First they came for our gas-guzzling vehicles and our Caribbean getaways.
Then climate activists wanted us to stop eating hamburgers and ban gas stoves.
The next thing they look like they’re coming for is our refrigerators.
That’s at least what climate researcher Nicola Twilley claims, who says fridges in family kitchens are damaging the environment.
His new book, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves, takes a stand against the plight of the humble home refrigerator.
Author Nicola Twilley says the humble home fridge leads to food hoarding and climate-damaging waste
“You don’t really need to have a tomato in December,” says author Twilley.
It also attacks the “cold chain” storage system that keeps food fresh until it reaches our local supermarket.
“Food waste is often presented as the reason for building a cold chain,” Twilley told Bloomberg.
‘The problem is that in the developed world we waste between 30 and 40 percent of our food in retail and consumer stores.’
Twilley says it’s become too easy to drive to Walmart and load up on food that fills our refrigerators, and often just sits there, forgotten, slowly rotting while we order takeout pizza.
“The abundance that refrigeration has given us has translated into a kind of carelessness, a willingness to waste,” he says.
“Food is so plentiful and so cheap that people prefer to go buy something else.”
As a result, the typical American household has become dependent on its refrigerators.
Twilley found that the average American household refrigerator is opened an average of 107 times a day.
In the United States, total annual food waste amounts to about 170 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
This is equivalent to the annual CO2 emissions of 42 coal-fired power plants.
The cold storage chain also uses refrigerated trucks and cavernous, icy warehouses that strain power grids.
That cold chain preserves nearly three-quarters of the food Americans consume, the book says.
According to Twilley, cold storage companies are currently the third largest industrial consumers of energy.
The energy needed to operate refrigeration equipment currently accounts for more than 8 percent of global electricity consumption.
This means more power plants will emit heat-trapping gases, raising global temperatures and causing more storms, wildfires and droughts, UN scientists warn.
And it’s going to get worse, the show’s host warns. Podcast about gastropods.
The cold storage chain preserves nearly three-quarters of the food Americans consume.
The energy needed to operate refrigeration equipment currently accounts for more than 8 percent of global electricity consumption.
The New York Times Book Review called Twilley’s text “engrossing” and “hard to put down.”
China and large parts of Africa are still building out their cold storage chains, meaning many more megawatts of energy will be consumed in the coming decades.
Twilley calls for big changes in the way Americans eat, shop and store their food.
Refrigerators are great for milk and meat, he says, but there’s no need to keep bread, potatoes or onions cold.
Shoppers should also try to buy fruits and vegetables that are in season and, whenever possible, leave them on the counter so they don’t get forgotten.
Once we put them in that drawer at the back of the fridge, they’re out of sight…and out of mind.
“It’s like I don’t eat apples outside of the fall,” Twilley told the Zero podcast.
‘I have citrus in the spring and berries in the summer, and it’s annoying and unpleasant, but I try not to preach about it, but also everything tastes better.’
She added: “You don’t really need to eat tomatoes in December, they won’t taste like anything anyway, just don’t do it.”
Twilley’s concerns are supported by the Biden administration’s climate policies.
John Kerry, the U.S. special envoy for climate, pledged late last year to cut emissions from refrigerators, air conditioning units and other refrigeration-related products in the battle against man-made global warming.
Kerry had the United States sign on to the Global Cooling Pledge, which commits countries to reducing their cooling-related emissions by at least 68 percent by 2050, compared to 2022 levels.
