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Thursday, December 09, 2004 |
OT: The Birds-day Of A Very Useful Man
Today is Clarence Birdseye's 118th birthday. Birdseye was the inventor of modern frozen food, but he saw himself -- rightly -- as far more talented than that:
The public customarily thinks of me as an inventor....but inventing is only one of my lines. I am also a bank director, a president of companies, a fisherman, an author, an engineer, a cook, a naturalist, a stockholder, a consultant, and a dock-walloper.He went to Amherst, where he helped to pay for his tuition by trapping rats and selling them to a local geneticist, and "selling live frogs for use as reptile food to the Bronx Zoo". Money got increasingly tight, and he dropped out to join the U.S. Biological Survey. Eventually, he would end up in Labrador in the fur trade, in a cabin 250 miles away from civilization with his wife and new son, traveling extended distances by dogsled. It was then he learned from the native Eskimos the principles of quick freezing that would make him a very, very rich man:
He noted that duck and caribou frozen in the extreme cold of midwinter were better than those frozen in the spring or fall. He noticed how easily food was preserved in the arctic climate. He watched the Eskimos' rudimentary quick-freeze methods, a process by which items are frozen at such a speed that only small ice crystals are able to form, and noted that quickly frozen fish retained flavor and texture better than fish frozen slowly. In an early experiment in freezing vegetables, Birdseye, in order to provide fresh vegetables to his family in this remote area, froze cabbage for later use.The big breakthroughs were yet to come: he had to develop a means to get frozen foods to market, and he had to be able to do it year-round. Working in his kitchen "with an investment of $7 for an electric fan, buckets of brine, and cakes of ice," Birdseye came up with a wax-paper packaging that could be sold in stores; and later, with a group of investors, invented a practical freezer. But it became rapidly clear that the frozen foods revolution would require enormous amounts of capital (stores didn't have frozen foods sections yet, and refrigerated railcars hadn't even been invented). Birdseye was not deterred. In the depths of the Depression, he arranged for freezers to be leased to grocers, and in 1944 he leased the first refrigerated railcars to set up a nationwide distribution network.... He entered the wholesale fish business in 1922 and experimented with the process of quick freezing food that he had learned while in Labrador. He later said, "My contribution was to take Eskimo knowledge and the scientists' theories and adapt them to quantity production."
A man of enormous and wide-ranging tastes and abilities, for whom we have a great deal to thank: he is the fellow without whom most batchelors would starve.
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