Status Updates From Frostbite: How Refrigeratio...

In aggregate, livestock make up 62 percent of all mammals on Earth; humans, at 34 percent, account for most of the rest. Everything else—dogs, cats, deer, rabbits, whales, elephants, bats, and even rats—only adds up to the remaining 4 percent.

For millennia, humanity had controlled only half the equation—a power that alone was enough to change the course of human evolution. Within our first century of domesticating cold, we not only rearranged meat production and consumption, with effects extending from Irish independence to Amazonian deforestation, but also altered the composition of Earth’s biomass beyond recognition.

It’s worth remembering that all of these far-reaching and often unexpected consequences of refrigerating meat were spurred in part by a nutritional fallacy: the mistaken conclusion that protein from flesh foods was the only essential nutrient. If chemists had come down in favor of grains and beans instead, the world might have looked very different.

refrigeration was deemed more significant than the knife, the oven, the plow, and even the millennia of selective breeding that gave us the livestock, fruits, and vegetables we recognize today. It is also a much more recent development: our ancestors learned to control fire before modern humans even evolved, but our ability to command cold at will dates back little more than 150 years.

On a mission to finish the non fiction books I paused reading when the holds ran out lol