From KCRW, I'm Evan Klyman, and you're listening to Good Food.

The United States is the world leader still in refrigeration, if nothing else.

And it's funny because it's not all joined up, so we never think of it at the scale that it really is.

But yeah, it's an enormous artificial winter. It just happens to sort of be

scattered around logistics parks and, you know, ports around the country.

It is tradition on good food to compile our favorite segments of the year in our final

episode before the new year. And the one segment that made all of our lists was Nicola Twilli

talking about what most would think is pretty mundane, refrigeration. But in her book,

Frostbite, how refrigeration changed our food, our planet, and ourselves, the author, New Yorker

contributor and co-host of Gastropod plunges us into the

cold chain and shows us how keeping things frosty has changed the way we eat. We kicked off

our conversation talking about what she calls the artificial cryosphere. Yeah, the natural

cryosphere, of course, is the poles and the glaciers, the world's naturally

cold spaces.

So the artificial cryosphere has its wonders, too.

Fewer explorers, but equal numbers of wonders.

And so I went to see some of them.

There are, for example, in the Ozark region,

huge underground former mines that are now refrigerated warehouses. So I visited one in Missouri

where, I mean, it's vast. That's where craft stores most of its cheese. You know, there are cheese caves in Europe.

That's how we get Roke 4 and Grie-Air. Well, there are cheese caves in the U.S. too.

And they're just, they're refrigerated warehouses in former limestone mines that are filled with craft cheese.

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