“The Price of Cold” — the story of my recent adventures exploring China’s artificial cryosphere — is now online in The New York Times Magazine. In it, I visit the world’s first and only frozen dumpling billionaire, hang out with the chef leading a one-man refrigeration resistance movement, and visit refrigerated warehouses and R&D labs […]
Category Archives: Artificial Cryosphere
Harvesting Winter
IMAGE: A block of Thompson Lake Ice, hauled onto the surface with tongs. All photographs by Nicola Twilley. In 1805, a twenty-three year-old Bostonian called Frederic Tudor launched a new industry: the international frozen-water trade. Over the next fifty years, he and the men he worked with developed specialised ice harvesting tools, a global network […]
Perishable: An Exhibition
A couple of years (!) ago, I mentioned that I would be working with the Center for Land Use Interpretation on an exhibition exploring the U.S. cold chain. I’m delighted to announce that the result of that collaboration, Perishable: An Exploration of the Refrigerated Landscape of America, is now on display at CLUI’s Los Angeles […]
L’Ego au Frigo
IMAGE: Marie – Paris – France, from the In Your Fridge series by Stéphanie de Rougé. Photographer Stéphanie de Rougé wanted to shoot a series of intimate portraits of New Yorkers framed by their most personal context. She started by taking photographs of her subjects in their bedrooms, but found that, because New Yorkers rent, […]
Defrost Prior to Construction
When it was built in Chicago’s meatpacking district at the start of the 1920s, Fulton Market Cold Storage Company was touted as “an example of the very highest development in cold storage warehouse design.” IMAGE: Fulton Market Cold Storage Company advertisement from 1921, featured in California Fruit News, Volume 64, Issue 1722. At the time, […]
Cold Cabinet
IMAGE: LA Cold Storage, photograph by Nicola Twilley. As dedicated Edible Geography readers will know, for the past couple of years I have been a part-time explorer of the artificial cryosphere — the enormous coldscape of refrigerated warehouses, tank farms, banana-ripening rooms, reefer trucks, and home appliances that are tied together across America in a (relatively) […]
Princely Packets of Golden Health
A confession: the title of this post is lifted directly from an irresistibly enthusiastic history of butter packaging [PDF], prepared by one Milton E. Parker in 1948, for the Packaging Machinery Division of the Lynch Corporation, which I stumbled across while trying to find out how the EU butter molehill is stored. Parker is an […]
Spaces of Banana Control
When Paul Rosenblatt answers the phone, he says “Bananas!” IMAGE: All photos from our visit to the Banana Distributors of New York were taken by me, unless otherwise noted. Rosenblatt ships a million boxes of bananas every year from the Banana Distributors of New York facility on Drake Street, in the Hunt’s Point section of […]
Industrial Lava, Cattle Cinematography, and the Supermarket to the World
The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), for those of you who are not yet familiar with its delights, is “dedicated to the increase and diffusion of information about how the world’s lands are apportioned, utilised and perceived.” It is also one of the treasures of Los Angeles (or Culver City, to be precise), and the enjoyment with which I recently read its Winter 2011 Lay of the Land newsletter prompted me to spend to spent a happy evening revisiting old issues and rediscovering several food-related gems.
The Anti-Fridge
IMAGE: Owner of Defunct Amusement Park | Alpine, TX | 1-Person Household | Former WW II Prisoner of War | 2007. From You Are What You Eat by Mark Menjivar, “a series of portraits made by examining the interiors of refrigerators in homes across the United States.” Found via GOOD, where you can see many […]