Drill Down: Ice Ice Baby, Too Cold Too Cold

He was once the Donald Trump of Hip Hop. Now he is a gag in a blog post about ice.

It's nice to think we make our own decisions, eat the food we choose to eat, and regardless of our education or experience, are smart enough to be the owner/resident of a healthy, human body. But truth: we our choices are created & influenced by our eras.

My parents were smart, relatively sophisticated and earned solid stable livings their whole lives. And yet, the diet they raised me was primarily Kraft dinner, McDonald's, Hamburger Helper, Shake & Bake and Sara Lee, with dueling momma or poppa salads pushed in from their own parent's earlier era. The 70s was the Industrial (Convenience Foods) Revolution. I recent read a blurb on the inter webs that got me thinking about bigger revolutions that probably changed the food culture of my grandparents and their parents dramatically, from the actual Industrial Revolution.

Hotels have also had a longstanding interest in ice. When industrial-size ice machines were introduced in the 1890s, in the days before modern refrigeration, hotels—along with dairies and breweries—were among the first businesses to embrace them. Not wanting to be at the mercy of the natural ice industry (in which ice was harvested out of lakes and ponds and transported all over the country—like in the movie Frozen), hotels installed ice machines that would be able to provide the stuff on demand for all their varied icy needs: keeping food fresh, making ice cream, serving cocktails, helping guests cool down via the tried and true ice-to-forehead method, and more. Back then, you’d have to ring up room service for the stuff; thanks to Wilson, you can now go get it yourself.

I have an antique ice box I inherited from my parents. It has a top-loading area, framed out in thin metal, and a front loading space below with a drip tray. A big block of ice would go below, and whatever needed to be cool above. Both chambers are now full of various liquors, at room temperature. The reference above to who embraced mechanical refrigeration first -- dairies and breweries -- got me thinking. A cow is a bit of a temperature controlled environment. Up until the milk is squirted out, it's factory is pretty much a sealed unit. A brewery is not. I know enough about brewing and yeast to know if you don't have some control over the temperature, yeast can under/over perform, die or become explosive under contained vessels, like, say, a beer bottle...

Sealed Cow Unit

There’s no question that the brewing industry was one of the first to realize the significant benefits that refrigeration offered. German lager beer came to America with the German immigrants in the 1840s, tasting a lot better than American ale. Refrigeration enabled the breweries to make a uniform product all year round. Brewing was the first activity in the northern states to use mechanical refrigeration extensively, beginning with an absorption machine used by S. Liebmann’s Sons Brewing Company in Brooklyn, New York in 1870. Commercial refrigeration was primarily directed at breweries in the 1870s and by 1891, nearly every brewery was equipped with refrigerating machines.

Just as porn drives communications technology, alcohol drove food and preservation technology. Because everything great invented by man comes back to porn and booze. Anyway, yes, beer and ice cream, two staples in many of our diets that would not be so prevalent if it wasn't for the ice revolution. Thinking of it that way, was the invention of modern refrigeration good or bad for us?

Because refrigeration facilitated the hygienic handling and storage of perishables, it promoted output growth, consumption, and nutrition through the spatial and temporal integration of markets for perishables. We estimate the impact of mechanical refrigeration on output and consumption, and hence on human nutrition, concentrating on the contribution from refrigerated dairy products, an important source of nutrients, particularly proteins and calcium. We conclude that the adoption of refrigeration in the late-nineteenth-century United States increased dairy consumption by 1.7% and overall protein intake by 1.25% annually after the 1890s. The increase in protein consumption was particularly important to the growth of the human organism. 

Moments after two human organisms shared hopefully more than one human orgasm to create one or more human organisms.

Yes, more protein is wonderful, but if I allowed my six year old daughter to eat multiple ice creams and multiple ice pops daily as she requests on the regular, perhaps this scientist wouldn't be so gung ho. Still, point is, before refrigeration, nutrition was a lot more scarce. Now it ain't. Too bad if we're wired to over-eat.

The idea of refrigerating ourselves via air conditioning is making us fat is not a new one. Just as a cow is a perfect mechanism for regulating it's own temperature for creating milk, the human body also regulates it's own temperature. But that regulation ain't free -- it takes energy a.k.a. calories to turn up the internal furnace when you're in the cold and it takes energy to sweat off the excess temp and push blood closer to the surface of your skin to help cool it. Air conditioning short-wires the need for this calorie-expending internal thermostat.

Ice, ice cream, a cool room and/or a chilled beverage in the summer, it's a pretty awesome thing that makes being alive fun. As my 1900's ice box attests too, people haven't always had it so comfortable. Gratitude.
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WEEKLY AVERAGE: 2948

Frustratingly high. I need to look back at when I was regularly keeping it closer to 2700 and see what I was doing differently...

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MONDAY COUNT: 2930

SLEPT: 11pm-6am, 7 hrs

AM SNACK: 6:15 am, iced green tea

BREAKFAST 1: 8:15am, apple/beet/celery/carrot/cayenne/cucumber/ginger juice, 160 cal

BREAKFAST 2: 9:45am, steel cut oatmeal, 450 cal

LUNCH: 1:30pm, falafel, onion soup, health salad, pickles, 560 cal

PM SNACK:  3:30pm, momma salad, cheezits, 310 cal

DINNER: 6:45pm, mahi mahi,  asparagus, poppa salad with dressing, 650 cal

EVENING SNACK: 7:15pm, popcorn, +/- 400 cal

EVENING SNACKS: 8pm, 2 kid granola bars, peanut butter crackers, 400 cal
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TUESDAY COUNT: 2690 cal

SLEPT: 9pm-6am, 9hrs

AM SNACK: 6:15 am, iced green tea

BREAKFAST: 7:45am, apple/beet/celery/carrot/cayenne/cucumber/ginger juice, 160 cal

BREAKFAST 2: 9:45am, Fage with honey, vanilla and almontsl 450 cal

LUNCH: 1pm, chicken meatballs, steamed string beans, lentil curry, pickles, 620 cal

PM SNACK: 4pm, momma salad, 100 cal

DINNER: 7pm, French Bread pizzas, poppa salad with dressing, 1080 cal

EVENING SNACKS: 8pm, 2 kid granola bars, pirate booty, 280 cal


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WEDNESDAY COUNT: 3650 cal

SLEPT: 10pm - 6am, 8 hrs

AM SNACK: 6:155am, iced green tea

BREAKFAST: 7:15am, apple/beet/celery/carrot/cayenne/cucumber/ginger juice, 160 cal

BREAKFAST 2: 9:45am, steel cut oatmeal, 450 cal

LUNCH: 1:45pm, grilled pork tenderloin, poppa salad with dressing, pickles, 420 cal

PM SNACK: 3:30pm, momma salad, cheezits, 310 cal

PM SNACK: 4:30pm, cashews, 250 cal

DINNER: 8pm, chipotle burrito, ice cream, 1180 cal

EVENING SNACKS: 9pm, nutella, pirate booty, +/- 800 cal
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BIKE CREDIT: 680cal
THURSDAY COUNT: 2850

SLEPT: 10:30pm-2:30am, 4 hours

AM SNACK: 3am, iced green tea, 150mg caffeine

BIKE SNACK: 5am, homemade granola bar, 510 cal

BREAKFAST 1: 7am, apple/beet/celery/carrot/cayenne/cucumber/ginger juice, 160 cal

BREAKFAST 2: 9:15am, Fage with almonds, honey, almonds, vanilla, 450 cal

LUNCH: 1pm, grilled pork tenderloin, poppa salad with dressing, sautéed mushrooms pickles, 590 cal

PM SNACK: 3:15pm, momma salad, cheezits, 310 cal

PM SNACK: 4:30pm, cashews, 250 cal

PM SNACK: 5pm, peanut m&ms, 260 cal

DINNER: 6:45pm, fancy gyro, eggplant, halava & baklava, +/- 1000 cal
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FRIDAY COUNT: 2620

SLEPT: 9pm-6am, 9 hours

BREAKFAST: 6:15am, iced green tea

BREAKFAST 1: 8am, apple/beet/celery/carrot/cayenne/cucumber/ginger juice, 160 cal

BREAKFAST 2: 9:30am, steel cut oatmeal, 450 cal

LUNCH: 1pm, sardines & avovado on whole wheat toast, pickles, poppa salad and dressing, 700 cal

PM SNACK: 3:30pm, momma salad, cheezits, 310 cal

DINNER: 6:30pm, lomein, beef patty, +/- 1000 cal