Admit it: You have no idea how to use your crisper drawer
The secret to the most underused piece of tech in your kitchen
It’s no secret that I’m a food nerd. (If you’re a Consumed subscriber, we’ll just assume you think that’s a plus.) But even I have to admit that I was not excited to read 320 pages on refrigeration. And I certainly never would have, if the author of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves weren’t Nicola Twilley.
Twilley is one of today’s great food journalists because, in defiance of the media’s herd mentality, she seems utterly free to follow her curiosity. About 10 years ago, she helped create “smog meringues” so she could taste the difference between the air pollution of a fast-food heavy LA smog versus a pea-soupy London variety. (Both were disgusting…but different disgusting.) Since then, she’s launched the long-running podcast Gastropod (food with a side of science and technology) and has become a frequent contributor to the New Yorker on everything from designing hedge mazes to the race to redesign sugar (read this piece!).
So it’s not all that surprising that Twilley spent nearly a decade researching the history and science of refrigeration – and then, somehow, made it a must-read.
Frostbite is full of all manner of fascinating facts for your next cocktail party. (See my favorites below.) But first: Did you know that you can adjust your crisper drawer to increase shelf life? I had always wondered what those slide-tabs on the produce drawers did…but, of course, never bothered to figure it out. Twilley explained it all to me and here’s my summary:
While we have incredibly sophisticated technologies to help us store and ripen fruits throughout the supply chain, our refrigerator is … pretty much a dumb device.
The cold that circulates through the big box slows decay of fruits and vegetables. But the dryness of that cold air can cause certain kinds of vegetables – especially leafy greens – to wilt.
Refrigerator models differ. But almost all have some lever that allows you to open or close a small vent. Closing it traps moisture in the drawer, creating a high-humidity drawer. Opening the vent allows air to circulate, creating a low-humidity drawer.
What goes in the high-humidity drawer: leafy greens and thin-skinned vegetables like cucumbers, broccoli, green beans, eggplant. Moisture will help anything that is prone to wilting.
What goes in the low-humidity drawer: Ethylene-gas emitting fruits including pears, apples, melons and stone fruits. (Though, as Twilley explained, you should resist putting stone fruit in the fridge at all, as it is “a stone-fruit killing zone.”) The open vent lets the ripening gas escape so things stay fresher, longer.
One final note: No matter what settings you have, it’s important not to mix the gas-emitting fruits with the thin-skinned veggies. The ethylene will cause the veggies to ripen, and then rot, faster.
You are now ready to adjust your fridge (and hopefully save money and frustration.)
Other truly fascinating refrigerator facts:
Refrigerated warehouse jobs are some of the most dangerous in America
Warehouse jobs are generally dangerous – just google “forklift accidents” on YouTube. But add cold to the recipe and it becomes particularly perilous. Frozen digits make it hard to be precise with heavy machinery and, over time, workers get the “umbles” – grumbling, mumbling, fumbling and stumbling. (This is also referred to as “cold stupid.”) The average frozen food warehouse is kept between five and 20 degrees below zero. The mean temperature at the summit of Mt. Everest in winter is only slightly colder – minus 31 degrees.
The discovery of “protein” fueled the rise of refrigeration…and industrial meat
In the 1830s, European chemists isolated and named “protein” for the first time. But … based on an experiment – in which a dog, which was fed only carbohydrates and fat, died – they concluded that protein was the only nutritive element in food. And you know what has lots of protein? Meat.
As a result, Twilley reports, “factory owners, general, and governments – indeed anyone who wanted to squeeze the most productivity out of their minions – began to concern themselves with the adequacy of the workers’ meat and dairy intake.”
With this backing, entrepreneurs found huge support (and investment) to develop chilled shipping containers and rail cars to move meat from the country to the cities. “If chemists had come down in favor of grains and beans instead,” Twilley concludes, the world might have looked very different.”
A woman patented the idea of shelves in refrigerator doors; it’s one of the last great refrigerator innovations.
Until the 1930s, most refrigerators were essentially a large cold box. Then, a 20-something mother of two, Constance Lane West, came up with the idea to put shelves inside the doors. Her patent, used by a manufacturer called Crosley, lasted until 1953. Since then, Twilley points out, there’s been remarkably little innovation in your fridge. There are the crisper drawers (see above) and the ice maker. But the only recent success story in home refrigerator innovation was the introduction of the “french door” design.
Which, by the way, they don’t have in France.
What do the French call the model? “Réfrigerateur américan.”