Whether it ’s frozen waffles for breakfast or a bag of frozen pea to supplement dinner , you credibly take the accessibility , affordability , and gadget of frozen solid food for granted . Yet thing like tasty flash-frozen pizza pie were once a tobacco pipe dream , and we can thank entrepreneurClarence Birdseyefor making it possible to purchase high - timbre frozen foods year - round .
Call of the Wild
Born in Brooklyn in 1886 , Birdseye was fascinated by the open . As a child , he love reading about adventurous hunters and trapper , and teach himself taxidermy . After calibrate from high school in Montclair , New Jersey , he shortly lick as an inspector for the New York City Sanitation Department and as an part boy on Wall Street . He then set out college at Amherst , where hestudiedbiology , and where his fellow bookman badger him for his passionate peculiarity about anuran , betrayer , and bugs .
After he was forced to flatten out of Amherst due to circumscribed finances , he ricochet from caper to Book of Job : Birdseye journey to Arizona and New Mexico to hit the books animal populations as an adjunct naturalist for the Department of Agriculture ’s U.S. Biological Survey ; worked at an indemnity company ; recorded the amount of snow that New York City removed from the street after blizzard ; and , in the summer of 1910 , collectedticksto research Rocky Mountain spy fever , a potentially calamitous tick - borne disease .
Then , in 1912 , Birdseye traveled to Labrador , where he became tortuous in the pelt swop . It was an experience that would change his life — and the world .
He notice that the Pisces frozen by the Inuit smack well once thawed and had a more appealing texture than any rooted food he had eat before . After keep an eye on their techniques and conducting his own experimentation , he eventually realized that the cold temperatures in Labrador — often -30 ° farad or colder — freeze food at once , preserving its appreciation , texture , show , and nutrients . With that , Birdseye had the penetration necessary for turning tasty frozen food into a business organisation . He would subsequently say , " immediate freezing was conceived , born , and nourish on a unknown combination of ingeniousness , stick - to - itiveness , lather , and good luck . "
A Cool Idea
Frozen food was available to Americans in the other twentieth century , but it was far from favour : Because items were stop dead tardily just around 32 ° F and in great quantities , usually over the course of several days , the food was oftenmushyand tasted unappealing . ( In fact , it was so bad that New Yorkbannedit from state prisons as inhumane . ) Birdseye recognize he could do better .
After long time of experiments , Birdseye finally hit the bullseye : He develop two methods of instant - freezing food for thought that would prevent large ice crystal from forming and degrade the intellectual nourishment ’s quality . Each involved put packages of food between alloy — first smash cool down with calcium chloride , then hollow plates filled with an ammonia - based refrigerant — which keep taste and grain entire by allowing only lilliputian ice quartz to shape . In 1924 , he help happen the General Seafoods Company , which became Birds Eye Frosted Food Company , and by 1930 , after a purchase by General Foods , he was peddling his glacial food in supermarkets , delighting customers with frozen meat , Pisces , oysters , raspberries , pea , and spinach .
In the 1940s , Birdseye was capable to allot his frozen food across the country by using refrigerated boxcars . Besides freezing , packaging , and market his frozen solid food , he also build a distribution base to enrapture it to retail computer memory across the country . World War II was a boon for business : ration on can intellectual nourishment — which were sent to soldiers abroad — mean that people buy more flash-frozen food for thought .
A Legacy of Invention
Besides establishing his frozen foods society , Birdseye was a fertile inventor who filed century of patents for everything from an infrared heat lamps to a recoilless harpoon gun for whales . Birdseye also spend fourth dimension in Peru todevelopa method acting of rapidly convert sugar cane waste product into paper mush . When he was n’t working , he enjoy hiss watching and spending time with Eleanor , his wife of more than four tenner . Hediedof tenderness bankruptcy in 1956 in New York City .
Today , nigh a century after Birdseye began selling frozen food , his company , Birds Eye , still sells frozen vegetables . And although food vogue have been shifting from frozen to fresh , local nutrient , many people in the worlddon’t haveyear - round access to refreshful produce . That means frozen nutrient — and Birdseye ’s contribution to it — won’t become disused anytime soon .
Additional source : Birdseye : The Adventures of a Curious Man
