0:00 Nearly half of the 1.3 billion tons of food produced for human consumption is wasted every year.0:07 Mm-hm.0:08 And a study out of the University of Michigan says about 620 million metric tons of that could be saved.0:16 Wow.0:17 Just...0:17 saved.0:18 You know, last week we talked about glass, and how these 'Invisible Engines' shape our world.0:25 This feels like another one of those, but for keeping things from rotting.0:31 It's exactly that.0:33 It's called the cold chain.0:35 And without it, the modern world, you know, our world, just stops.0:40 Completely.0:41 Okay, so...0:42 the cold chain.0:43 It sounds so technical, so modern.0:46 Where does something like that even begin?0:49 It begins way before you'd think, and with something incredibly simple: ice.0:55 In the early 1800s, people were literally harvesting ice from frozen lakes, packing it in sawdust, and shipping it.1:05 Thomas Moore patented an insulated icebox in 1803 to move butter.1:10 They were shipping...1:12 cold.1:12 They were shipping cold.1:14 But that's inefficient, right?1:17 You lose a lot of it.1:18 The real revolution was when we stopped moving cold and started making it.1:24 A guy named Jacob Perkins gets a patent for a vapor-compression refrigeration cycle in 1834.1:32 That's the seed.1:33 By 1882, London has a cold store that can hold 59,000 animal carcasses.1:39 Fifty-nine thousand.1:40 So that's the moment it changes from a novelty to an industry.1:45 That's the one.1:47 And then the final piece of the puzzle was making it mobile.1:52 Frederick McKinley Jones, a self-taught inventor in the mid-twentieth century, creates the first successful refrigeration system for trucks.2:03 Suddenly, the cold chain isn't just a warehouse.2:07 It's a network.2:08 It's everywhere.2:09 And that's how I get strawberries from California in the middle of a Boston winter.2:16 That's exactly how.2:18 But it's so much bigger than that.2:20 It's not just about convenience.2:23 It reshaped agriculture itself.2:25 Before mobile refrigeration, you had to move live cattle from, say, Texas to Chicago to be processed.2:34 Right, the big cattle drives.2:36 Exactly.2:37 The cold chain killed the cattle drive.2:40 Suddenly, you could process the meat right there and ship the product, not the living animal.2:47 It changed land use, it changed economics, it changed diets, all because of this invisible-but-everywhere technology.2:57 But there's a cost, right?2:59 I saw a number that the cold chain is responsible for something like four percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.3:08 Yeah.3:09 That’s the paradox.3:10 It's this incredible tool for efficiency and for preventing waste...3:16 but the system itself runs on refrigerants and massive amounts of energy.3:22 We're solving one problem while, uh, definitely contributing to another.3:28 It's not just about food, though, is it?3:31 I feel like there's another shoe to drop.3:34 Oh, there is.3:35 And it's the one that really keeps me up at night.3:39 Pharmaceuticals.3:41 Vaccines.3:41 About fifty percent of vaccines are lost globally each year.3:46 Wait—FIFTY?3:47 Half?3:48 Half.3:48 Because the cold chain breaks.3:50 A vaccine might need to be kept between two and eight degrees Celsius.3:56 A biologic drug might need to be frozen at minus twenty.4:01 A tiny fluctuation, and it's useless.4:04 Think about the COVID-19 pandemic.4:06 The Pfizer vaccine.4:08 The ultracold storage.4:10 Minus seventy degrees Celsius.4:12 At the time, there were only maybe 25 or 30 countries in the ENTIRE world with the infrastructure to handle that.4:21 The cold chain wasn't just a supply line; it was the line between who could be protected and who couldn't.4:30 It became a global decider of life and death.4:34 Wow.4:34 I...4:34 I just thought of it as a fancy fridge.4:37 We all do.4:38 It's designed to be invisible.4:41 We've built our entire global food and medical systems on the quiet, constant hum of refrigeration.4:49 We only notice it when the humming stops.4:52 And the whole system is this massive, energy-hungry machine that we absolutely cannot live without.5:00 Right.5:00 It's the ultimate invisible engine.5:03 It's second nature.5:05 But it's also a trap we've built for ourselves over the last 150 years.5:11 What happens when the energy gets too expensive, or the environmental cost gets too high?5:18 We don't have an answer for that.
