Ever been to Italy? The food is ------- amazing. Know why? Everything is fresh. If it's out of season, you don't eat it. Refrigeration is one of the worst thing that happened to food.

Tomatoes. I rest my case.

#8

Well, seems like we've identified the ignoramus. Buddy, it's you.

Before you buy orange juice, it's probably been stored for up to two years in a two-story stainless steel tank containing 265,000 gallons of a viscous brown paste. It's still orange juice, but with the water and volatile flavor molecules removed. The result is a simple syrup that's six times sweeter than the original juice and has none of the orange's fruity, floral freshness.

Bananas? They may not be refrigerated in the supermarket, but they're the quintessential refrigerated fruit. Only thanks to what Nicola Twilley calls "a continuous network of thermal control" have they managed to become a global commodity rather than a luxury. And that bag of salad you picked up for dinner? It's not just a plastic bag, but, as Twilley explains in his new book Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves , "a technologically engineered respiratory apparatus designed with layers of semipermeable films to slow the metabolism of spinach, arugula, and endive and extend their shelf life."

Three-quarters of everything in the average American diet, she explains, passes through the cold chain"a network of warehouses, shipping containers, trucks, refrigerated display cases, and home refrigerators that keep meat, milk, and other products chilled during their journey from farm to plate. As consumers, we place great trust in terms like "fresh" and "natural," but artificial refrigeration has created a blind spot, Twilley says. We've become so efficient at preserving (and storing) food that, as she writes, "we know more about how to extend the shelf life of an apple than we do about a human being," and most of us never think about this extraordinary process.

But it's not all good: Refrigeration is a major contributor to global warming and ozone depletion, so much so that Project Drawdown, a climate solutions nonprofit, points to refrigerant management as the single most important action we can take to mitigate climate change.

"What we eat, how our food tastes, where it is grown, and how it affects both our health and the planet: these issues shape our daily lives and our survival as a species," Twilley writes, "and all of them have been completely transformed by artificially produced cold."