Calendar of Events
Note: Meetings are usually held on the second Sunday of each month, September through May, from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. Currently we are meeting via Zoom, but in-person meetings are held at the Bethesda-Chevy Chase Services Center, 4805 Edgemoor Lane, Bethesda, Maryland, and occasionally at other venues. The meetings are open to anyone. However, certain meetings may require a fee.
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Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves
SPEAKER: Nicola Twilley
SPEAKER BIO
Nicola Twilley is author of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves, winner of the 2025 James Beard Award for Literary Writing, the 2025 California Book Awards Nonfiction Gold Medal, the 2025 Nach Waxman Prize, and the 2025 Nautilus Book Awards Gold Medal for Journalism and Investigative Reporting. She is co-host of the award-winning “Gastropod” podcast, which looks at food through the lens of history and science, and which is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with “Eater.” Her first book, Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine, was co-authored with Geoff Manaugh and was named one of the best books of 2021 by Time Magazine, NPR, the Guardian, and the Financial Times. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and was one of the 2025 winners of the National Academies of Sciences’ Eric and Wendy Schmidt Awards for Excellence in Science Communications. She lives in Los Angeles.
TALK DESCRIPTION
Twilley will discuss her award-winning book, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves, in which she 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. 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.
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.