One book, read slowly on the kindle:
Frostbite: how Refrigeration changed our food, our planet, and outselves, by Nicola Twilley.
This is narrative nonfiction, a history of refrigeration from the earliest uses of ice to preserve food, through to the present. The narrative is held together by the author's explorations, including taking a job in a refrigerated warehouse, and talking to a lot of different people, mostly but not only in the US and Britain.
The discussion of the cold chain includes patterns of where things were built, including how the locations of warehouses affected where stores were built, and vice versa, and the effects of refrigerated railroad cars. There's a bunch in here I hadn't known. For example, chilling meat can tenderize it. And, in the late 19th century scientists thought that protein was not just a nutrient, but the only part of food that mattered, which is part of why transporting meat to the urban working class seemed important, and maybe part of the explanation for the disdain for vegetarians in the why early 20th century.
The last chapter of the book discusses other ways of preserving food, including a company that has developed an invisibly thin, flavorless film that can be sprayed onto food to preserve it. "Changed our food" doesn't just mean what foods are available when, though that's a lot of it, but things like why iceberg lettuce is called that, and was so common in mid-20th-century America, and the tendency to find the same kinds of apples in any supermarket, regardless of region or season. I learned from that chapter that the Roxbury russet is the oldest American apple varietal; the author mentions it as an example of something that the reader has probably never tasted, but not only do I seek out interesting apple cultivars, I live near Roxbury.
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