THE BIRTH OF COOL

Artificial refrigeration is arguably the single most significant infrastructure of modern-day human existence. It informs, organizes, and even dictates our behaviors, and it has formidably changed human behavior since its inception.

Readers of Nicola Twilley’s THE BIRTH OF COOL will take a mind-expanding trip through this vast artificial cryosphere and discoverthe keys of its transformative power: how, for example, our ability to keep and transport refrigerated foods from anywhere in the world has unshackled our diets from any constraint of season or geography; how food has rapidly transformed from precious sustenance to globalized commodity, a reinvention of one of humankind’s most fundamental activities; and why the maxim that “fresh is best” now goes as incontrovertible dogma, despite the complexity in the very notion of “fresh.” The artificial cryosphere is also a permanent fixture of our existence and, with time, will only grow exponentially more consequential. But the unfettered expansion of this coldscape must now make way for greater awareness and shrewder consideration of the consequences. We must become the architects of our future cryosphere, not only in the United States but around the globe. A mix of journalism, history and anecdote, THE BIRTH OF COOL will appeal to fans of Michael Pollan (Nicola’s mentor), Mark Kurlansky, Eric Schlosser, Anthony Bourdain, and Mary Roach – and we’re discovering that it’s sparking surprisingly lively conversations too! Nicola Twilley is a contributing writer at The New Yorker, the co-founder of Gastropod (a popular, award-winning podcast that looks at food through the lens of history and science), and the founder and author of Edible Geography (a long-running blog about food, landscape, space, and culture). With her husband, Geoff Manaugh, she is co-author of The Coming Quarantine, a book of narrative nonfiction about medical quarantine to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Twilley was selected by Michael Pollan as one of the six inaugural UC Berkeley-11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellows. Her fellowship story on China’s refrigeration boom was published by The New York Times Magazine.