In many parts of the existence , having a refrigerator is part of everyday life sentence . But in China , only 7 % of people in cities had refrigerators in 1995 . Now that phone number is over 95 % . Writer Nicola Twilley has an article in the New York Times about how this simple technology has changed everything .
Photo by Massimo Vitali
Twilley , who is turn on a book project about infrigidation , journeying to Zhengzhou , a urban center that has become China ’s unofficial fixed food chapiter . There , “ frozen dumpling billionaire ” Chen Zemin drop out his day job as a surgeon to become one of the country ’s first frozen food entrepreneur . Since then , rival companies have sprung up in the region to contend with his frozen dumpling and rice ball imperium .
Of of course , when you bring refrigeration to a nation of millions , there are always unexpected consequences .
compose Twilley :
Because of his aesculapian background , Chen had an approximation for how to go the life brace of his spicy - pork won piles and sweet - sesame - paste - occupy balls . “ As a surgeon , you have to keep up thing like organs or blood in a cold-blooded environment , ” Chen say . “ A surgeon ’s life history can not be separate from refrigeration . I already knew that cold was the good strong-arm way to preserve . ”
Using mechanical role harvested from the infirmary junk pile , Chen built a two - stagecoach deep-freeze that chilled his viscid Elmer Leopold Rice balls one by one , apace enough that large ice quartz glass did n’t spring inside the pick and ruin the texture . His first patent of invention cross a production process for the balls themselves ; a 2nd was for the packaging that would protect them from freezer sting . Soon enough , Chen realized that both creation could be applied to pot stickers , too . And so in 1992 , against the advice of his integral family , Chen , then 50 , quit his infirmary job , rented a little former mark shop and started China ’s first frozen - food business . He named his freshman dumpling society 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 opened market .
Today , Sanquan has seven factory nationally . The largest , in which Chen and I were chatting , hire 5,000 workers and produce an astounding 400 ton of dumplings a day . He show me the factory floor from a field glass - walled skywalk ; below us , dozens of workers — in hooded white jumpsuits , white face masks and white arctic — be given to closely 100 dumpling machines lined up in rows inside a vast , white - tiled icebox . Every few instant , someone in a pinkish jumpsuit would wheel a novel vat of land pork through the stainless - sword double door in the corner and employ a shovel to top off the jumbo conical funnel on each dumpling manufacturing business . In the far quoin , a quality - restraint inspector in a chicken jumpsuit was dealing with a recalcitrant auto , scooping defective dumpling off the conveyor swath with both hand . At the conclusion of the line , more than 100,000 dumpling an hr rain down like beige pebbles into an sempiternal taking over of open - mouthed pocketbook .
scene like this are being reduplicate all over Zhengzhou — a smoggy industrial urban center that , thanks to Chen ’s ingenuity , has become the uppercase of rooted food in China . Sanquan ’s rival , Synear , was founded in Zhengzhou in 1997 , and the two company describe for near two - third of the country ’s glacial - food market . The city is home to five of the 10 large Chinese - owned company in the industry , according to the hebdomadary Frozen Food Newspaper , the industry ’s only trade publishing , which is also base in Zhengzhou . ontogeny has been especially rapid recently , with sales mass repeat in the retiring five year and expected to repeat again within the next five .
When Chen founded Sanquan , fewer than one in 10 of his fellow citizen even have a refrigerator . In the easterly megacities of Beijing , Shanghai , Shenzhen and Guangzhou , it was n’t until the later 1980s — as electric grids became more reliable and kinsfolk had more disposable income — that refrigerators became a fixture of most homes . For second- and third - tier cities , like Zhengzhou , they arrive even more slow …
This is not simply transforming how Formosan people grow , distribute and wipe out solid food . It also stands to become a formidable new factor in climate change ; cooling is already responsible for 15 percent of all electrical energy consumption worldwide , and leaks of chemical substance refrigerants are a major reservoir of greenhouse - flatulency pollution .
scan the rest of Twilley ’s fascinating articlein the New York Times .
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