Announcing the Winner of the 2025 Nach Waxman Prize for Food and Beverage Scholarship
Frostbite by Nicola Twilley wins
the Nach Waxman Prize for Food and Beverage Scholarship
Kitchen Arts & Letters and Maron Waxman are delighted to announce that the 2025 Nach Waxman Prize has—by unanimous choice of the panel of judges—been awarded to Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves by Nicola Twilley (Knopf). The prize carries an award of $5,500.
We invite you to join Nicola Twilley and the Waxman Prize judges for a discussion of this remarkable book in a free Zoom meeting on Friday, May 23 at 3 pm ET.
https://us05web.zoom.us/j/86967964780?pwd=8nGauXiQbrrhdprkCF3mEKpLfUbUhk.1
In addition, the judges selected for honorable mention A Twist in the Tale: How the Humble Anchovy Flavoured Cuisine by Christopher Beckman (Hurst) and One Thousand Vines: A New Way to Understand Wine by Pascaline Lepeltier (Mitchell Beazley).
Also shortlisted for the Prize out of nearly 50 entries were The Molino: A Memoir by Melanu Martinez (University of Arizona Press) and Intoxicating Pleasures: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey after Prohibition by Lisa Jacobson (University of California Press).
The Nach Waxman Prize recognizes a book published in the United States in the previous calendar year which is likely to attract new readers to the field of food scholarship or to alter significantly the direction of future research. The winning book must be well-written and accessible to motivated general audience readers.
In the words of the prize judges, Frostbite does so remarkably well:
Darra Goldstein: Frostbite illuminates the invisible world of the cold chain—the modern journey of perishable food from field to table. In an exemplary blend of rigorous scholarship and engaging writing, Nicola Twilley chronicles the history of refrigeration, from its miraculous ability to preserve foods to the significant ills it has brought to the global food chain, including the compounding effects of refrigeration’s heat in our dangerously warming world. Twilley’s research is both archival and empirical. In order to understand the sensory as well as the scientific properties of cold, she endured painful shifts in a refrigerated warehouse and visited numerous food-processing facilities. Thus, she is able to write as fluidly about the human sensation of cold and the smell of aging meat as about the respiration rates of lettuce, and her description of silvery, two-story tanks of frozen orange-juice concentrate glimmering in the half-light of a Delaware warehouse is memorable. While acknowledging the undeniable advantages of refrigeration, Twilley rues that thanks to cold’s preservative properties, many modern consumers have never tasted truly fresh food. In gaining shelf life through refrigeration, we have lost deliciousness.
Morna Livingston: Nicola Twilley's Frostbite is the perfect guide to the "engineered winter" in refrigerated warehouses. Because much refrigeration history is either lost to common memory or was never in the public eye to begin with, her chapters on extending food’s edibility hold successive surprises. Beginning with packing food in blocks of winter ice—to storing it in enormous cold, atmosphere-controlled rooms—Twilley enlivens her work by delineating the quirky, intelligent, and unusual people who made the cold system possible. She follows inventions of equipment and packaging with sketches showing how what our refrigerators hold may define our personalities; calculates the chilling cost of cooling on the environment; and speaks of possible alternatives to refrigeration on fruit, like adhesive skins. Twilley's thoughtful history will make it hard to open any refrigerator quite the same way again, much less consign fresh-picked blueberries to their chill.
Mayukh Sen: In a year full of formidable food histories, Nicola Twilley’s Frostbite rose to the top of a crowded field for its unique subject, intrepid reporting, and character-driven storytelling. Twilley’s immersive, engaging prose pulls readers into a world they may not have thought much about and urges them to look at it with fresh eyes.
The Prize is named for Nach Waxman (1936-2021), the founder of Kitchen Arts & Letters bookstore, where he ardently championed the work of food and beverage scholars, as well as other authors who explored and illuminated the culture behind cooking, eating, and drinking. More information about Nach Waxman, as well as the Prize judges, can be found here.
