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But as the developing world undergoes the transformation that the United States underwent during the twentieth century, it is time to make a full accounting of the cold chain's costs, as well as its benefits. Refrigeration has changed our height, our health, and our family dynamics; it has reshaped our kitchens, ports, and cities; and it has reconfigured global economics and politics. It spawned Tupperware and the TV dinner, it served as midwife to the shopping trolley and the hoodie, and it sounded the death knell for several species. Most urgent, mechanical cooling makes a growing and significant contribution to global warming, based on the power required to run it as well as the super-greenhouse gases that circulate within many cooling systems. With unfortunate irony, the spread of the artificial cryosphere turns out to be one of the leading culprits in the disappearance of its natural counterpart.

To its earliest pioneers, control of cold endowed humankind with godlike powers over the otherwise immutable forces of decay and loss, unlocking limitless abundance by removing the constraints of distance and the cycles of seasonality. Today, our dietary dependence on refrigeration is almost complete—and human control over nature has never seemed less sustainable. Cooking may have made us human but, to misquote Paul Theroux's utopian protagonist in The Mosquito Coast, is ice really civilization? What would happen to our dinner plates, our cities, and our environment if we cast off its frosty fetters?

First of all, though, what actually goes on inside the (usually white) boxes that house the artificial cryosphere?

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Before I was allowed anywhere near Americold's refrigerated warehouse floor, I had two hours of safety training to complete. Warehouse work is already one of the most dangerous jobs in the United States, and many of those risks can be traced back to the forklift. These little cubes on wheels look like oversize bumper cars with two silver prongs attached, but they are surprisingly tricky to operate. Tweaking the angle of the fork so that the truck doesn't tip over when reaching for a heavy pallet load depends on experience and intuition. Steering is done using two levers, both of which are incredibly sensitive; on one of them, the controls are also inverted, so that a left turn will take you to the right. "If you want some horror, watch YouTube forklift accidents," said Anthony Espinoza. "If you crash into the racking hard enough to knock it over, you get a domino effect and the entire roof will come down."

In addition to the standard forklift-driving and pallet-unloading accidents, the cold-storage environment presents dozens of additional risks. In a frozen warehouse, the floor glitters with ice crystals, leading to slips and falls. The ammonia used in the refrigeration system is deadly. A few years earlier, Espinoza told me, he'd experienced a chemical leak when a pipe was accidentally ruptured by an out-of-control forklift. Within three minutes, the entire dock was filled with a white cloud. "When you see that, you're seeing death," he said. "Ammonia wants moisture—it wants your eyeballs and your crevices."

The biggest challenge, however, comes from the very same quality that makes refrigeration so powerful: cold's ability to slow everything down. The microbes and enzymes that would normally be spoiling the yogurt and curdling the milk become sluggish in the chilled air, but so do the humans charged with loading and unloading those dairy products. Even computers cease to function in the deep freeze, so companies like Honeywell produce a special range of barcode sensors and laptops equipped with internal heaters and screen defrosters. At minus twenty and below, tape doesn't stick properly, rubber becomes brittle, cardboard is stiffer—and all those minor obstacles seem more like insurmountable challenges to a cold-slowed brain.

A medical mnemonic describes the effects of excessive cold on the human body as the "umbles": the underdressed or overexposed individual starts to grumble, mumble, fumble, and stumble. "Cold stupid" is mountaineering slang for the way that thought processes congeal after spending too long at a low temperature. As early as 1895, the cold-storage industry's first trade journal, Ice and Refrigeration, pointed out that "extreme cold, as is well known, exerts a benumbing influence upon the mental faculties." By way of example, the author referred to an account of the retreat of Napoleon and his troops from Moscow, during which a doctor noted that, at five degrees, "many of the soldiers were found to have forgotten the names of the most ordinary things about them." For context, the average frozen food warehouse is held between five and twenty degrees below zero, although specialist facilities for storage of particularly delicate foods such as tuna can go as low as minus eighty; the South Pole averages minus seventy-four during its chilliest months; while the mean temperature at the summit of Mount Everest in winter is a comparatively balmy minus thirty-one degrees.

As polar explorers and mountaineers know all too well, long before amnesia sets in—let alone hypothermia or frostbite—human performance slips when the mercury drops. The energy needed for fast and focused exertion is siphoned off to help maintain body heat. Espinoza told me that engineers at Americold HQ carefully calculate work plans to take that lowered productivity into account. The persistent background discomfort of being cold—numb fingers and toes, runny noses, and teary eyes—is distracting. Cold also inhibits peripheral vision, reaction times, and coordination, a phenomenon researchers blame in part on slowed neural connectivity but mostly on the fact that, when the brain is focused on bodily discomfort, it can't really concentrate on anything else. Compared side by side, employees in a refrigerated warehouse will move and think more slowly, and are more likely to punch the wrong buttons on their forklift trucks and touch screens, than their counterparts in a dry-goods facility.