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CHAPTER ONE

My first day at Americold's warehouse in Ontario, California, began promptly at 8:00 a.m. Outside, it promised to become the kind of blue-skied, seventy-degree March day that makes greater Los Angeles feel like the paradise it plays on TV. Inside, Anthony Espinoza, the facility's general manager, warned me it was just three degrees in the coolers and between thirty-six and thirty-eight degrees on the dock. "It's minus ten in the freezer," he added, radiating good cheer. "That's the tundra."[*1]

My expedition into the artificial cryosphere—the vast synthetic winter we've built to preserve our food—began here, with a week of shift work in the refrigerated warehouses of Southern California. Americold is one of the largest providers of temperature-controlled warehouse space, not only in the United States but around the world. Globally, the company maintains 1.5 billion cubic feet of cold, storing everything from ground beef destined for school lunch programs to frozen lobsters on their way to upscale restaurant chains like McCormick & Schmick's. In Ontario, most of the 100,000-square-foot warehouse is given over to Danone products: pallet after pallet of Horizon chocolate milk, Land O'Lakes creamer, Silk soy milk, and Greek yogurt, much of which comes from a plant just forty-five minutes away. "They focus on creating food," explained Espinoza. "We focus on making sure it gets to their customers intact."

Espinoza and his warehouse manager, Kyle Schwedes, had already welcomed two new recruits the day before. "I told them it's very cold, it's very physical, it's very demanding," said Schwedes. He and Espinoza look for a few essential attributes in warehouse candidates. Interpersonal skills and attention to detail are important, but experience driving a stand-up reach forklift is nonnegotiable.

The other essential test is, of course, how the would-be warehouse worker reacts to the frigid temperatures. "I love the cold," said Espinoza. "It preserves me! All our guys have a youthful appearance." (Much to his delight, I had guessed his age as a full decade younger than he actually is.) Still, a lot of people are just not cut out for a career spent inside a gigantic fridge. Later, once I was out on the floor myself, a shift supervisor named Amato took me under his wing. He told me he'd seen dozens of new recruits leave after only a couple of hours in the chiller. "They take off their coats at lunchtime, and poof! They're gone," he said. "It's the rare person that lasts here."

*  *  *

It's the rare person who steps inside a refrigerated warehouse in the first place. Over the course of nearly two decades spent reporting on food for national and international newspapers and magazines, as well as for my own podcast, I've been lucky enough to visit all sorts of unusual, behind-the-scenes locations, from farms and factories to sourdough libraries, experimental orchards, and military labs. Still, until I began writing this book, I had never so much as peeked inside anything larger than a walk-in fridge. You probably have not either.

The refrigerated warehouse is the missing middle in food's journey from farm to table: a black box whose mysterious internal workings allow perishable food to conquer the constraints of both time and space. Even those chefs who are proud to know the life story of each steak they serve, or the foodies who insist on meeting the farmer who raised the meat they eat, would never dream of inquiring as to its storage history—or imagine that beef carcasses have to be electrocuted in order to withstand the rigors of refrigeration without toughening up. Similarly, you may be familiar with the full range of lettuce varietals in the bag of supermarket spring mix sitting in your crisper drawer, but I'd be willing to bet you have no idea that the bag itself is a highly engineered respiratory apparatus, designed in layers of differentially semipermeable films to slow spinach, arugula, and endive metabolism and extend their shelf lives. I certainly didn't.

The cold chain—as the network of warehouses, shipping containers, trucks, display cases, and domestic fridges that keep meat, milk, and more chilled on their journeys from farm to fork is technically known—has become such an essential part of our food system that it is taken for granted. Its extent and operations are opaque even to our elected leaders. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, as supermarket shelves emptied, one industry expert told me that he received a frantic call from a senior official in the British government, asking how many refrigerated trucks and warehouses the country's food supply depended on.

This inadvertent blind spot is a big—and dangerous—mistake. As I've discovered while traveling the world to research this 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. What we eat, what it tastes like, where it's grown, and how it affects both our health and that of our planet: these things shape our daily lives as well as our continued existence as a species, and they've been entirely transformed by manufactured cold.