Alan (the Lone Librarian on semi-hiatus)) Teder’s Reviews > Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves > Status Update
Alan (the Lone Librarian on semi-hiatus)) Teder
is on page 5 of 400
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.
— Mar 08, 2026 03:04PM
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Alan (the Lone Librarian on semi-hiatus))’s Previous Updates
Alan (the Lone Librarian on semi-hiatus)) Teder
is on page 108 of 400
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.
— 16 hours, 53 min ago
Alan (the Lone Librarian on semi-hiatus)) Teder
is on page 107 of 400
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.
— Mar 08, 2026 03:07PM
Alan (the Lone Librarian on semi-hiatus)) Teder
is on page 82 of 400
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.
— Mar 08, 2026 03:06PM
