Category:

To make this daily game of warehouse Jenga even more challenging, certain products can't go next to each other. In the cooler, you have to make sure foods containing allergens—soy, nuts, dairy, wheat— aren't touching; in the freezer, that's okay. Organic products shouldn't sit underneath conventional ones; raw foods mustn't be stacked above cooked. "You have to think about odor," added Espinoza. "Onions and seafood can be quite potent." Pizza sauce and pepperoni are also disturbingly pungent: just a few hours spent picking Schwan's Big Daddy's Pepperoni and Freschetta Supreme sausage frozen pizzas was enough to make my woolen beanie and furry coat collar stink for days. Like natural fibers, bread and cheese have a tendency to absorb the odors to which they're exposed, as does ice cream, which can't even be stored in the same room as the pizzas.

"Ice cream's a whole different level of complexity," said Espinoza. "It's mostly air, so you can't stack it because it will compress."*3] Making sure food at the bottom of the pallet doesn't get squashed by the weight of the food above is another requirement for successful stocking, as is ensuring that the finished cube is evenly weighted, so as not to risk tipping the forklift.

*  *  *

Determined to earn my cryospheric credentials, I was thrilled when I took just 24 minutes and 40 seconds of my HQ-allotted 29:32 to complete my first picking task. But after less than half an hour in the freezer, the chill had crept in. My fingers and toes were numb; my nose wouldn't stop running. "New guys will put tissue up their noses," said Amato. "You see guys who want to work, and they just can't handle the cold." Men with facial hair grew miniature icicles in their mustaches and beards; the one guy wearing glasses had to stop and wipe off the condensation from his breath every few minutes. Everyone gets sick in their first few months on the job, I was told; colds, coughs, and "freezer flu" are a year-round phenomenon in the cold-storage industry.

Although the idea that working in the cold would lead to 'catching' cold makes intuitive sense, scientists have only just discovered why. Until recently, the general uptick in respiratory illness in the winter was blamed on the fact that people spend more time indoors together, swapping viruses, in cooler weather. That's likely a factor, but cold is also directly, not just indirectly, responsible for making us sick, thanks to a previously unknown immune mechanism: cells in our nostrils that are capable of detecting incoming microbes and releasing a swarm of tiny little antiviral bubbles to surround and neutralize them. According to the Boston-based team behind the breakthrough, at forty degrees, nostril cells release significantly fewer and less potent defensive bubbles than they do at seventy-five degrees, making it easier for viruses to stage a successful infection.

This recent discovery aside, much remains to be learned about the health impact of working in the cold or the ways in which humans adapt to life in the cryosphere, either natural or artificial. Over the years, researchers studying Arctic explorers, lumberjacks, miners, and refrigerated warehouse employees have consistently found that exposure to cold results in a rapid pulse rate as well as higher blood pressure, as the heart works harder to pump cold-thickened blood around cold-constricted blood vessels.

Cold stress can literally be measured in the blood of forklift truck operators: scientists found that plasma levels of the fight-or-flight hormone noradrenaline were significantly higher after a shift in the freezer, as opposed to the same amount of time in an ambient warehouse. Muscles contract and tendons tighten in the cold, making them more prone to strains and tears; inhaling cold air can trigger bronchial spasms, inducing asthma or even a chronic pulmonary condition known as Eskimo lung. There's even some evidence that low temperatures wreak psychological harm by increasing feelings of loneliness, rejection, and exclusion. After fifteen years in the Siberian gulag, including "solitary confinement in ice," Russian writer Varlam Shalamov concluded that "the main means for depraving the soul is the cold."

On the other hand, a growing body of research is focused on the ways in which exposure to cold temperatures improves insulin sensitivity and blood-sugar control. Although references to the health benefits of cold-water immersion date back to ancient Egypt, over the past decade, ice baths and so-called wild swimming have become the focus of both medical research and social media hype as something of a cure-all. Denis Blondin, a Quebecois scientist and former personal trainer whose research is focused on the therapeutic impacts of cold exposure, told me that when he sits people in a specially designed cooling suit for three hours, they experience the metabolic equivalent of a medium exercise training session. "It's the combination of muscle contractions from shivering and the stimulus that you're getting from the cold that really improve your ability to handle glucose in your blood," he said. "There are some changes to your lipid profiles, too, but there's not enough data on that yet."

Still, despite the growing body of evidence for cold's benefits, Blondin cautioned me against the conclusion that working a shift in an Americold freezer would automatically make me healthier. Participants in Blondin's studies spend their three hours of low-temperature exposure sitting still, absorbing cold's benefits without the need to pump their syrupy blood around narrowed vasculature or strain their cold-contracted muscles. Amato, Jimmy, and the rest of my new colleagues spend their eight hours in near-constant motion. According to Blondin, it's likely that both things can be true: "You can be at higher risk if you work in a cold environment 'and' the cold can be beneficial."