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In 2012, the Royal Society—the UK's national academy of science— declared refrigeration the most important invention in the history of food and drink. Judged in terms of its impact on a range of criteria, including productivity and health, refrigeration was deemed more significant than the knife, the oven, the plow, and even the millennia of selective breeding that gave us the livestock, fruits, and vegetables we recognize today. It is also a much more recent development: 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.

As the developing world begins to build its own American-style cold chains, the expansion of this manufactured Arctic has accelerated. 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. (The standard domestic fridge, at between twenty and twenty-five cubic feet, is just a tiny closet in the distributed, McMansion-sized pantry it takes to preserve our perishables.) While ecologists and explorers concern themselves with the shrinking natural cryosphere—Earth's frozen poles and permafrost—this alternate, entirely artificial cryosphere is expanding virtually unnoticed, all around us.

My fascination with the cold chain began about fifteen years ago, when the farm-to-table movement was picking up steam in the media. While my fellow food journalists were writing about feedlots and fast food, or locavores and edible schoolyards, I got stuck on the conjunction. What about the to? What happened between the farms and the tables?

Almost immediately, I realized that my humble home fridge was merely the tip of the iceberg. Considered as a connected whole, the cold chain seemed to me as worthy of awe as the Pyramids of Giza—a continuous monument of engineered winter that has remade our entire relationship with food, for better and for worse. Industry insiders clearly had a grip on its geography and mechanics; a handful of historians had traced particular elements of its evolution; scattered scientists were engaged in analyzing its various effects on everything from the flavor of tomatoes to the contents of our gut micro biome; and, more recently, policymakers have begun to worry about its environmental impact. Yet, to my surprise, no one had tried to tie those threads together into a coherent narrative—a story that could help us understand the extraordinary scope and implications of the refrigeration revolution.

As I pored over my copy of the International Association of Refrigerated Warehouses' annual directory of member facilities, I couldn't help but wonder: Where are the Shackleton and Scott of the artificial cryosphere? Why is no one embarking on bold expeditions into its farthest-flung corners, braving its icy wastes, mapping its unexplored contours, meeting its inhabitants, and chronicling its customs? Then I realized that perhaps I should put on some thermal underwear and do it myself. This book is the result.

In the course of my adventures, I have been inside places most of us will never see and met people most of us have never heard of—despite the fact that they stand between us and hunger. As we continue together on the following pages, we'll visit the landmarks of the artificial cryosphere, from the vast caves where Kraft stores America's national cheese reserve to the Arctic vault where the future of farming is safeguarded by refrigeration. We'll tease out cooling's unwritten history, rummaging through untouched archives and tracking down forgotten pioneers. We'll get to know forklift operators, fridge designers, a frozen-dumpling billionaire, and the world's only refrigerator dating expert. Most important, we'll arrive at an understanding of the true stakes of our refrigerated food system.

Of course, humanity's mastery of cold has been turned to many other fascinating uses over the past century, from data centers to medicine, air-conditioning to ice rinks. In this book, I have limited my inquiries to food alone: the means by which refrigeration has created the most radical change in how we live. As the Royal Society said, explaining the reasoning behind its decision, refrigeration has been a blessing, "responsible for bringing a more varied, interesting, nutritious, and more affordable diet to an ever increasing number of people."