One of the joys of a collaborative intellectual endeavor is that a small and spontaneous idea can quickly turn into a fascination or even obsession that develops a life of its own. Fueled by mutual enthusiasm, it can become a large-scale scholarly undertaking that eventually absorbs more time and energy than one (or two) can reasonably afford. However, it can also herald great insights and be sheer fun. This article on regimes of freshness is in many ways the intermediate result of such a dynamic. It is the outcome of a long-lasting collective adventure into what we eventually termed the 'cryogenic culture': a large-scale historical formation brought about by the social implementation of artificial coldness since the late nineteenth century. We argue that this culture systematically produces and fundamentally depends on artificial coldness, for example, for food supply, electricity generation, mobility, telecommunication, health care, biomedical products, and reproductive technologies. Today, nearly every aspect of life is affected by refrigeration techniques: we cool food, drugs, semen, cells, blood, organs, tissues, and bodies as well as air condition environments. Increasingly, we also cool and climate control entire cities-even the global climate is an object of concerted (or refused) cooling efforts. This concurrence of several researchers half a world apart simultaneously beginning to research the rise of the cryogenic culture is far from being a coincidence. With the dissemination of technologies of cryopreservation in recent years, frozen biological substances of any provenance have become valuable and highly contested resources. This not only holds true in reproductive medicine and biotechnology, but also in pharmaceutics, transplantation surgery, the food industry, conservation biology, epidemiology, and public health (