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01 / 05
Three Cheers for Refrigeration—and Four, Once Everyone Has It

Blog Post | Health & Medical Care

Three Cheers for Refrigeration—and Four, Once Everyone Has It

Refrigerators have revolutionized health and wellbeing for those with access to them, but their affordability is under fire.

Summary: Refrigeration has revolutionized public health and improved the quality of life worldwide, but its future is under threat. The remarkable benefits it brings, such as reducing foodborne illnesses and improving the quality of food, are being undermined by misguided climate change policies that increase costs. This article explains why it is crucial to prioritize the accessibility and affordability of refrigeration and reliable electricity, as they are such powerful keys to human progress.


It is difficult to overstate the benefits of refrigeration. Even more than its technological sibling air conditioning, refrigeration has dramatically improved public health and the quality of life wherever it has become widespread. And unlike air conditioning, the utility of which is questioned in some intellectual circles, refrigeration has few if any critics. Nonetheless, in an age when climate change has become the near obsession of most international policymakers—and given that refrigeration does require a considerable amount of (often) fossil-fuel fired electricity—it is worth highlighting the importance of avoiding measures that threaten its continued spread throughout the world.

The Rise of Refrigeration and Fall of Foodborne Illness

In 2013–2014, salmonella-contaminated chicken from Foster Farms in California caused a known 634 illnesses across 29 states. This major outbreak and recall received substantial press coverage at the time, as have similar ones that have happened. But before refrigeration, such incidents would not have been treated as news; they were an everyday reality.

Along with air conditioning, the United States was the first nation to have a refrigerator in most residences, as well as an extensive cold chain among food producers and wholesalers and retailers upstream of the consumer. Therefore, America provides the longest test case of the public health benefits from having a food supply that can be kept cold as needed. Those benefits are impressive.

It is over the last century that American households went from zero to nearly 100 percent in refrigerator use. Indeed, market penetration was already above 80 percent by the 1940s. Thanks to a fridge in every kitchen, and along with other major advances like pasteurization, food-related illness and mortality have seen a precipitous decline.

Even health outcomes not obviously connected to refrigeration have benefited from it. For example, there is considerable evidence that cancers of the stomach became considerably less common in the United States thanks to refrigerators.

Beyond reducing foodborne illness, refrigeration has also improved the quality of the food supply. This is particularly true for protein sources like dairy, meat, and fish that are quickly perishable without it. It has also enabled wider and year-round availability of fresh fruits and vegetables. These fresh (and also fresh frozen, as sizeable freezer sections have become a standard feature in refrigerators) foods have largely replaced heavily salted or smoked or pickled foods, and thus improved diets.

Lower income households have benefited the most from refrigeration. Not only has the cost of a high-quality diet come down, but the once-considerable expense of food spoilage has been reduced. This is particularly important for those who live in hotter regions.

Given all the health benefits of a safer and better food supply attributable to refrigeration, there is little doubt it has contributed to the considerably longer life expectancies in the United States over the past century. Granted, improved health care has been the main driver of these improvements, including vaccines against many once-common diseases. But even with that, refrigeration has played a vital role in the manufacture, transport, and storage of those vaccines as well as in many other medical applications.

Progress and Challenges toward Global Availability of Refrigeration

Refrigerators started as a luxury good a century ago, but prices have substantially declined since (although it should be noted that the recently growing regulatory burden on appliances in the United States and Europe may undercut this trend). Today, very few kitchens in the developed world are without a refrigerator, and market penetration in the developing world has been robust, particularly over the last three decades.

At this point, equipment cost is a barrier for only the world’s very poorest households. However, United Nations efforts favoring “climate-friendly” refrigerators represent a worrisome trend threatening affordability. For example, many existing refrigerators use refrigerants called hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) that are considered to have a high per-molecule global warming potential, though their overall contribution to anthropogenic warming is only 3 percent. These refrigerants are now subject to restrictions pursuant to the Kigali Amendment, a United Nations treaty.

Although the Kigali Amendment is more lenient toward developing nations than developed ones, it will nonetheless harm the developing world’s refrigerator buyers in two ways. First, the treaty and implementing provisions will serve to disrupt with the supply of second-hand refrigerators from first-world nations, which are often the lowest cost option in developing nations. In fact, the trade in such refrigerators is now perceived by many in the international community as an environmental threat that needs to be eradicated. Second, the Kigali Amendment will eventually impose restrictions on the types of new systems allowed to be produced in developing nations.

These measures are fairly new and are just beginning to be implemented, so the impact on equipment costs is not yet known. But they will likely raise, at least to some extent, the purchase price of a refrigerator. It does not take much of an increase to have a deleterious impact on market penetration among the world’s poorest households.

Access to Reliable Electricity

While refrigerator affordability is an ongoing concern, the greater obstacle is access to reliable electricity.

The slow march to a completely electrified world is 90 percent complete. We have finally reached the point where most of the developing world has joined the developed world in being electrified, but about 750 million people still don’t have it. Worse, by adding in those lacking access to reliable electricity, the number jumps to 3.5 billion, according to one estimate. In Africa, less than half the population enjoys access to reliable electricity.

An unreliable electricity supply can significantly undercut the advantages of refrigeration, as anyone who has had to clean out the fridge after an extended blackout can attest. More progress on both the availability and reliability of electricity is still needed if the benefits of refrigeration are to become universal.

Once again, the climate change agenda is becoming a growing impediment. Progress on electrification is jeopardized by the United Nations’ Paris Agreement and other measures that target affordable and reliable—but carbon-emitting—coal and natural gas in favor of intermittent and unreliable wind and solar. Doing so threatens to both slow progress in expanding electrification for those who don’t yet have it and to improve reliability for those who do.

Even in the first world where refrigeration has long been nearly universal, there are risks from mandates and subsidies for an increasingly renewables-heavy electricity mix chosen for climate considerations at the expense of reliability. If unchecked, this trend could lead to more frequent blackouts and, thus, backsliding on the refrigeration benefits people take for granted. This is especially so for the summer months when refrigeration is most vital.

Conclusion

Today, a large and growing number of the world’s households, both rich and poor, are able to buy a refrigerator, plug it in, and enjoy the benefits of its uninterrupted operation. This has been an indisputably significant boon to the safety and quality of the food supply and thus to public health. However, ill-advised climate change policy measures are emerging as a real threat to refrigeration’s continued spread. Prioritization of a climate agenda that raises the cost of a refrigerator is likely to do considerably more harm than good and deter the spread of affordable and reliable electricity throughout the world. Refrigeration has been a growing success story for humanity over the past century, but continued progress is now at risk.

Associated Press | Food Consumption

Will US Convenience Stores Find the Secret to Selling Better Food?

“Americans who think of petrified hot dogs, frozen burritos and salty snacks when they imagine getting food at a gas station or truck stop may be pleasantly surprised during their next road trip: U.S. convenience stores are offering them more and better — though not necessarily healthier — choices.

From 7-Eleven to regional chains like QuikTrip, the operators of c-stores, as they’re known in the trade, are looking overseas for grab-and-go inspiration, adding sit-down seating at some locations, expanding their coffee menus to rival Starbucks and experimenting with made-to-order meals for busy families.

The moves are happening as convenience stores seek ways to offset slowing sales of cigarettes, maps and soft drinks. By tempting customers’ palates with fresh deli sandwiches and build-your-own burgers, the humble food marts want to become an alternative to fast-food restaurants for busy Americans who crave easy, interesting and less expensive eating options.”

From Associated Press.

Blog Post | Food & Hunger

Grim Old Days: Tom Standage’s Edible History of Humanity

So many of history's twists and turns have been guided by what people ate.

Summary: Tom Standage’s book explores how history’s major events and periods are reflected in the history of food, from the agricultural revolution to the spice trade of globalization. The book reveals the harsh realities of pre-industrial food production and the deadly consequences of misguided beliefs about food. It recounts how past societies waged wars and committed atrocities in the name of different foods, and how food has had profound historical influence over major events.


Tom Standage’s An Edible History of Humanity traces how food impacted major world events in different eras, from the agricultural revolution to the spice trade’s role in early globalization. The book covers the industrial and post-industrial eras with harrowing descriptions of the horrific famines wrought by communism’s price controls and collectivization of agriculture. Its insights into the pre-industrial age are also noteworthy.

Standage reminds the reader that food is a product of innovation and progress, saying that “a cultivated field of maize, or any other crop, is as man-made as a microchip” and that the barely edible wild ancestors of today’s foods were nothing like their modern counterparts. The book also reveals that many foods of the past looked less appetizing and tasted worse. Consider the carrot. “Carrots were originally white and purple, and the sweeter orange variety was created by Dutch horticulturalists in the sixteenth century as a tribute to William I, Prince of Orange.” And that is not the only royal anecdote in the book. In the late 17th century, pineapples were known as “the fruit of kings” in Europe because they were so rare; King Charles II of England even posed for a painting with a pineapple and held a feast in which he “cut the fruit up himself and offered pieces of it from his own plate. This might sound like a gesture of humility, but was really a demonstration of his power: only a king could offer his guests pineapple.”

An Edible History also reminds the reader that poverty was the default throughout much of history, quoting a Mesopotamian proverb from around 2,000 BC that notes, “Wealth is hard to come by, but poverty is always at hand.” In ancient Uruk, according to Standage, “80 percent of the population were farmers.” In nonindustrialized corners of the modern world, not much has changed on that front. “In poor countries such as Rwanda, the proportion of the population involved in agriculture is still more than 80 percent—as it was in Uruk 5,500 years ago.”

The vast majority of people in pre-industrial societies the world over labored on farms, and the backbreaking work took a heavy toll on their bodies. Archeology reveals that historically in agricultural societies, “female skeletons often display evidence of arthritic joints and deformities of the toes, knees, and lower back, all of which are associated with the daily use of a saddle kern to grind grain.”

The book describes how difficult life was for agricultural workers, once the greater part of humanity. Many people viewed the ceaseless agricultural labor that defined their lives as a form of divine punishment: Standage quotes a verse in the biblical Book of Genesis that reads, “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.” In some cultures, the painful struggle to produce food from the earth was likened to fighting a war. “For the Incas, agriculture was closely linked to warfare: The earth was defeated, as if in battle, by the plow. So the harvest ceremony was carried out by young noblemen as part of their initiation as warriors, and they sang a haylli [a military victory chant] as they harvested the maize to celebrate their victory over the earth.”

Sometimes, local beliefs connected to food could prove lethal. The Aztecs thought the “Earth Mother was nourished by human blood . . . and the crops would only grow if she was given enough of it” in the form of innumerable human sacrifices. “Sacrificial victims were referred to as ‘tortillas for the gods.’” The Incas also practiced human sacrifice. “After subjugating a new region, the Incas sacrificed its most beautiful people.”

Other bizarre beliefs related to food are detailed in the book. “Herodotus, the Greek writer of the fifth century B.C. known as the ‘father of history,’ explained that gathering cassia, a form of cinnamon, involved donning a full-body suit made from the hides of oxen, covering everything but the eyes. Only then would the wearer be protected from the ‘winged creatures like bats [which] have to be kept from attacking the men’s eyes when they are cutting the cassia.’” Theophrastus, another ancient Greek philosopher, believed cinnamon “was guarded by deadly snakes” and that “the only safe way to collect it was . . . to leave a third of the harvest behind as a gift to the sun, which would cause the offering to burst into flames.’” The Roman writer Tacitus worried about “spendthrift table luxuries,” such as spices now considered unremarkable. The book examines how the acquisition of what are today ordinary spices that can be purchased for a few dollars at any grocery store once inspired wars, including wars of conquest and destructive battles over trading rights. “After the year 1500 there was no pepper to be had at Calicut that was not dyed red with blood,” the author quotes Voltaire as quipping in 1756.

The book describes how in the quest for spices, often “violence was used arbitrarily and unsparingly.” For example, when the Portuguese explorer Vasco Da Gama arrived in India, he “arbitrarily burned and bombarded towns on the coast in order to force key ports to [trade spices to Portugal rather than rival Muslim merchants] and his men also sank and looted Muslim and local vessels, on one occasion using prisoners for crossbow practice; the hands, noses, and ears of the remaining prisoners were cut off and sent ashore.” This violence was over pepper, something that is now inexpensive and thoroughly unremarkable. The quest to attain nutmeg, meanwhile, led the Dutch East India Company, or Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), to commit human rights abuses in the Banda Islands: “Villages were burned down and the inhabitants were killed, chased off, or sold into slavery. The village chiefs were tortured and then beheaded by the VOC’s samurai mercenaries, brought in from Japan.” Again, that was over nutmeg. As the book notes: “Today most people walk past the spices in the supermarket, arrayed on shelves in small glass bottles, without a second thought.” It can be hard to imagine, but people once killed and died to obtain the likes of pepper and nutmeg.

An Edible History’s discussion of the spice trade also makes vivid how poor the state of geographic knowledge was in the past. In the 1420s, Portugal’s Prince Henry the Navigator sought in vain to “make contact with Prestor John, the legendary Christin ruler of a kingdom thought to be somewhere in Africa or the Indies.” In the 1480s, when Christopher Columbus tried to convince the Portuguese crown to fund his voyage, he was turned down in part because his calculations relied on the writings of Marco Polo, and Polo’s “book describing his travels in the East was widely regarded at the time as a work of fiction.” In fact, it wasn’t until the 19th century that scholars began to accept Polo’s travelog as a genuine historical account. When Columbus finally did make his voyage in 1492, he spread further confusion, believing he had visited Asia rather than a continent unknown to Europeans. And that was not all. “He claimed to have found the footprints of griffins.” “In the 1540s [the] conquistador, Gonzalo Pizarro, scoured the Amazon jungle in a doomed search for the legendary city of El Dorado and the ‘país de la canela,’ or cinnamon country. It was not until the seventeenth century that the search for Old World spices in the Americas was finally abandoned.”

The book also details the strange dietary advice of the past, such as dietary guidelines meant to ward off the devastating bubonic plague: “There are accounts of people being sealed into their houses to prevent the plague from spreading, and of people abandoning their families to avoid infection. Medical men proposed all sorts of strange measures that would, they said, minimize the risk of infection, advising fat people not to sit in the sunshine, for example, and issuing a series of baffling dietary pronouncements. Doctors in Paris advised people to avoid vegetables, whether pickled or fresh; to avoid fruit, unless consumed with wine; and to refrain from eating poultry, duck, and meat from young pigs. ‘Olive oil,’ they warned, ‘is fatal.’” What, then, was a person properly worried about the plague to eat? “The French doctors recommended drinking broth seasoned with pepper, ginger, and cloves. The plague was thought to be caused by corrupted air, so people were advised to burn scented woods and sprinkle rosewater in their homes, and other aromatics when going out. . . . This helped to conceal the smell of the dead and dying, as well as supposedly purifying the air. John of Escenden, a fellow at Oxford University, was certain that a combination of powdered cinnamon, aloes, myrrh, saffron, mace, and cloves had enabled him to survive even as those around him succumbed to the plague.”

Superstitions initially prevented Europeans from eating potatoes when that vegetable arrived on their continent: “Potatoes resembled a leper’s gnarled hands, and the idea that they caused leprosy became widespread. According to the second edition of John Gerard’s Herball, published in 1633, ‘the Burgundians are forbidden to make use of these tubers, because they are assured that eating them caused leprosy.’ . . . Potatoes became associated with witchcraft and devil worship.” In fact, even in the 1770s, “potatoes were still widely believed to be poisonous and to cause disease.”

Wall Street Journal | Food Consumption

Forget Cutting Sugar—New Tech Makes It Healthier Instead

“A guilt-free chocolate bar, full of sugar, could someday land at a supermarket near you.

The chocolate would look and taste normal, and contain the same amount of sugar. But an enzyme, encased in an edible substance and added to the bar, would reduce how much sugar is absorbed into the bloodstream, and even turn it into a fiber that is good for your gut.

The product is the brainchild of scientists at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. In 2018, Kraft Heinz tapped the scientists to help develop a sugar substitute that would enable the food giant to cut the sweetener from its food without losing its benefits. The scientists had a different idea—save the sugar but devise a way to make it healthier.”

From Wall Street Journal.

Blog Post | Human Development

1,000 Bits of Good News You May Have Missed in 2023

A necessary balance to the torrent of negativity.

Reading the news can leave you depressed and misinformed. It’s partisan, shallow, and, above all, hopelessly negative. As Steven Pinker from Harvard University quipped, “The news is a nonrandom sample of the worst events happening on the planet on a given day.”

So, why does Human Progress feature so many news items? And why did I compile them in this giant list? Here are a few reasons:

  • Negative headlines get more clicks. Promoting positive stories provides a necessary balance to the torrent of negativity.
  • Statistics are vital to a proper understanding of the world, but many find anecdotes more compelling.
  • Many people acknowledge humanity’s progress compared to the past but remain unreasonably pessimistic about the present—not to mention the future. Positive news can help improve their state of mind.
  • We have agency to make the world better. It is appropriate to recognize and be grateful for those who do.

Below is a nonrandom sample (n = ~1000) of positive news we collected this year, separated by topic area. Please scroll, skim, and click. Or—to be even more enlightened—read this blog post and then look through our collection of long-term trends and datasets.

Agriculture

Aquaculture

Farming robots and drones

Food abundance

Genetic modification

Indoor farming

Lab-grown produce

Pollination

Other innovations

Conservation and Biodiversity

Big cats

Birds

Turtles

Whales

Other comebacks

Forests

Reefs

Rivers and lakes

Surveillance and discovery

Rewilding and conservation

De-extinction

Culture and tolerance

Gender equality

General wellbeing

LGBT

Treatment of animals

Energy and natural Resources

Fission

Fusion

Fossil fuels

Other energy

Recycling and resource efficiency

Resource abundance

Environment and pollution

Climate change

Disaster resilience

Air pollution

Water pollution

Growth and development

Education

Economic growth

Housing and urbanization

Labor and employment

Health

Cancer

Disability and assistive technology

Dementia and Alzheimer’s

Diabetes

Heart disease and stroke

Other non-communicable diseases

HIV/AIDS

Malaria

Other communicable diseases

Maternal care

Fertility and birth control

Mental health and addiction

Weight and nutrition

Longevity and mortality 

Surgery and emergency medicine

Measurement and imaging

Health systems

Other innovations

Freedom

    Technology 

    Artificial intelligence

    Communications

    Computing

    Construction and manufacturing

    Drones

    Robotics and automation

    Autonomous vehicles

    Transportation

    Other innovations

    Science

    AI in science

    Biology

    Chemistry and materials

      Physics

      Space

      Violence

      Crime

      War