Nicola Twilley

“Gustavus Swift achieved fame and fortune by refrigerating—and, in so doing, revolutionizing—the American meat supply. “He was not to change the world’s maps, nor make military history,” his eldest son, Louis, wrote in his biography of his father, The Yankee of the Yards, coauthored with journalist Arthur Van Vlissingen Jr. “Instead, he was the human instrument by which destiny transformed the world’s sources and supplies of an essential class of foodstuffs.” According to his son, Swift wasn’t driven by grand ambition or a desire to benefit mankind. Instead, his motivation sprang from a much less lofty place: a mania for saving money.”
― Nicola Twilley, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves

“Among its provisions were extremely short limits on the duration that meat, fish, eggs, and butter could be stored under refrigeration. The only problem, as Harry Dowie and other representatives of the nation’s fishers and farmers eagerly pointed out in their congressional testimony, was that those limits had no basis in science. Americans were eating plenty of refrigerated beef and chicken, and some were fine while others weren’t, but no one knew why. For much of its first half century, refrigeration had been an engineering problem. Now it was time for the chemists to get involved once again.”
― Nicola Twilley, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves