中国郑州的三全工厂，工人们正在制作速冻饺子和汤圆。　Massimo Vitali for The New York Times

来源：纽约时报

“在四川，我们都是吃货，”陈泽民（音）说。他是世界上第一个，也是唯一一个靠速冻饺子成为亿万富翁的人。“我们有句话是这么说的，‘穷日子也要打牙祭’。”他笑着拍了拍自己不算大的肚子。“我喜欢吃。”

陈泽民今年72岁，他从没想过会成为饺子大亨。和大多数在“文化大革命”中成年的人一样，他无法选择自己的职业。上中学的时候，他是个“喜欢自己动手的家伙”。“我喜欢做电路和晶体管收音机之类东西，”他告诉我。“我申请上大学去学半导体电子学。”但是国家决定陈泽民应当成为外科医生，于是他尽职地完成了学业，课余时间学习烹饪自娱自乐：他学会了做四川泡菜、宫保鸡丁，当然，也有饺子。甚至后来他当上了郑州第二人民医院的副院长后（郑州是一个省会城市，与上海和北京之间等距），还是对白天的工作感到厌倦。“也没什么事可做，”他热切地眨着眼睛，双手合十，顶着下巴。“我在楼里到处巡视、开会，但我的大部分时间好像都在看报纸，喝茶。”他做了很多鲁贝·戈德堡（Rube Goldberg，指迂回曲折的方法去完成一些其实是非常简单的工作——译注）式的修理工作：应急修好了医院老化的设备，帮邻居修理收音机，甚至还建造了郑州的第一台洗衣机。当然，他也烹饪。几十年来，他在春节期间总是亲手做汤圆送给别人，在亲朋好友和邻居当中很有名。

后来中国开始向西方开放，毛泽东主张改革的继任者邓小平宣布一部分人可以“先富起来”，陈不仅早已厌倦了工作，两个儿子的婚事也需要用钱，他也想成为先富起来的一员。不久后，他就开始思考，用他自己的话说，是怎么“让我的汤圆长腿”。为了不让揉面、擀面、拌馅、手包的功夫白费，中国的锅贴和汤圆都是成批制作，但只能保鲜一天。凭着自己的医学背景，陈泽民想到了可以延长自己的火腿馄饨和甜芝麻馅汤圆保鲜期的办法。“外科医生得把器官和血浆之类东西冷藏起来，”他说，“外科医生的事业生涯和冷冻机是分不开的。我已经知道冷藏是最好的物理保鲜方式。”

陈泽民用医院垃圾中回收来的机械部件造出了一个双槽冷冻机，一个个地冷冻他的糯米汤圆，冷冻速度刚好让内部的馅不至于冻成冰晶，从而破坏口感。他申请的第一个专利包括制作汤圆的过程本身；第二个专利则是防止冷冻汤圆表面冻干变硬的包装。很快，陈就意识到两项创新也都可以应用在锅贴上。1992年，不顾全家人的意见，50岁的陈泽民辞去了医院的工作，租来一个小印刷厂，开创了中国第一家速冻食品企业。他给自己蹒跚起步的饺子公司起名为“三全”，是“中国共产党第十一届中央大会第三次全体会议”的缩写——这次会议于1978年召开，标志着中国向开放的市场迈出了第一步。

如今，三全公司在全国拥有七家工厂。我和陈泽民就在其中最大的一家工厂中聊天，它拥有5000名员工，每天生产的饺子高达惊人的400吨。他带我走上一座带玻璃围墙的天桥，给我看厂房第一层；我们下面有几十个工人，穿着带头罩的白色连体衣，戴着白色口罩，穿白色胶鞋，照管着大约100台饺子机，它们在一台巨大的、贴着白色瓷砖的冷藏室里排列成行。每隔几分钟，一个穿着粉色连体衣的人就会把装满猪肉的大缸从角落里的不锈钢双层门中送进来，用铲子把猪肉填满饺子机上的巨大圆锥形漏斗。在屋子另一端，质量监督员穿着黄色连身衣操作一台很难摆弄的机器，它用两只手把有瑕疵的饺子从传送带上捞起来。在生产线尽头，每小时大约有10万多个饺子像米色的卵石一样落入无穷无尽、敞着口的包装袋中。

这样的景象在郑州还在不断复制——郑州是一座烟雾笼罩的工业城市，由于陈泽民的聪明才智，它已成为中国速冻食品之都。三全的竞争对手“思念”1997年在郑州创立，两家公司包揽了全国速冻食品市场的近2/3。这个工业内唯一的一份行业出版物，每周出版的《冷冻食品》也在郑州，据该报报道，这个行业最大的10家国有企业之中，有5家在郑州。近年来的增长尤其显著，在过去五年，销售量增加了一倍，未来五年中预计还将增加一倍。

陈泽民创立三全的时候，拥有冰箱的人家不到10%。在东部人口超过一百万的大城市，如北京、上海、深圳和广州，直到20世纪80年代末，供电网络更稳定，家庭也拥有更多可支配收入后，电冰箱才开始成为大多数家庭的必需品。在郑州这样的二三线城市，电冰箱的普及来得更加缓慢。但在从1995到2007年的12年间，中国的城市家庭电冰箱普及率从7%跃升到95%。

人造的冬天开始在这个国家蔓延，从田野到港口，从仓库集散地到公路。2007年，中国拥有2.5亿立方英尺的冷藏存储容量；2017年的存储容量预计是这个数字的20倍。届时中国将拥有50亿立方英尺的存储容量，超过自冰箱发明以来冷藏存储容量就位居世界首位的美国。但是尽管如此，届时中国的人均冷藏存储容量只有3.7立方英尺，是美国人目前人均冷藏存储容量的1/3左右，也就是说，中国的冰箱发展大潮只是刚刚开始。

冰箱的发展不仅改变了中国人生产、销售和消费食品的方式。也成了天气变化中的重要元素；制冷在全球耗电量中已经占据了15%，化学冷冻剂的泄露是温室效应气体污染的主要来源之一。在所有威胁到这颗行星的环境的生活方式改变之中，或许中国人饮食方式的改变是最重要的一环。

在美国，第一家机械制冷仓库于1881年在波士顿开张，美国版的陈泽民是一个布鲁克林出生的企业家，名叫克莱伦斯·伯兹艾(Clarence Birdseye)，1924年，他发明了快速冷冻机，可以批量复制他在拉布拉多旅行期间喜欢上的美味冻鱼。至今市面上仍有以他的名字命名的“伯兹艾”品牌速冻蔬菜。在20世纪30年代，非裔美国人、电冰箱先驱弗莱德里克·麦金利·琼斯(Frederick McKinley Jones)设计了可以用卡车运输的方便冷柜；50年代，美国几乎所有人都拥有冰箱，斯旺森公司推出的冷冻“豪华火鸡宴”“有家的味道”，令需要工作的主妇们欣喜不已。

近一个世纪之后，美国人可以在阴郁的2月享用夏日的浆果。一年四季，全国各地的早餐桌上都有新鲜的非冷冻橙汁，不管距离佛罗里达州的原产地有多么遥远；小店中的冷柜里有金枪鱼刺身寿司。美国人已经习惯了把冰箱和新鲜联系起来，以至于豆奶的生产厂家还得花额外的钱把产品放在冰柜里展示，其实他们的产品放在货架上就行了。相反，中国人直到1955年才有冷藏库。尽管如今摩天楼、购物中心和高铁已经改变了中国人的生活，冰箱在个人层面上还是一种重大进步。出了还没有冰箱的人，我采访的所有年过30的中国人都记得自己拥有第一台家用冰箱的时刻。45岁的刘培军是一个物流企业家，在北京郊区拥有三家冷藏库，他还记得童年时把肉挂在窗外保持冷鲜，留到春节家宴上吃。

到了20世纪80年代末，陈泽民开始思考怎样用糯米汤圆发家致富的时候，肯德基也在中国开了第一家分店，并通过建立自己的冷藏设施和运输路线，开始在全国扩张。1996年，沃尔玛进入了繁荣发展的中国超市行业，也带来了它的美国式冷柜和冷藏配送中心。为了给2008年北京奥运会做准备，北京市政府开始着手实现雄心勃勃的“超级市场化”计划，旨在把肉食和蔬菜移入安全而现代化的、有恒温控制的食品店的食品罩之后，摆脱“湿漉漉”的露天市场——在那里，小摊贩们用临时的水管从水龙头接冷水，以此冷却食品。那段时期，管理咨询公司科尔尼(A.T.Kearney)公司做了一份报告，预测同时也开创了这个国家的冰箱大潮。它预计，到2017年，大规模冷藏每年将带来1600亿美元的附加值。

在实际中，政府向任何有志于建立冷藏库的人提供减税、津贴和土地优先使用权。2010年，政府的权势部门——国家发展与改革委员会把扩展全国的冷藏与冷冻能力列入了国家第12个五年计划的核心发展计划中去。“在邓小平理论与三个代表重要思想的指导下，”虽然我的译员在翻译技巧上无懈可击，这份声明还是让他喘不上气来，“我们必须大力发展现代物流产业。”

在城市化、GDP发展与政府支持的强大结合之下，在中国的沿海大城市，对冷藏服务的需求年同比增长超过30%。举个例子，中国冷藏物流公司烟台月(Yantai Moon，音译)的利润在2013年一年就增长了五倍之多。受政府五年计划的鼓励，与陈泽民相类的企业家们也开始建立自己的冷藏设备，为自己挣得“面子”——有点像美国富商购买橄榄球队。“如果一个独立的私营企业家建了冷库，中央政府就会注意到他，”正准备在中国开设第三家冷藏设备生产厂的美国优选冷藏服务公司的蒂姆·麦克莱伦(Tim McLellan)说道，“他就会有一张与李克强总理或者习主席的合照。”麦克莱伦说，就算“设计和技术是30年前的，就算他们完全不知道该怎样运营这个冷库”，但事情就是这样的。

除了冷冻食品与冰箱的发展，另一个关键的增长区域是物流届所谓的“冷链”，既新鲜食品低温运输系统——它是一个无缝对接的运输网络，全程实现低温控制，让容易腐坏的食品可以直接从农田进入冰箱。在美国，我们每年吃的食品中至少有70%是通过冷链运输的。相反，在中国，只有不到1/4的肉食是在冷藏条件下被屠宰、运输、存储和贩卖。水果和蔬菜的数字只有5%。

这些统计数据所反映的现象会令美国的大多数食品安全监督者感到焦虑。比如，在上海，一家大型猪肉加工厂根本就没有冷藏系统；它在晚上温度较低的时候杀猪，地点设在一个露天大棚里，以便通风。之后被去除内脏的新鲜生猪在烟雾弥漫的空气里挂上几个小时。北京的一家批发市场供应全市70%的蔬菜，小贩们小心地把一个个未经包装的西兰花从堆着冰块和稻草的卡车上拿下来。一个中年农民为抵御寒冷，穿得严严实实，他告诉我，随着冰块的融化，蔬菜不等卖掉就会腐坏，估计卡车上的1/4蔬菜都要坏掉，等天热了，坏掉的会更多。而距离三全公司那闪闪发光的自动饺子冷冻机仅有20分钟车程的地方，坐落着郑州中心市场，那里有成堆未被冷藏的生鸡，从塑料货箱里满溢出来，堆在水泥地上。

在20世纪上半叶，冰箱的崛起，辅以巴氏消毒杀菌法和新的食品安全法案，大大减少了美国由食品引起的疾病。1950年，由痢疾和腹泻（严重的疾病通常由食用了细菌感染或带有寄生虫的食物导致）引起的死亡率比1900年降低了90%还多。有理由认为，同样无懈可击、严密规范的冷链系统也可以防止中国消费者吃下腐坏的食物，从而导致疾病。食品安全问题，用共产党特色的话语来说就是“日益突出”，因此才进入了五年计划。在过去几年里，所有的大型冷冻食品公司——三全、思念和通用磨坊(General Mills)拥有的湾仔码头——尽管拥有现代设施，但都曾发生过葡萄球菌超标的丑闻。

科尔尼公司那份报告的主要作者迈克·莫里亚蒂(Mike Moriarty)说，是食品安全问题促使他开始研究中国的冷链。他所合作的跨国公司都在抱怨薄弱的搬运环节，威胁到他们的品牌在中国的声誉。莫里亚蒂的调查发现，一个中国人平均每周会有两次感觉消化不适——这是一种低水平的食品中毒，或许大多是由于细菌繁殖引起，通过冷藏食品就可以防止。“糟糕的肠胃，”莫里亚蒂总结，“是身为中国食品消费者的一种体验。”

刘培军这种新一代物流企业家正在崛起，他们正在帮助打造这个国家新生的冷链。在北京五环路外，紧挨着一家废弃的狗肉餐馆，坐落着一个没有窗户的仓库，在这里，刘培军给身上的双层北面牌夹克衫拉上拉链，准备进入华氏零度的冷藏室。里面的四层货架上堆着大盘大盘的虾饺。在微弱的光线下，我还认出了哈根达斯冰淇淋和阿拉斯加冰冻蟹爪的箱子。刘培军说，这些货物会在春节的一次网络促销活动中直接送到消费者手上。

1996年，刘培军开始担任三全等速冻食品的代理商，当时三全刚刚来到北京。“我在超市里做品尝和促销活动，”他说。“一开始人们都躲得远远的，但速冻饺子真的是没过多久就流行起来。我很快发现，真正的瓶颈不是消费者的需求不够，而是冷藏存储和配送能力不够。”最后，刘培军决定开自己的公司：快行线食品物流公司。2008年，他把一处鸡棚改建成自己的第一个仓库，存储冷冻食品，并配送给沃尔玛这样的超市，以及天猫（相当于中国版的亚马逊）这样的电商，以及高端饭馆的食品供应商。刘培军现在在北京拥有三个仓库，还有一个城市货运车队，这个仓库的设备是最老的。最近，他开始在上海租用一处仓库；为了满足这个城市不断发展的豪华市场的需求，他还在建设一个能达到零下70华氏度的超级冷藏室——这个温度用来储存高级寿司级的金枪鱼。

刘培军的企业主要为中国正在兴起的中层和上层阶级服务。但是随着更多企业进入冷藏物流市场，中国政府希望这不仅能促进食品安全，也可以制止巨大的食品浪费。在它的农产品冷链物流发展规划中，中国也制定了五年目标，希望在2015年，把蔬菜、肉类和水产品的损失率分别减少至15%、8%和10%以下。如今中国在食品方面的浪费高达每年320亿美元，如果明年内这个目标能够实现，就有望实现很大的节约，但目前看来，还有很长的路要走。在中国，各种产品几乎有一半不等进入零售市场就已经烂掉了。就连拜访一尘不染的高科技三全厂房时，我也可以看到各种冷链中的漏洞，说明肯定有不少食品不等入库就被丢弃了。

“你可能见过他们收卷心菜，”几天后，我在上海见蒂姆·麦克莱伦时，他说。“你注意到了吗，它们都没有经过冷藏。在夏天、、、、、、浪费的数量、、、、、、”他摇着头。

虽然冷藏可以防止食品浪费，但令人不快的事实是，一条完善发展的冷链（包括现场预冷站、屠宰场、配送中心、卡车、食品店和家用的冷藏设备）需要耗费大量能源。在苏州，我参观了艾默生环境优化研究中心，艾默生是全球最大的冷藏系统生产商之一。它生产的压缩机、阀门和流控计为许多中国最新的自动饺子冷冻柜和酸奶展示柜提供制冷。

艾默生亚洲分部的副总工程师克莱德·沃霍夫(Emerson)和三十年前的陈泽民一样，也是那种“喜欢自己动手的人”。沃霍夫说，一种新的冷藏设备零件，不等制造出来，他就能预测到它发出的轰鸣声。去年夏天，艾默生设计出一种节能自动控制系统，帮助西班牙的超市连锁Dia的上海店减少了25%的用电。但是，当不可避免的幻灯放映结束后，我们坐在会议桌边，我开始向马克·比尔斯(Mark Bills)提问，他是个年轻活泼的俄亥俄人，协助领导艾默生在亚洲的制冷事务，我问他假如中国建设起和美国相当的人均冷藏空间，对环境将有什么样的影响，谈话出现了尴尬的停顿。

“如果假定在可预见的未来，冷链出现两位数的增长率，”比尔斯犹豫地开了个头，又停顿下来寻找合适的措辞。

“这个，想想可预见的未来每年会有两位数的能源节约，这个”——他停顿一下——“是一种挑战。我们尽量产生积极地影响，但到最后，这会是、、、、、、”

比尔斯的声音减弱了，他摊开手，耸了耸肩，在全世界，这个手势的意思都是“我们有麻烦了”。

沃霍夫走进来说：“我们确实已经到达极限了，”他说。

计算发展中的中国冷链对气候变化的影响是极为复杂的。人工制冷对全球温室气体排放主要有两种影响。首先是制冷系统的核心，既热传导过程中产生的能量（可能是仓库的能耗，也可能是卡车运输使用的柴油），这在冷藏系统对全球变暖效应中的影响占80%（以二氧化碳排放吨数计算），并且占据了全球电力消耗的1/6。

但另一个问题在于冷藏系统本身：压缩机为了制冷需要排出和浓缩各种化学物质。其中有些冷藏设备会向大气排放废气——有的少（最现代的家用冰箱每年的排放量占总量的2%左右），有的多（商用冷藏仓库的每年平均排放量在15%）。此外，不同的冷藏系统使用不同的制冷剂，其中有些，比如氨，对全球变暖效应的影响微不足道。但在中国普遍使用的氢氟烃则被称为“超级温室气体”，因为它们比二氧化碳热几千倍。如果当前制冷剂的使用继续这个发展势头，专家估计，到2050年，氢氟烃将占据全球温室气体排放总量的一半。

更糟的是，长远来看，甚至无法确定冷藏是否能够减少食品浪费。从逻辑上说，家中的冰箱可以减少食品浪费，延缓蔬菜和牛奶腐坏，让家庭可以存储剩菜。但达特默斯大学的地理学教授苏珊娜·弗里德伯格(Susanne Freidberg)和《新鲜：关于腐烂的历史》(Fresh : A Perishable History)一书的作者说，在美国，冰箱越来越难以阻止浪费的发生。美国人也要扔掉40%的食品，但将近半数的浪费是发生在消费者层面，也就是说，发生在零售商那里和家中。“使用冰箱本来是为了防止食品浪费的，”弗里德伯格说。“但与此同时，有研究表明，从更长期看来，冷链鼓励消费者买下的食品超过了他们能吃下的量。”牛津大学主管食品与气候研究网的塔拉·加奈特(Tara Garnett)说，在冰箱存储方面，有一种“安全保障”综合征。她写道，“人们总觉得食品在冰箱里可以保存更久，结果突然发现它们已经坏了。”

除了加奈特的安全保障综合征，还有其他问题。在美国家庭中，家用冰箱的平均尺寸已经比1975年增加了将近20%，食品浪费专家乔纳森·布鲁姆(Jonatha Bloom)说，这是他所谓的“装满食品柜效应”。“现在太多人都拥有那种巨大的冰箱，我们会觉得要把它们好好装满才对，”他说。“但是不等你吃完那么多东西，它们就变坏了。”加州大学洛杉矶分校的社会科学家们对洛杉矶地区的家庭展开了一项长达四年的研究，确认囤积食物的倾向在许多家庭中的冰箱里都存在。毫不令人惊讶的是，尽管情况如此，研究中的父母们还抱怨“食物损失”，比如莴笋头在蔬菜保鲜盒里烂掉，放在里侧的酸奶遭到冷落直到过了保质期等等。布鲁姆说，对于大多数接受调查的家庭，乃至对于大多数美国人来说，家用冰箱“就是更干净、更凉爽的垃圾箱”。

冰箱在中国与美国的影响力已经不止是令地球变暖和（可能）制造食品浪费。通过人工延长易腐烂的水果、蔬菜和动物制品的保质期，冰箱几乎改变了我们对食物的了解以及我们与食物的关系——我们购买和享用食品的方式，甚至是我们对于“新鲜”的定义。

英国厨师和中餐菜谱作者法奇希亚·邓洛普(Fuchsia Dunlop)说，过去20年间，随着冰箱的兴起，她目睹了传统保存食物方式的消亡。“1994年，我第一次到中国生活的时候，”她说，“所有东西都要风干、腌制或用盐渍。在阳光充足的日子，人们会把各种蔬菜在阳光下晒干，之后还会把有些菜用盐腌，之后放在罐子里发酵。还有些蔬菜会被泡在浓盐水里，干净整洁地保存起来。在成都，他们把香肠和火腿挂在老房子的屋檐下风干，大伙的家里都有大大的陶土泡菜坛。”

不过，现在大多数老房子都已经被拆毁了。在它们的原址上盖起了崭新的高楼大厦，邓洛普告诉我，在这样的楼里，“有用护栏封闭着的阳台，所以有时可以看到有的阳台上，用晾衣杆挂着咸肉、咸鱼。”但是，她说，这种情形并不常见。如今，在美国，早已消失的腌制、盐制和烟熏传统又开始复兴了，中国更加古老、更加丰富的食品保存技巧却开始消失。

长远来看，冷链对食品系统的影响更为显著。冰箱使得食品的地域临近性和季节性消失了，这将改变中国农民的生产内容。我采访了北京蔬菜研究中心的植物学家，他们在研究常见中国农作物的选种和优化，让它们更加适合冷藏。如果成功了，这些中国蔬菜水果的地域变种和特别品种或许很快就会和同类美国产品相似，市面上的美国西红柿通常局限在三个品种，苹果通常局限在五个品种，都硬邦邦的（而且没有味道），方便在冷藏的条件下长途旅行和存储。

不是所有中国人都热衷迎接冷藏革命。在风景如画的浙江省省会杭州郊外，有一家名叫龙井草堂的饭馆，做的是从当地取材、未经工业化处理的菜式。老板戴建军45岁，喜欢一支接一支地吸烟，我问他喜不喜欢速冻饺子，他摘下厨师帽，用双手摩擦着光头，最后用平静但却隐隐带着一丝怒气的口吻说：“要我实话说，它们根本就不算食品。”

戴接连为我带来了两顿丰盛的饭菜，中间去了附近的湖上泛舟打渔，供晚上吃；席间有干蔬菜和蘑菇、醋渍萝卜、臭豆腐和在陶罐里腌了六个月的花生。他的干菜室就在旁边，用竹子围起，里面有分成两半的腌银鱼，成排挂起的火腿。在两顿饭中间，戴拿出iPad，给我看一系列各地保存小萝卜的方法，山区的人把萝卜在太阳下晾干，然后用盐渍；平原的人则是先盐渍后晾干。捕鱼归来后，其他渔民在一个木头案板上剁去鱼头，除去内脏，做鱼的大厨叫王先生，他拿出裹着黄泥的美味鸭蛋，告诉我，鸭蛋在室温下保存了30天。

其他原料都是在当天取得的。戴有一本皮面精装的日记本，记录着每批鸡肉、茶叶、芥菜和黑木耳的来源。有几笔纪录中还附有农民采摘或屠宰的照片。那天我吃到的所有东西都没有经过冷藏。

这些食物充满启示：它们复杂而轻盈，比我之前吃过的中餐有着更加微妙和丰富的质感及口味。戴自己不怎么吃东西，更喜欢抽烟，喝东西（先是绿茶，之后是白酒，这是一种清澈的烈性酒，由本地的粘稻米蒸馏而来），谈天说地时他喜欢夹杂着生动的手势，从意大利菜（口味太重，只适合培养歌剧演员）说到名厨费兰·阿德里亚(Ferran Adrià)——“他是反革命”，口吻权威，偶尔听来不知所云。

最后，那天晚上快结束的时候，我提起2012年，英国皇家学会称冰箱是食品与饮料史上最重要的发明。戴和其他人喝了不少白酒，已经面红耳赤，他们听我说完都笑得直不起腰来。

平静下来后，戴说：“在我们的圈子里，这听起来很可笑！”

作者NICOLA TWILLEY2014年08月04日。本文最初发表于2014年7月27日。　翻译：董楠 _(网文转载)

What Do Chinese Dumplings Have to Do With Global Warming?

‘In Sichuan, we’re eaters,” said Chen Zemin, the world’s first and only frozen-dumpling billionaire. “We have an expression that goes, ‘Even if you have a very poor life, you still have your teeth to please.’ ” He smiled and patted his not insubstantial belly. “I like to eat.”

Chen, who is 72, never planned on being a dumpling mogul. Like almost everyone who came of age during the Cultural Revolution, he didn’t get to choose his profession. He was a “gadget guy” during his high-school years. “I liked building circuits and crystal radios and that sort of thing,” he told me. “I applied to university to study semiconductor electronics.” But the state decided that Chen should become a surgeon, and so he dutifully completed his studies and amused himself in his free time by learning how to cook: He made Sichuan pickles, kung pao chicken and, of course, dumplings. Even after he became vice president of the Second People’s Hospital in Zhengzhou, a provincial city about halfway between Shanghai and Beijing, Chen remained bored with his day job. “I didn’t have enough to keep me busy,” he said, blinking earnestly, hands steepled beneath his chin. “I would wander round inspecting the building, and I had meetings, but I felt as if I spent most of my time reading the newspaper and drinking tea.” He engaged in lots of Rube Goldberg-like tinkering: jury-rigging the hospital’s aging equipment, fixing his neighbors’ radios and even building Zhengzhou’s first washing machine. And he cooked. For decades, his lunar New Year gifts of homemade glutinous rice balls were legendary among friends and neighbors.

But as China began to open up to the West and Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s reformist successor, declared that some people “will get rich first,” Chen, who not only was bored but had two sons’ weddings to pay for, wanted to become one of those people. It wasn’t long before he started thinking about, as he put it, giving “my rice balls legs.” Chinese pot stickers and rice balls are traditionally made in enormous batches, in order to justify the effort it takes to knead the dough, roll it out, mix the filling and wrap by hand a morsel that stays fresh for only one day. Because of his medical background, Chen had an idea for how to extend the life span of his spicy-pork won tons and sweet-sesame-paste-filled balls. “As a surgeon, you have to preserve things like organs or blood in a cold environment,” Chen said. “A surgeon’s career cannot be separate from refrigeration. I already knew that cold was the best physical way to preserve.”

Using mechanical parts harvested from the hospital junk pile, Chen built a two-stage freezer that chilled his glutinous rice balls one by one, quickly enough that large ice crystals didn’t form inside the filling and ruin the texture. His first patent covered a production process for the balls themselves; a second was for the packaging that would protect them from freezer burn. Soon enough, Chen realized that both innovations could be applied to pot stickers, too. And so in 1992, against the advice of his entire family, Chen, then 50, quit his hospital job, rented a small former print shop and started China’s first frozen-food business. He named his fledgling dumpling company Sanquan, which is short for the “Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China” — the 1978 gathering that marked the country’s first steps toward the open market.

Today, Sanquan has seven factories nationwide. The largest, in which Chen and I were chatting, employs 5,000 workers and produces an astonishing 400 tons of dumplings a day. He showed me the factory floor from a glass-walled skywalk; below us, dozens of workers — in hooded white jumpsuits, white face masks and white galoshes — tended to nearly 100 dumpling machines lined up in rows inside a vast, white-tiled refrigerator. Every few minutes, someone in a pink jumpsuit would wheel a fresh vat of ground pork through the stainless-steel double doors in the corner and use a shovel to top off the giant conical funnel on each dumpling maker. In the far corner, a quality-control inspector in a yellow jumpsuit was dealing with a recalcitrant machine, scooping defective dumplings off the conveyor belt with both hands. At the end of the line, more than 100,000 dumplings an hour rained like beige pebbles into an endless succession of open-mouthed bags.

Scenes like this are being replicated all over Zhengzhou — a smoggy industrial city that, thanks to Chen’s ingenuity, has become the capital of frozen food in China. Sanquan’s rival, Synear, was founded in Zhengzhou in 1997, and the two companies account for nearly two-thirds of the country’s frozen-food market. The city is home to five of the 10 biggest Chinese-owned companies in the industry, according to the weekly Frozen Food Newspaper, the industry’s only trade publication, which is also based in Zhengzhou. Growth has been especially rapid recently, with sales volume doubling in the past five years and expected to double again within the next five.

When Chen founded Sanquan, fewer than one in 10 of his fellow citizens even owned a refrigerator. In the eastern megacities of Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou, it wasn’t until the late 1980s — as electrical grids became more reliable and families had more disposable income — that refrigerators became a fixture of most homes. For second- and third-tier cities, like Zhengzhou, they arrived even more slowly. But in the 12 years between 1995 and 2007, China’s domestic refrigerator-ownership numbers have jumped to 95 percent from just 7 percent of urban families.

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.

In the United States, the first mechanically cooled warehouses opened in Boston in 1881. America’s Chen Zemin was a Brooklyn-born entrepreneur named Clarence Birdseye, who invented a fast-freezing machine in 1924 to replicate the taste of the delicious frozen fish he enjoyed while traveling in Labrador. (Birds Eye brand frozen vegetables still bear his name.) In the 1930s, the African-American refrigeration pioneer Frederick McKinley Jones designed a portable cooling unit for trucks; by the 1950s, pretty much everyone in America had a refrigerator, and Swanson was delighting working wives with a frozen “sumptuous turkey dinner” that “tastes home-cooked.”

For nearly a century now, Americans have been able to enjoy summer berries in the sunless depths of February. Fresh, not-from-frozen orange juice can be found year-round on the nation’s breakfast tables, no matter how many thousands of miles from its Florida source; raw tuna, in the form of sushi, is available in grocery-store chill cabinets. Americans have become so used to associating refrigeration with freshness that soy-milk manufacturers have actually paid extra to have their product displayed in a refrigerated case, despite the fact that it is perfectly shelf-stable. By contrast, the Chinese didn’t build their first refrigerated warehouse until 1955. And even as skyscrapers, shopping malls and high-speed trains have transformed life in China, the refrigerator represents, on an individual level, a significant step forward. Every Chinese person over age 30 whom I spoke to could remember wistfully the moment he got his first home refrigerator, with the exception of those who still don’t have one. Liu Peijun, a 49-year-old logistics entrepreneur who now owns and operates three refrigerated warehouses on the outskirts of Beijing, told me that one of his earliest memories from childhood was of hanging meat outside the window to keep it cold until the lunar New Year feast.

But by the late 1980s, as Chen was just beginning to wonder how his glutinous rice balls could make him rich, Kentucky Fried Chicken opened its first restaurant in China and began expanding across the country by building its own freezer infrastructure and trucking lines. Walmart jumped into the budding Chinese supermarket scene in 1996 with its own American-style chill cases and refrigerated distribution centers. 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.

In practical terms, tax breaks, subsidies and preferential access to land has been made available to anyone aspiring to build a refrigerated warehouse. In 2010, the government’s powerful National Development and Reform Commission made expanding the country’s refrigerated and frozen capacity one of the central priorities in its 12th Five-Year National Plan. “Under the guidance of Deng Xiaoping Theory and the important thought of Three Represents,” the document breathlessly declares, defeating my interpreter’s otherwise flawless translation skills, “we must vigorously develop the modern logistics industry.”

Driven by this powerful combination of urbanization, rising G.D.P. and government support, demand for refrigeration services has increased by more than 30 percent year-on-year in China’s major coastal cities. To give an example, profit at Yantai Moon, a Chinese-owned refrigeration-logistics company, increased fivefold in 2013 alone. Encouraged by the government’s Five-Year Plan, Chen’s fellow entrepreneurs are building their own cold-storage facilities to gain “face” — similar to the way a wealthy businessman in the United States might buy a football team. “If an independent private guy builds a cold-storage warehouse, the central government notices,” said Tim McLellan, a director at Preferred Freezer Services, an American company that is about to open its third cold-storage facility in China. “Now he has a picture with Premier Li Keqiang or President Xi.” That is true, he said, even if “the design and technology are 30 years old and they have no idea how to run it.”

Despite the expansion in frozen foods and refrigerators, the critical growth area is what’s known in the logistics business as the “cold chain” — the seamless network of temperature-controlled space through which perishable food is supposed to travel on its way from farm to refrigerator. In the United States, at least 70 percent of all the food we eat each year passes through a cold chain. By contrast, in China, less than a quarter of the country’s meat supply is slaughtered, transported, stored or sold under refrigeration. The equivalent number for fruit and vegetables is just 5 percent.

These statistics translate into scenes that would concern most American food-safety inspectors. In Shanghai, for example, one large pork processor has no refrigeration system; instead, it does all its slaughtering at night, when the temperature is slightly cooler, in a massive shed with open sides to allow for a cross breeze. The freshly disemboweled pigs hang for hours in the smoggy air. In Beijing, at the wholesale market that supplies 70 percent of the city’s vegetables, vendors carefully excavate individual, naked stalks of broccoli from trucks packed solid with ice and hay. A middle-aged farmer, bundled up against the cold, told me that he expects to have to throw away a quarter of the truckload — more when the weather is warm — as the ice melts and the vegetables rot faster than they can be sold. And just 20 minutes down the road from Sanquan’s gleaming, automated dumpling freezer, the central Zhengzhou market has mountains of unrefrigerated chicken carcasses, flopping out of plastic crates onto the concrete floor.

During the first half of the 20th century, the rise of refrigeration, combined with pasteurization and new food-safety laws, significantly reduced the incidence of food-borne diseases in the United States. Death rates from dysentery and diarrhea — serious illness is an all-too-common result of consuming bacteria or parasite-laden food — decreased by more than 90 percent from 1900 to 1950. It stands to reason, then, that a similarly seamless, well-regulated cold chain could stop spoiled food from reaching and sickening Chinese eaters. Food safety comes up in the Five-Year Plan as an issue that is “becoming protruding,” to use the distinctive prose of the Communist Party. In the past few years, all the major frozen-food companies — Sanquan, Synear and the General Mills-owned Wanchai Ferry — have been hit with staph-contamination scandals, despite their own modern facilities.

Mike Moriarty, a lead author on the A.T. Kearney report, said food safety was what initially prompted him to research the Chinese cold chain. The multinationals he works with kept complaining that poor handling was threatening their brand reputation in China. His investigations found that, on average, a Chinese person experiences some kind of digestive upset twice a week — a kind of low-level recurring food poisoning, much of which is probably caused by the kind of bacterial growth that could have been prevented by keeping food cold. “Bad bowels,” Moriarty said, “is just part of the drill for being a food consumer in China.”

A new generation of logistics entrepreneurs like Liu Peijun is emerging to help forge links in the country’s nascent cold chain. In a windowless warehouse next to a deserted dog-meat restaurant just off Beijing’s Fifth Ring Road, Peijun zipped up a double layer of North Face jackets, in preparation for entering his freezer room, which is kept at 0 degrees Fahrenheit. There, piled high on four-story racks, stood pallet after pallet of shrimp dumplings; in the dimly lit roar, I also spotted boxes of Häagen-Dazs ice cream and Alaskan frozen crab claws. Peijun said those were going to be delivered direct to consumers as part of an online promotion for the Chinese New Year.

Peijun started out in 1996 as an agent for frozen-food brands like Sanquan, when it first reached Beijing. “I did tastings and promotions in supermarkets,” he said. “People sort of shunned them in the beginning, but the dumplings caught on really fast. I quickly realized that the real bottleneck was not consumer demand but the lack of refrigerated storage and distribution.” Eventually, Peijun decided to start his own company, Express Channel Food Logistics. He built his first warehouse on the site of a former chicken shed in 2008, storing and delivering chilled and frozen food for grocery stores like Walmart, e-commerce sites like Tmall.com (China’s version of Amazon.com) and high-end restaurant-supply companies. That facility is the oldest of the three warehouses Peijun now owns in Beijing, in addition to a fleet of city freight vans. He has recently started renting his first warehouse in Shanghai, and he is also building a superchilled room capable of reaching minus 70 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature needed to store high-end sushi-grade tuna, destined for the city’s ever-expanding luxury market.

Businesses like Peijun’s mostly serve China’s rising middle and upper classes. But as more and more entrepreneurs enter the refrigerated-logistics market, the Chinese government is hoping not just to promote food safety but also to prevent an enormous amount of food waste. In its Development Plan for Cold-Chain Logistics of Agricultural Products, China set itself the five-year goal of reducing the loss rate for vegetables, meat and aquatic products to less than 15 percent, 8 percent and 10 percent by 2015. If the nation hits those targets next year, the effort could save a large part of the more than $32 billion in food now wasted, but at this point, there is quite a way to go. Nearly half of everything that is grown in China rots before it even reaches the retail market. Even during my visit to the spotless, high-tech Sanquan factory, I could see the sort of cold-chain gaps that suggest how so much food is tossed out before it reaches the store.

“You probably saw them receiving cabbage,” Tim McLellan said when I saw him in Shanghai a few days later. “Did you notice? None of it’s refrigerated. In the summer months . . . the amount of waste. . . .” He shook his head.

For all the food waste that refrigeration might forestall, the uncomfortable fact is that a fully developed cold chain (field precooling stations, slaughterhouses, distribution centers, trucks, grocery stores and domestic refrigerators) requires a lot of energy. In the city of Suzhou, I visited the research-and-development center of Emerson Climate Technologies, one of the largest manufacturers of refrigeration systems in the world. Emerson distributes the compressors, valves and flow controls that cool many of China’s new automated dumpling freezers and yogurt-display cases.

Clyde Verhoff, vice president of engineering for Emerson’s Asia division, is himself the sort of gadget guy that Chen Zemin was three decades ago. Verhoff claims that he can predict the hum that a new refrigeration component will make before it is even built. Last summer, Emerson helped the Spanish supermarket chain Dia consume 25 percent less electricity in their Shanghai stores by designing an energy-efficient, automated control system. But as we sat at a conference table after the inevitable PowerPoint slide show, there was an awkward pause when I asked Mark Bills, an otherwise cheerful young Ohioan who helps lead Emerson’s refrigeration business in Asia, about the environmental consequences of China’s building the same amount of cold space per person as the United States.

“If you assume that there’s going to be double-digit growth in the cold chain for the foreseeable future,” Bills began, hesitantly. He paused, searching for the right phrase.

“Well, to think that there’s going to be double-digit efficiency savings for the foreseeable future, year over year, is” — he paused — “a challenge. We’re doing what we can to help influence that in a positive light, but at the end of the day, there’s going to be. . . .”

Bills let his sentence trail off, throwing open his hands and shrugging in the universal gesture for “we’re in trouble.”

Verhoff stepped in. “We’re really hitting the limit of what can be done,” he said.

Calculating the climate-change impact of an expanded Chinese cold chain is extremely complicated. Artificial refrigeration contributes to global greenhouse-gas emissions in two main ways. First, generating the power (whether it be electricity for warehouses or diesel fuel for trucks) that fuels the heat-exchange process, which is at the heart of any cooling system, accounts for about 80 percent of refrigeration’s global-warming impact (measured in tons of CO2) and currently consumes nearly a sixth of global electricity usage.

But the other problem is the refrigerants themselves: the chemicals that are evaporated and condensed by the compressors in order to remove heat and thus produce cold. Some of that refrigerant leaks into the atmosphere as a gas — either a little (roughly 2 percent a year from the most up-to-date domestic refrigerators) or a lot (on average, 15 percent from commercial refrigerated warehouses). In addition, different refrigeration systems use different refrigerants, some of which, like ammonia, have a negligible global-warming impact. But others, like the hydrofluorocarbons that are popular in China, are known as “supergreenhouse gases,” because they are thousands of times more warming than CO2. If current trends in refrigerant usage were to continue, experts project that hydrofluorocarbons would be responsible for nearly half of all global greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050.

To make matters worse, it’s not even clear that refrigeration reduces food waste over the long term. Logically, it would seem that a refrigerator should result in less food waste at home, slowing down the rate at which vegetables rot and milk sours, as well as allowing families to save leftovers. But Susanne Freidberg, a geography professor at Dartmouth College and author of “Fresh: A Perishable History,” says that refrigeration in the United States has tended to merely change when the waste occurs. Americans, too, throw away 40 percent of their food, but nearly half of that waste occurs at the consumer level, meaning in retail locations and at home. “Food waste is a justification for refrigeration,” Freidberg said. “But at the same time, there are studies that show that, over the longer time frame, the cold chain encourages consumers to buy more than they’re going to eat.” Tara Garnett, who runs the Food Climate Research Network at Oxford University, says there is a “safety net” syndrome of refrigerated storage. In the refrigerator, she writes, “the food can always keep longer, goes the thinking, except that suddenly one finds it has gone off.”

In U.S. homes, the size of the average domestic refrigerator has increased by almost 20 percent since 1975, leading the food-waste expert Jonathan Bloom to identify what he calls the “full-cupboard effect,” over and above Garnett’s safety-net syndrome. “So many people these days have these massive refrigerators, and there is this sense that we need to keep them well stocked,” he said. “But there’s no way you can eat all that food before it goes bad.” A four-year observational study of Los Angeles-area families carried out by U.C.L.A. social scientists confirmed this tendency to stockpile food in not just one but in multiple refrigerators. Unsurprisingly, given the clutter, parents in the study complained of “losing food,” as heads of lettuce rotted out of sight in the crisper and pots of yogurt in the back languished past their sell-by dates. For most of these families, as for most Americans, Bloom says, home refrigerators simply “serve as cleaner, colder trash bins.”

The impact of refrigeration, in both China and the United States, goes beyond warming the planet and (perhaps) reducing food waste. By artificially extending the life span of otherwise perishable fruits, vegetables and animal products, refrigeration changes almost everything about how we know and interact with food: how we shop, what we eat and even the definition of the word “fresh.”

Fuchsia Dunlop, a British cook and author who writes about Chinese cuisine, described how she saw traditional food-preservation skills die out over the past two decades, as refrigeration gained ground. “When I first lived in China, in 1994,” she said, “everything was dried, pickled or salted. On sunny days, people would be laying all kinds of vegetables out to dry in the sun, and some of them afterward would be rubbed with salt and put in jars to ferment. Other vegetables would be pickled in brine and preserved neat. In Chengdu, they would hang sausages and pork under the eaves of the old houses to dry, and there were these great clay pickle jars in people’s homes.”

Now, though, most of those old houses have been demolished. In the new, high-rise apartment buildings that have been built in their place, Dunlop told me, “you do have balconies that are enclosed with bars, so sometimes you can see salt meat and salt fish on coat hangers out on them.” But, she said, it’s rare. At the moment that America’s long-lost pickling, salting and smoking traditions are being revived, China’s much richer and more ancient preservation techniques are dying out.

Over the long term, the cold chain’s effects on the food system are likely to be even more significant. By removing constraints of proximity and seasonality, refrigeration can change what Chinese farmers produce. I met with plant scientists at the Beijing Vegetable Research Center who are selecting and optimizing the varieties of popular Chinese greens that stand up best to cold storage. If they are successful, the incredible regional variety and specificity of Chinese fruits and vegetables may soon resemble the homogeneous American produce aisle, which is often limited to three tomato varieties and five types of apple for sale, all hardy (and flavorless) enough to endure lengthy journeys and storage under refrigeration.

Still, not all Chinese people are ready to embrace the refrigeration revolution. Dai Jianjun is the 45-year-old chain-smoking chef of Longjing Caotang, a restaurant on the outskirts of Hangzhou, the scenic capital of Zhejiang province, which serves an entirely locally sourced, anti-industrial cuisine. When I asked him how he liked frozen dumplings, he took off his corduroy cap, rubbed his shaved head with both hands and finally, in a calm voice that carried a distinct undercurrent of anger, said, “If I may speak without reserve, they’re not food.”

Over the course of two epic meals, separated only by a short paddle on a local lake to catch fish for dinner, Dai fed me dried vegetables and mushrooms, vinegar-pickled radishes, fermented “stinky” tofu and peanuts that six months earlier had been packed into earthenware jars. I visited his on-site bamboo-walled drying shed, where salted silvery fish halves and hunks of pork hung in orderly rows. Between courses, Dai pulled out his iPad to show me a series of videos that demonstrated how radish preservation varies by topography, with hill people drying the vegetable in the sun before salting it and flatlanders working in reverse order. After our boat ride, as the rest of the fishermen beheaded and gutted the catch on a wooden block, the fish boss, who went by the name Mr. Wang, prepared a particularly delicious yellow-mud-preserved duck egg, which, he told me, keeps at room temperature for 30 days.

The rest of the ingredients were harvested or foraged that day. Dai keeps leatherbound purchase diaries documenting the provenance of every chicken, tea leaf, mustard green and black fungus. Several entries are accompanied by photos of a farmer picking or slaughtering the item in question. Not a single thing I was served that day had been refrigerated.

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The food was revelatory: complex but light and offering a more subtle yet diverse range of textures and flavors than I had previously encountered in Chinese cuisine. Dai himself barely ate, preferring to smoke, drink (first green tea, then baijiu, a clear spirit distilled locally from glutinous rice) and gesticulate expressively while issuing definitive, if occasionally bizarre, pronouncements on everything from Italian cuisine (too heavy and only good for producing opera singers) to Ferran Adrià (“anti-revolutionary”).

Finally, toward the end of the evening, I mentioned that, in 2012, Britain’s Royal Society had named refrigeration as the most important invention in the history of food and drink. With their faces already reddened from the liberal consumption of baijiu, Dai and the other men all convulsed with laughter.

Once he had composed himself, Dai said, “Within our circle, you sound ridiculous!”