|
Showing 1 - 4 of
4 matches in All Departments
Quarantine has shaped our world, yet it remains both feared and misunderstood. It is our most powerful response to uncertainty, but it operates through an assumption of guilt: in quarantine, we are considered infectious until proven safe. An unusually poetic metaphor for moral and mythic ills, quarantine means waiting to see if something hidden inside of us will be revealed.
Until Proven Safe tracks the history and future of quarantine around the globe, chasing the story of emergency isolation through time and space – from the crumbling lazarettos of the Mediterranean to the hallways of the CDC, to the corporate giants hoping to disrupt the widespread quarantine imposed by Covid-19 before the next pandemic hits through surveillance and algorithmic prediction.
Yet quarantine is more than just a medical tool: Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley drop deep into the Earth to tour a nuclear-waste isolation facility beneath the New Mexican desert, strip down to nothing but protective Tyvek suits to see plants stricken with a disease that threatens the world’s wheat supply, and meet NASA’s Planetary Protection Officer tasked with saving the Earth from extraterrestrial infections.
The result is part travelogue, part intellectual history – a book as compelling as it is definitive, and one that could not be more urgent or timely.
An engaging and far-reaching exploration of refrigeration, tracing its
evolution from scientific mystery to globe-spanning infrastructure, and
an essential investigation into how it has remade our entire
relationship with food—for better and for worse
How often do we open the fridge or peer into the freezer with the
expectation that we’ll find something fresh and ready to eat? It’s an
everyday act—but just a century ago, eating food that had been
refrigerated was cause for both fear and excitement. The introduction
of artificial refrigeration overturned millennia of dietary history,
launching a new chapter in human nutrition. We could now overcome not
just rot, but seasonality and geography. Tomatoes in January? Avocados
in Shanghai? All possible.
In Frostbite, New Yorker contributor and cohost of the award-winning
podcast Gastropod Nicola Twilley takes readers on a tour of the cold
chain from farm to fridge, visiting off-the-beaten-path landmarks such
as Missouri’s subterranean cheese caves, the banana-ripening rooms of
New York City, and the vast refrigerated tanks that store the nation’s
orange juice reserves. Today, nearly three-quarters of everything on
the average American plate is processed, shipped, stored, and sold
under refrigeration. It’s impossible to make sense of our food system
without understanding the all-but-invisible network of thermal control
that underpins it. Twilley’s eye-opening book is the first to reveal
the transformative impact refrigeration has had on our health and our
guts; our farms, tables, kitchens, and cities; global economics and
politics; and even our environment.
In the developed world, we’ve reaped the benefits of refrigeration for
more than a century, but the costs are catching up with us. We’ve
eroded our connection to our food and redefined what “fresh” means.
More important, refrigeration is one of the leading contributors to
climate change. As the developing world races to build a US-style cold
chain, Twilley asks: Can we reduce our dependence on refrigeration?
Should we? A deeply researched and reported, original, and entertaining
dive into the most important invention in the history of food and
drink, Frostbite makes the case for a recalibration of our relationship
with the fridge—and how our future might depend on it.
Quarantine has shaped our world, yet it remains both feared and
misunderstood. It is our most powerful response to uncertainty, but it
operates through an assumption of guilt: in quarantine, we are
considered infectious until proven safe. An unusually poetic metaphor
for moral and mythic ills, quarantine means waiting to see if something
hidden inside of us will be revealed.
Until Proven Safe tracks the history and future of quarantine around
the globe, chasing the story of emergency isolation through time and
space – from the crumbling lazarettos of the Mediterranean to the
hallways of the CDC, to the corporate giants hoping to disrupt the
widespread quarantine imposed by Covid-19 before the next pandemic hits
through surveillance and algorithmic prediction.
Yet quarantine is more than just a medical tool: Geoff Manaugh and
Nicola Twilley drop deep into the Earth to tour a nuclear-waste
isolation facility beneath the New Mexican desert, strip down to
nothing but protective Tyvek suits to see plants stricken with a
disease that threatens the world’s wheat supply, and meet NASA’s
Planetary Protection Officer tasked with saving the Earth from
extraterrestrial infections.
The result is part travelogue, part intellectual history – a book as
compelling as it is definitive, and one that could not be more urgent
or timely.
|
|