英国卫报:小冰块下的大生意(1)（在线收听）

The ice in your drink comes from one of two places: your freezer, or someone else's. For homemade ice, the supply chain is reassuringly familiar: water goes into the freezer, and a bit later, ice comes out. But what about the ice cubes that you bought from a supermarket, or extracted, by the handful, from a plastic bag at a drinks party? They were frozen when you took possession of them; they are long gone now. Where did they start out, back when they were water?

饮料中的冰块来自两个地方：你的冰箱，或者别人的冰箱。对于自制冰块来说，其供应链是令人放心的：水进入冰箱，过一会儿，冰块就出来了。但是，你从超市买来的冰块，或者在酒会上从塑料袋里一把一把取出来的冰块来自哪里呢？当你拿到它们的时候它们已经冻好了，现在它们早已消失。它们是从哪里开始的，当它们还是水的时候？

Follow their journey all the way back from the point of sale – through warehouses and depots and cold storage facilities and innumerable temperature-controlled lorries – and there's a decent chance that most of them came from the same place: an industrial estate just outside South Kirkby in West Yorkshire. The company that made them is called The Ice Co, and if you haven't heard of it, you have almost certainly used its products.

我们从销售点开始，一路全程追踪：经过一个又一个仓库、冷藏设施和无数的温度控制卡车——大部分的冰块很有可能来自同一个地方：即西约克郡南柯比郊外的一个工业区。生产这些冰块的公司叫The Ice Co，就算你没有听说过它的大名，但几乎可以肯定的是，你用过它的产品。

If you have grabbed a bag of ice from the freezer of a corner shop on a hot day, The Ice Co probably supplied it. If you have bought ice from Tesco, Sainsbury's, Waitrose, Morrisons or Ocado, The Ice Co thanks you for your business. If you have ever plonked a bottle of prosecco into a house party ice bucket filled with cylindrical cubes, or pulled a cold can of Coke from the chilling bins at Glastonbury, or – indeed – endured the Arctic Enema ice bath obstacle at a Tough Mudder endurance course, it is highly likely that the ice originated in The Ice Co's ice factory, a long, flat building nestled in the countryside between Doncaster and Leeds.

如果你在一个大热天从街角商店的冰箱里拿了一袋冰，它很有可能来自The Ice Co公司。如果你在特斯科、森宝利、维特罗斯、莫里森或者奥凯多（均为英国商超）购买过冰块，The Ice Co公司感谢您的惠顾。如果你曾经把一瓶普罗赛克葡萄酒倒入满是圆柱形冰块的家庭聚会冰桶中，或者从格拉斯顿伯里音乐节的冰柜里拿出一罐冰镇可乐，或者在一次“最强泥人”耐力赛中忍受了冰浴的障碍，这些冰很有可能都来自The Ice Co的制冰厂，那是一栋长而扁平的建筑，坐落在唐卡斯特和利兹之间的一个乡村。

Like central heating and hot water, ice is one of those minor luxuries we scarcely think to notice. And yet The Ice Co has turned frozen water into a 38m pound brand – at a retail price of roughly 1 pound a bag, that equates to plenty of people indulging every year.

就像中央暖气和热水一样，冰块是我们几乎不会注意到的小奢侈品之一。然而，The Ice Co公司已经将冷冻水变成了市值3800万英镑的品牌——零售价大约是每袋1英镑，这告诉我们每年都有很多人为其买单。

It is perhaps surprising that there is even a market for packaged ice in the UK – let alone one that requires The Ice Co to produce 400 tonnes of the stuff per day, or 5bn cubes per year. We do not lack the specialised equipment required to make our own ice: 98% of British homes contain some form of freezer. We do not, as a rule, have issues with our drinking water, so freezing our own in plastic or silicone trays is not unsafe. While British summers can be warm, they are nothing like summer in the southern US's so-called Sun Belt, the modern ice trade's heartland, where the largest operators produce over 1bn cubes a day. We do not, strictly speaking, even need ice in our drinks – no one does! – which means that we must have acquired a taste for it; so much so, over the years, that we are now willing to pay for the privilege.

或许令人惊讶的是，英国竟然有一个包装冰的市场——更不用说一个需要Ice Co每天生产400吨或每年50立方的市场了。我们并不缺乏自制冰块所需的特殊设备：98%的英国家庭都有某种冰箱。我们的饮用水一般来说没有问题，所以我们把自己家的水放在塑料或硅胶托盘里冷冻并非不安全。英国的夏天可能很暖和，但和美国南部所谓的“阳光地带”的夏天截然不同。“阳光地带”是现代冰贸易的中心地带，在那里，最大的冰商每天能生产10亿立方冰块。严格地说，我们并不需要在饮料里加冰块——没有人需要！——这说明我们一定是已经尝到了它的某种味道，以致于这么多年来已经愿意为这个特权付钱。