How the Miracle of Refrigeration Changed Our Food System – And Chicago's Role in Its Development

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Nicola Twilley will discuss Frostbite in Chicago at The Plant, a repurposed meatpacking facility, on Friday, July 12 at 6:30 pm. 

Before Gustavus Swift, if you ate meat, it practically walked right up to you. The Chicago meatpacking tycoon upended centuries of butchery by developing the refrigerated train car and thus allowing for the bestial growth of Chicago’s stockyards, as Nicola Twilley recounts in her new book Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. (WTTW also told the story of Swift in Chicago Stories: The Union Stockyards.)

“It was Gustavus Swift who really showed that you could use cold to move food at scale,” says Twilley, whose book chronicles the epochal introduction of refrigeration to our food system and its surprising effects on how we eat today. She will discuss the book in Chicago at The Plant, a repurposed meatpacking facility, on Friday, July 12 at 6:30 pm. 

Until the refrigerated train car came into use, livestock was herded to cities, then slaughtered and dressed by local butchers who had to sell the meat before it went bad. By the late nineteenth century, cattle were covering further distances by being shipped from the grasslands of America’s West on trains to Chicago and then to metropolises like New York City – but they were still alive for the journey, which meant they had to be fed along the way before walking to butchers to be slaughtered.

Swift resented the cost of shipping and feeding live cattle only to lose out on the valuable byproducts of their carcasses, which could be sold and transformed into other money makers such as fertilizer, leather, violin strings, pharmaceuticals, and more. So he began slaughtering the livestock in centrally located Chicago, where he could then process “everything but the squeal,” avoid paying middlemen, and ship so-called “dead meat” to cities.

He turned to the developing technology of refrigeration to keep the meat from rotting – and in the process divorced the consumer from the origin of the meat they were eating, thus contributing to a refrigeration-enabled fundamental change in our relationship to food.

The cattle population of the U.S. more than doubled over thirty years in the wake of Swift’s innovation. Thanks to him and other dogged entrepreneurs who wanted to sell their products further and further afield throughout more and more of the year, we can now eat beef that was carved from a cow thousands of miles away; enjoy tropical bananas at our preferred ripeness even in wintry climates; eat lettuce weeks after it was harvested, out of a bag precisely engineered to keep it crisp; and crunch on an apple harvested as much as a year earlier thanks to atmospherically controlled warehouses that enable the fruit’s availability outside its season. And we can eat it all without thinking about how miraculous those feats are.

The vast cold-storage system we have built to transport food around the world has a “philosophical implication,” says Twilley.

“We’re completely disconnected from our food: where it comes from, when it was harvested, what it’s actually like when it’s alive. It abstracts food, and you can see how it does that by turning it into a commodity.”

Grocery stores carry apples that have marketing budgets and brand names, and look and taste consistent no matter where or when you buy it, even though fruit is generally much more fickle in nature.

While we take all of this for granted now, in Swift’s time, people distrusted refrigerated food. “The idea of having meat that had been killed somewhere and, two weeks, three weeks later, you’re eating it, just revolted people,” Twilley says.

In 1911, several decades after Swift debuted his refrigerated train cars, the general public still had to be convinced. So the Poultry, Butter and Egg Association organized the world’s first cold-storage banquet in Chicago’s Hotel Sherman, serving the mayor, health commissioner, a congressman, scientists, and others from across the country a meal consisting entirely of foods that had been refrigerated. The meal received national media coverage. Twilley quotes The Egg Reporter as averring that the guests “had demonstrated to them in a forceful way the fact that cold storage foods are really edible and that one could partake of a cold storage meal and still live.”

It wasn’t just refrigerated food that seemed dangerous – it was also the technology behind it. While early refrigeration such as that on Swift’s train cars was enabled by the use of natural ice harvested from rivers and lakes then stored in insulated buildings, mechanical refrigeration took longer to become viable. Among the attractions at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago was a cold-storage warehouse dubbed the “Greatest Refrigerator on Earth” – but the risk it entailed was so great that it wasn’t insured. Indeed, when it went up in flames, more than a dozen people were killed, many of them firefighters trapped on its chimney.

The technology of mechanical refrigeration eventually improved to be both safe and small enough to cool not just rail cars but also trucks. The latter innovation came courtesy of a remarkable Black racing enthusiast named Fred McKinley Jones – and it led to the demise of the industry that Gustavus Swift’s refrigerated rail cars helped build in Chicago.

“Suddenly, you didn’t have to bring the cattle to one central place with a railway connection to be slaughtered, you could slaughter them out in the middle of nowhere near where they were raised,” says Twilley. Industrial feedlots and meatpacking plants began to appear on the plains of Kansas, Colorado, and Nebraska, overtaking the stockyards in Chicago. Not only could meatpackers save money by slaughtering the cows where they were raised; they also saved on labor costs. Chicago’s stockyard workers had been unionized since the 1930s and thus made more than the non-union rural employees, who are more spread out and are often immigrants.

Swift’s company stopped operating in Chicago in 1959, and the city’s Union Stockyards closed for good in 1971. The new, rural system of meatpacking did indeed cut costs and lead to cheaper prices for the consumer, which allowed Americans to eat more and more meat. Without refrigerated long-haul trucking, Twilley writes, “American farms could never have become as monolithic and productive, nor the contents of American supermarkets so convenient and cheap.”

Refrigeration allowed us to conquer rot, seasonality, and geography. “The American diet became increasingly seasonless, homogenous, and convenience-based, and the shared, home-cooked family meal began its slow decline,” Twilley writes. Nearly three-quarters of what Americans eat today has undergone refrigeration. Almost two-thirds of global produce is consumed in a different country than that in which it was grown.

Refrigeration “enables us,” Twilley says. “I don’t think the things it does are good, but they’re entirely understandable.” While it has enabled many wondrous things – the preservation of food, the spread of local ingredients, a possible improvement in our health, even the existence of leftovers as a category of food – it has also had pernicious effects. Paradoxically, home fridges can encourage more food waste in that we can stock up on a large quantity of ingredients that then languish and eventually go bad. We might be able to eat ingredients from far-flung climes thanks to refrigerated shipping, but such globalization favors produce that can withstand a long journey, crowding out diverse local varieties. Our gut health may be suffering as we eat less fermented foods – a pre-refrigeration mode of preservation. And that’s not even mentioning the environmental and labor impacts of a globalized food system.

“Our food system is frostbitten: it has been injured by its exposure to cold,” Twilley writes. But it doesn’t have to exist in the form it does today, as she points out: “Refrigeration is essential to the food system we have, but a refrigerated food system doesn’t have to look like this.”

After the cold-storage banquet held in Chicago in 1911, the Chicago Inter Ocean bemoaned the dawn of a refrigerated era. “There seems to be only one consolation,” it wrote, as reported by Twilley in her book. “The generation growing up doesn’t know the difference [in taste between refrigerated and non-refrigerated food] and may be happy in its ignorance.”

Our refrigerated food system has enabled ignorance in many ways, which is a large part of why Twilley wrote her book. “That’s an astonishing achievement in and of itself, to build this entire synthetic polar region that our food lives in,” she says. “And then not to know what it looks like? I couldn’t stand it.”