Outside/In10 Sep 2025

The cold truth about refrigeration

In the early 1900s, people didn’t trust refrigerated food. Fruits and vegetables, cuts of meat… these things are supposed to decay, right? As Nicola Twilley writes, “What kind of unnatural technology could deliver a two-year old chicken carcass that still looked as though it was slaughtered yesterday?” But just a few decades later, Americans have done a full one-eighty. Livestock can be slaughtered thousands of miles away, and taste just as good (or better) by the time it hits your plate. Apples can be stored for over a year without any noticeable change. A network called the “cold-chain” criss-crosses the country, and at home our refrigerators are fooling us into thinking we waste less food than we actually do. Today, refrigeration has reshaped what we eat, how we cook it, and even warped our very definition of what is and isn’t “fresh.” Featuring Nicola Twilley. For full credits and transcript, visit outsideinradio.org. SUPPORT Outside/In is made possible with listener support. Click here to become a sustaining member of Outside/In. Follow Outside/In on Instagram or join our private discussion group on Facebook. LINKS You can find Nicola’s new book “Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet and Ourselves,” at your local bookstore or online. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(404)

If climate change were a choose-your-own-adventure story

Dean Russell had just wrapped several reporting projects on climate change, mental health, and COVID. “My world was just so serious,” he said. That’s when his boss approached Dean with an idea. What i...

12 Aug 32min

The Willy Wonka factory of product testing

Producer Felix Poon goes on a field trip to the headquarters of Consumer Reports, where they test snow blowers on wet sawdust, drop bicycle helmets on anvils, and cover space heaters in towels to see ...

5 Aug 32min

Fiasco al fresco

At the height of summer, when so many of us are grabbing picnic blankets, hitting the beach, and embracing an al fresco lifestyle, a tale of two outdoor events gone spectacularly wrong. Featuring An...

29 Jul 31min

Night Owls

For over ten years, biologist Mark Higley has been stalking the forests of the Hoopa Valley Reservation with a shotgun. His mission? To save the endangered northern spotted owl. How? By shooting the m...

22 Jul 31min

The sunscreen episode

As consumers, we’re looking for a lot in our sunscreen. Not only do we want it to protect us from sunburns and skin cancer, we also want it to be invisible, lightweight, waterproof, nontoxic, shelf-st...

15 Jul 32min

How far would you go for a crow?

To the American birder, spotting the Tamaulipas Crow is potentially a once-in-a-lifetime event. The crow's range is mostly in Mexico and extends ever so slightly into Texas, specifically in and around...

8 Jul 35min

The problem with pickleball

Pickleball is the fastest growing sport in America. It may also be the most hated. Tennis and basketball players are complaining about losing court space because of an “invasion” of pickleballers. Res...

1 Jul 32min

You’ve got scorpion

A listener recently asked, “Has the entire surface of earth at some point or another been covered in poop?” Turns out, there are some questions that even we can’t answer. In this installment of our ...

24 Jun 31min