Author discusses how refrigeration has reshaped our lives for better or worse

"Gastropod" co-host Nicola Twilley sat down with ABC News' Trevor Ault to discuss her new book, "Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves."

Many of us may take refrigeration for granted or have not examined its impact, it has revolutionized the way we store, transport, and consume food. Twilley traces the impact of refrigeration on our diets, the global food industry and, of course, the environment.

Twilley says that when it comes to nutrients, the longer you refrigerate something, the more nutrients it loses. We have bred for shelf life rather than nutrients, so our fruits and vegetables now contain fewer vitamins than in the past.

ABC News sat down with Twilley as she discussed her book in more detail.

ABC NEWS: You know it's been brutally hot these past few weeks from coast to coast. And next we want to focus on something that maybe we haven't fully realized or may close attention to. And that is refrigeration, which has revolutionized the way we store, transport, and consume food. In her new book, "Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves," New Yorker contributor and co-host of the award-winning podcast Gastropod Nicola Twilley traces the impact of refrigeration. She joins us now. Thanks so much for being here, Nicola.

NICOLA: Thanks for having me.

ABC NEWS: So I know that this is a subject that you have been focused on for quite some time, I think. You gave a Ted talk on this, going back a dozen years with a headline that if you understand refrigeration, you understand the world. So I guess, what was the first thing that made you pay a heightened amount of attention to this topic?

NICOLA: Well, it all started when farm to table was first fashionable. Which, cast your mind way back more than a decade and restaurants were all farm to table people like Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser were writing books about how our food was raised, and no one was talking about how it got to the table. So I decided, well, here's the missing piece. I'll go and investigate.

ABC NEWS: I think that, to the unexamined person, refrigerators as a whole are pretty, thought of pretty positively of just the fact that they keep our food, quote unquote, fresh. Can you give us some examples beyond those, the obvious of how refrigeration is changing the food that we consume and our lives as a whole.

NICOLA: Absolutely. I mean, just think 100 years ago, most Americans wouldn't have eaten a banana. Now it's the most popular fruit in the world. You can have, walk into the supermarket in December and you can have asparagus and you can have grapes. They come from Chile and they come from Peru. So all year round, permanent global summertime at the supermarket. Also the convenience. Imagine pre-washed, pre-harvested spinach, salad bags full of ready to eat salad. All of that is because of refrigeration and not to mention affordable meat. That's one of its biggest contributions to how we eat.

ABC NEWS: That all sounds pretty good to me. Is what's the trade off?

NICOLA: I'm glad you asked. There's, there's always the cost. Right. And that's one of the reasons I wrote this book is because people haven't largely examined the cost. On the level of, nutrients, the longer you refrigerate something them, the more nutrients it loses. And we have bred for shelf life rather than nutrients. So our fruit and vegetables are less filled with vitamins now than the ones in the past. That's that's one example. A bigger downside is what is done to our environment. All the power that is used for cooling. It's a huge vast contribution to climate change. And that's before we even get to the chemicals that we use to refrigerate. They're called refrigerants, and they are the number one thing we could tackle to mitigate climate change, according to Project Drawdown. So it's it's got a lot of downsides. They're just not usually talked about.

ABC NEWS: Given all of that, if a person wanted to scale back some of their dependance on refrigeration. Aside from, you know, building a gigantic garden in their backyard and completely unplugging from the grid, what would you recommend to maybe shrink the footprint a little bit?

NICOLA: Well, it's really a global problem and that's where people are working on solutions. But for people at home, I really do have to say just because it keeps food, fresh for longer doesn't mean it's improving it. So you might put your bag of spinach in there and think when you eat it a week later, it looks fine. It's lost half the nutrients it had when you bought it. So don't stock up. Don't stockpile. Eat the things that you buy when you buy them.

ABC NEWS: Nicola, thank you so much for joining us. "Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves" is now available to purchase wherever you get your books. Thanks so much.

NICOLA: Thank you.