catch.

Even when one is not being hunted by killer whales, cold-induced lapses can be deadly, as depicted in what might be the refrigerated warehouse's most high-profile literary appearance. A chapter of Tom Wolfe's 1998 novel,  A Man in Full, is devoted to the struggles of the young Conrad Hensley as he stoically heaves beef shanks, frozen into eighty-pound bricks, during a night shift in Croker Global Foods' freezer unit, in Richmond, California. In his first few months on the job, Hensley has already seen colleagues felled. One "had wrenched his back doing practically nothing, and now he couldn't walk," he recalls before heading in for his shift. "Last week one of the Okies, Junior Frye, had had his ankle crushed by a pallet sliding across a patch of ice." That night, after a few hours in the "frigid gray dusk" of what Hensley has dubbed "the Suicidal Freezer Unit," a colleague turns his jack too fast, spins out of control on the frosty floor, and nearly kills them both.

In one of the training videos, an Americold associate named Jason Carter related his own cautionary tale—a "fifteen-second mess-up" that led to seven and a half hours in the trauma unit. It was the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, and he had loaded one pallet too many on his forklift. "I caught a bar, hit the back of my head, and knocked into my computer screen," he explained. "I broke thirty-seven different bones and both eye sockets—my kids were real tore up by it."

Espinoza told me that both safety and morale had improved dramatically in recent years. A sign near the entrance proclaimed the facility had gone 1,045 days without incident. "Still, it's a tough environment," he said. "It's not all blue skies and roses."

*  *  *

Once I was deemed ready to start my first shift at Americold, I was introduced to my buddy, an old-timer named Jimmy Ambrosi. Together we went through one final safety check and some warm-up stretches. Then I followed him into room 1, fumbling my way through the curtain of heavy-gauge vinyl strips that separate the docking zone from the coolers. "Welcome to Disneyland," Ambrosi yelled as I gazed up into a series of narrow slot canyons whose walls were made of Stonyfield Farm, Dannon Light + Fit, COCOYO nondairy, and Oikos Greek yogurts. "Just under seven thousand pallet positions and we're ninety-five percent full. I'm going to guess there's a hundred million dollars' worth of product in here right now," he calculated. At the supermarket, it's normal to encounter more yogurt than I would eat in a year. This was more yogurt than I could eat in a lifetime: thousands upon thousands of cartons, all packed into chunky cardboard cubes on wooden pallets, each cube swathed in plastic wrap and stacked on steel racking, reaching three stories up to the ceiling's girder skeleton and receding into the distance as far as the eye could see.

Lighting uses energy and emits heat, so a perpetual blue-gray gloom prevailed inside the windowless cooler and freezer rooms. Pools of deeper blue light traveled along the icy concrete floor, projected from the LED spotlights mounted on each forklift truck, in order to forewarn others of its emergence from the canyon depths. Each time a forklift reversed, a chorus of beeps pierced the unending roar of enormous fans. Everything seemed dimmed and muffled—even the air felt dense.[*2]

It also smelled funny: a distinctive, slightly metallic base note that I grew to recognize as the underlying smell of the artificial cryosphere. Everyone who works in cold storage knows it, even if they struggle to describe it. "There's no way to explain it to someone who hasn't been in there for an eight-hour shift," one industry veteran told me. "It just smells kind of weird." "It's a pleasant odor—or at least it isn't nasty," said Adam Feiges, who grew up in his family's cold-storage business before selling it to Americold. "It's cardboard, wood, foam insulation, oil, and what I always just think of as the smell of cold."

At Americold, new hires are assigned to stocking—moving freshly delivered perishables into the cooler or freezer—and picking, or getting them out again, for their first ninety days, so that's where I began. The racks store pallets three deep and six high, and product has to go out in the date order it came in. The Ontario facility typically receives 120 truckloads a day, and because it runs more or less at capacity, putting new pallets away often means shuffling old pallets around first, as if at a valet car park. Ambrosi's headset told us what to pick up and where it should go, and we used a scanner gun to log each pallet's final destination.

"The system we have isn't that smart," said Ambrosi. "It doesn't tell you what order to pick the pallet for maximum efficiency or to balance the weight load and compression." After a while, he promised me, I'd get the hang of it. "You have to marry up your tiers and heights," he explained, referring to the vertical and horizontal layout of the boxes we were stacking on each pallet. "It's all individual judgment, but there's different patterns we can use."