a very interesting read about the rapid expansion of refrigeration in China:
[It] is not simply transforming how Chinese people grow, distribute and consume food. It also stands to become a formidable new factor in climate change; cooling is already responsible for 15 percent of all electricity consumption worldwide, and leaks of chemical refrigerants are a major source of greenhouse-gas pollution. Of all the shifts in lifestyle that threaten the planet right now, perhaps not one is as important as the changing way that Chinese people eat.
Twilley takes a look at the rapid growth of the cold chain in China, which its corporate and government promoters envision will reduce waste and improve food safety.
Leading up to the 2008 Olympics, the Beijing municipal authorities embarked on an ambitious program of “supermarketization,” designed to get meat and vegetables out of the open-air “wet” markets — where food is cooled by standing fans and the occasional hose down from the cold tap — and safely behind sneeze-guards in modern, climate-controlled grocery stores. Around this time, the management consulting firm A.T. Kearney produced a report that both predicted and kick-started the country’s refrigeration boom. It projected that mass refrigeration would provide an added value worth $160 billion per year by 2017.
An artificial winter has begun to stretch across the country, through its fields and its ports, its logistics hubs and freeways. China had 250 million cubic feet of refrigerated storage capacity in 2007; by 2017, the country is on track to have 20 times that. At five billion cubic feet, China will surpass even the United States, which has led the world in cold storage ever since artificial refrigeration was invented. And even that translates to only 3.7 cubic feet of cold storage per capita, or roughly a third of what Americans currently have — meaning that the Chinese refrigeration boom is only just beginning.
This is not simply transforming how Chinese people grow, distribute and consume food. It also stands to become a formidable new factor in climate change; cooling is already responsible for 15 percent of all electricity consumption worldwide, and leaks of chemical refrigerants are a major source of greenhouse-gas pollution. Of all the shifts in lifestyle that threaten the planet right now, perhaps not one is as important as the changing way that Chinese people eat.
Feels like anytime China's mentioned it's drama, but the article's a sharp reminder of the high costs of contemporary – corporate – food supply systems; there's simply no future, anywhere – in China, in Asia, in Africa, anywhere – in adopting variations of what dominates in the US or Europe... well, apart from future profits for the handful of dominant players who will quickly replace the hundreds of millions of street hawkers, fresh market vendors, small-scale processors and peasant farmers that much of the world's food supply rests on now.
Read the full article in the New York Times Magazine.
And read more about the link between food and climate change: Food and climate change: the forgotten link.