Cold, very important. For me and for the world.
A book review from UnDark, July 12:
Nicola Twilley’s “Frostbite” explores how refrigeration has shaped everything over time from our guts to economies.
In the corner of most kitchens is a tall box that commands little notice. Yet such casual indifference to the fridge would have been unfathomable a few hundred years ago, when the properties of that chilly carton inspired the most existential of comparisons.
Take the example of René Descartes, who in “Meditations on First Philosophy,” published in 1641, invoked a metaphor for the nature of cold to discuss the existence of God. “If it is true that cold is merely the absence of heat,” he argued, “then an idea that represents cold to me as something real and positive will not inappropriately be called false.” Or consider a headline centuries later in a Buffalo, New York newspaper: “There is no death, only cold storage.”
Death still exists, though one could be forgiven for thinking that the blast of cold that extends the shelf lives of plant matter and animal muscle might also extend our own. (Isn’t that the promise of cryonics?) And “Descartes was right — about cold, if not necessarily God,” as journalist Nicola Twilley recounts in “Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves,” where she also reproduces the declaration from Buffalo. Cold is not a property in itself but merely the absence of heat, and yet the pursuit of this absence has left little untouched at any level.
Twilley takes readers from an ice house in Maine to a bioarchaeology museum in London to the hills of Rwanda. This deeply reported, vividly rendered book lives up to its subtitle and aptly explains why the United Kingdom’s Royal Society called refrigeration the most important invention in the history of food.
She begins the story in the time before this civilization-changing innovation. Dried meat from 12,000 B.C., salted fish from ancient Sumer, cheese, the fermentation that makes possible kimchi — all these rich flavors were byproducts of the desperation to make fresh food last just a little longer. Jump forward to the 1700s, and Scottish doctor William Cullen has created the first contraption for freezing water without ice. Picture two liquid-filled glasses in a vacuum chamber; one holds alcohol and salts that evaporate quickly, cooling the air enough to freeze the water in the other glass. The next century, a cold storage warehouse dubbed the “Greatest Refrigerator on Earth” debuts at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, though that particular building may be best remembered for causing a devastating fire.
“Frostbite” skillfully sketches the history of the refrigeration revolution, introducing us to colorful characters such as the 20th-century scientist Mary Engle Pennington, whose boss had her go by “M.E.,” so that she could get a job studying the challenges of food freshness before anyone discovered she was a woman. The book is stuffed with insights both macro and micro: that being able to keep foods fresh as they traveled the world (along with a change in consumers’ tastes) turned bluefin tuna from a “worthless trash fish” to a prized sushi ingredient. That, at least according to one theory, mechanical cooling quickly let Americans “scrape back” 0.02 inches lost after heights abruptly fell right before the Civil War. (It’s not definitively known what caused this shrinking.) Twilley interviews a portfolio manager who analyzes photos of fridges to figure out “how people would behave once they had some extra money” and consults the world’s only fridge-dating expert, who swears that the contents of the shelves act as a romantic compatibility test....
Cold is not a property in itself but merely the absence of heat, andyet the pursuit of this absence has left little untouched at any level.
....MUCH MORE
As mentioned some years ago:
June 3, 2019
Logistics: Big Money For Warehouses, Looking at Cold Storage.
...This next bit brings back some memories. My second stock to double was a cold storage company, actually a dairy with a cold storage operation that was valued at about one-quarter of comparables. I started chipping away at the float and before I got anywhere near enough stock, the management, who knew full well the value of the operation, did an LBO and took it private at 2x market and ended up generating cash-on-cash returns (for themselves) of around 40% per annum for a decade or so.
Bastards.
That led us into being on the right side of the the whole pandemic need for storage and particularly cold storage. Another example of how just being in the right place at the right time can make this whole investing thing so much easier:
June 6, 2019
"It's About To Become A Hot Market For Cold Storage Facilities"—CBRE
March 30, 2020
"Coronavirus: Panic buying sparks surge in flexible storage demand"
April 27, 2020
The UK Food Situation Is Going to Get Interesting
From Reuters:
World's biggest cold storage supplier could reach full UK capacity in three weeks.....
If interested see also January 2019's "Logistics of Cold"
That essay mentions an apple farmer, Barbara Pratt. She's also Maersk's
director of refrigerated technical services.
Maersk thinks pretty highly of her, giving her a page on the website: THE QUEEN OF COOL.
Unfortunately, when the cybercrooks attacked Maersk it was lost—you now
get a "subdomain takeover" notice so, if interested here she is saved at
the Internet Archive page.
In October 2021 the story was:
Buying Warehouses In Europe and China
It was rather lonely in 2019 when we were pitching warehouses and cold storage facilities but by December 2020 we were posting stuff like:
Real Estate: "Logistics market is hot, but is a bubble forming?"
It's always nice to see a sector you've been babbling about for a couple years finally referred to as a bubble....
Good times.