Crazier than a half dozen opium-smoking frogs.” That’s how one observer described General Jorge Ubico.1 The general, who was president of Guatemala from 1931 to 1944, liked to dress up as Napoleon Bonaparte. He may even have believed himself to be Napoleon Bonaparte reincarnate.
Like many other twentieth-century Latin American dictators, crazy General Ubico had a cozy relationship with the United Fruit Company. It became known as “El Polpo,” the octopus, because its tentacles reached everywhere. Ubico passed a law forcing indigenous Guatemalans to work for landowners—which is to say the United Fruit Company. The company owned most of Guatemala’s arable land. And it left most of it lying fallow, just in case it might need it in future. The company claimed the land was worth next to nothing, so it shouldn’t have to pay much tax on it. Ubico agreed.
But then Ubico was overthrown. An idealistic young soldier, Jacobo Árbenz, later rose to power. And he called El Polpo’s bluff. If the land was worth so little, he argued, the state would buy it and let peasants farm it. The United Fruit Company didn’t like this idea. The company lobbied the U.S. government, employing a PR agency to portray Árbenz as a dangerous communist. The CIA got involved. In 1954, Árbenz was ousted in a coup, stripped to his underwear, and bundled onto a flight to peripatetic exile. One of his daughters eventually killed herself. He drank himself into oblivion and died with a bottle of whiskey in his bathtub. Guatemala descended into a civil war that lasted for thirty-six years.2
There’s a name for poor countries with crazy dictators propped up by cynical foreign money: banana republics.3 Guatemala’s woes were intimately bound up with its chief export: bananas. But without the invention of yet another system, Guatemalan politics—and Western diets—would look very different. That system is called the “cold chain.”
One of the cofounders of the United Fruit Company, long before the cold chain existed, was a man named Lorenzo Dow Baker. He started off as a sailor. In 1870, he’d just ferried some gold prospectors up Venezuela’s Orinoco River, and his boat sprang a leak on the way home to New England, so he docked in Jamaica for repairs. He had money in his pocket and he liked to gamble—so he bought bananas, backing himself to get them home before they spoiled. He managed it, just, sold them for a healthy profit, and went back for more. Bananas became a delicacy in port cities such as Boston and New York. Ladies ate them with a knife and fork, to avoid any embarrassing sexual connotations.
But bananas were a risky business. Their shelf life was right on the cusp of the sailing time; when they arrived in port, they were too ripe to survive the onward journey inland.4 If only you could keep them cool en route, they would ripen more slowly and could reach a bigger market once they arrived in the United States.
Bananas weren’t the only foodstuff prompting interest in refrigerating ships. Two years before Baker’s first journey from Jamaica, Argentina’s government offered a prize to anyone who could keep its beef cold enough for long enough to export it overseas without spoiling. Packing ships with ice had led to costly failures. For a century, scientists had known that you could make artificial cold by compressing some gases into liquids, then letting the liquid absorb heat as it evaporated. But commercially successful applications remained elusive. In 1876, Charles Tellier, a French engineer, fitted up a ship, Le Frigorifique, with a refrigeration system, packed it with meat, and sailed it from France to Buenos Aires as proof of concept: after 105 days at sea, the meat arrived still fit to eat.
La Liberté, an Argentinian newspaper, rejoiced: “Hurray, Hurray a thousand times for the revolutions of science and capital”; Argentinian beef exports could begin.5 By 1902, there were 460 refrigerated ships—or “reefers”—plying the world’s seas, carrying a million tons of Argentina’s beef, El Polpo’s bananas, and much else besides.6
Meanwhile, in Cincinnati, a young African American boy was facing up to life as an orphan. He dropped out of school at age twelve, got a job sweeping the floor at a garage, and learned how to repair cars. His name was Frederick McKinley Jones, and he grew up to be a prolific inventor. By 1938 he was working as a sound system engineer, and a friend of his boss’s—who, like Malcom McLean, ran a trucking business—complained about the difficulties of transporting perishable goods by land. Reefers’ refrigeration units couldn’t cope with the vibrations of road travel, so you still had to pack your trucks with ice and hope you’d complete the journey before the ice melted.7 That didn’t always happen. Could the brilliant, self-taught Jones come up with a solution?
He could. His new vibration-proof refrigeration unit led to a new company, eventually called Thermo King, which became the last link in the cold chain, the global supply system that keeps perishable goods at controlled temperatures.
The cold chain revolutionized health care. During World War II, Jones’s portable refrigeration units preserved drugs and blood for injured soldiers. The cold chain now is how vaccines get around without going bad, at least until they reach remote parts of poor countries with unreliable power supplies—and there are new inventions on the horizon to solve that problem.8
Above all, the cold chain revolutionized food. On a warm summer’s day—let’s say 80 degrees—fish and meat will last only a few hours; fruit will be moldy in a few days; carrots might survive for three weeks if you’re lucky. In the cold chain, fish will keep for a week, fruit for months, and root vegetables for up to a year. Freeze the food and it lasts longer still.9
Refrigeration widened our choice of food: tropical fruits such as bananas could now reach any destination. It improved our nutrition. It enabled the rise of the supermarket: if your home has no way to keep food cold, you have to make frequent trips to the market; with a fridge and freezer at home, you can make a big shopping trip every week or two.10 And just as with the development of the TV dinner, simplifying the process of feeding a family transforms the labor market. Fewer shopping trips means housewives face fewer obstacles to becoming career women. As low-income countries get wealthier, refrigerators are among the first products people buy: in China, it took just a decade to get from a quarter of households having fridges to nearly nine in ten.11
The cold chain is one of the pillars of the global trading system. As we’ve seen, the shipping container made long-distance commerce cheaper, quicker, and more predictable. The bar code helped huge, diverse retailers keep track of complex supply chains. The diesel engine made huge oceangoing ships amazingly efficient.
The cold chain took all these other inventions and extended their reach to perishables. Now meat, fruit, and vegetables were subject to the economic logic of global specialization and global trade. Yes, you can grow French beans in France—but perhaps you should fly them in from Uganda. Different growing conditions mean this kind of shipping can make both economic and environmental sense. One study found it was eco-friendlier to grow tomatoes in Spain and transport them to Sweden than it was to grow them in Sweden.12 Another claimed that raising a lamb in New Zealand and shipping it to England emits less greenhouse gas than raising a lamb in England.13
Economic logic tells us that specialization and trade will increase the value of production in the world. It doesn’t guarantee that the value will be shared fairly. Consider the state of Guatemala today. It still exports bananas—hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth.14 It grows a lot of other stuff, too: sheep and sugarcane; coffee and corn and cardamom.15 But it has the world’s fourth-highest rate of chronic malnutrition; half of its children are stunted because they don’t get enough to eat.16
Economists still don’t fully understand why some countries grow rich while others stay poor, but most agree on the importance of institutions—things like corruption, political stability, and the rule of law. According to one recent ranking of countries’ institutions, Guatemala came a lowly 110th of 138.17 The legacy of General Ubico, the banana-driven coup, and the civil war lives on. Cold-chain technologies were designed to make bananas last longer. But banana republics, it seems, have a naturally long shelf-life.