Clarence Birdseye: The Arctic Adventurer Who Invented Frozen Food

Lee Habeeb (00:10):
This is Lee Habeeb and this is Our American Stories. If you’re like me, your freezer is packed with frozen foods, frozen oj TV dinners, frozen pizzas, snacks, snickers, bars, ice cream. But it’s an enormous operation to get it all there, And it all started with a man named Clarence Birdseye.

Lee Habeeb (00:30):
The story behind the Birdseye logo we see in every frozen food section is the key to understanding how one idea completely changed how we eat and cook, and how it created a three hundred billion dollar industry. Here to tell the story is Mark Kurlansky, author of Frozen in Time: Clarence Birdseye’s Outrageous Idea About Frozen Food,

Lee Habeeb (00:56):
Take it away, Mark.

Mark Kurlansky (01:01):
New York City was being reshaped. The Statue of Liberty was installed in the harbor and dedicated the year of Birdseye’s birth. Eight years later, the city began digging tunnels for subways. These were exciting times in New York and in America. In the nineteenth century, there was a notable difference between the culture of American inventors and that

Mark Kurlansky (01:23):
of Europeans. European inventors reveled in the theoretical, sometimes even shunning patents lest they give the impression of harbor and lowbrow commercial interests, whereas Americans thought inventions were pointless without practical and commercial application. There were, of course exceptions. Daimler,

Mark Kurlansky (01:46):
who was an engineer and now a scientist, did start producing automobiles, and Chardonnet, who was a scientist and colleague of Louis Pasteur, did start synthetic textile milk, the inventor Rayon actually, but many Europeans were content in the world of the theoretical, whereas Americans had a Puritan belief that

Mark Kurlansky (02:07):
anyone who invented something had a moral obligation to put it to useful purpose. The press would criticize inventors who failed to do this. Clarence Birdseye was born in Brooklyn in the eighteen eighties, and so he was a nineteenth century man, although he lived into the nineteen fifties, he

Mark Kurlansky (02:27):
was shaped by the nineteenth century and many ways you could see this. So he was born into the age of the Industrial Revolution, in an age of inventing light bulbs, cars, fountain pens, rolled film. All sorts of things were invented in his childhood or just before he was born. So

Mark Kurlansky (02:49):
he grew up with this idea that the really exciting people were inventors. Brooklyn and Manhattan. They were separate cities, and they were among the fastest growing cities in America. And the reason for this was they had gotten refrigeration in the ice boxes, which I remember for my grandparents when I was a kid, this big refrigerator looking thing

Mark Kurlansky (03:15):
where somebody would come along with a huge block of ice and you kept things cold in it. And what this meant was it was much easier for urban people to have food. Up until then, most people lived in agriculture areas because that’s where the food was. So now in fast growing Brooklyn and New York, people were having

Mark Kurlansky (03:35):
refrigerated food. I think over a million tons of ice was sold every year in Brooklyn. This was the most ice consuming place in the world. Bird’s eye was unusual was from the time he was a kid, he was fascinated by nature. He loved hunting, and he loved doing

Mark Kurlansky (03:55):
things that would show a profit. Very commercially minded person in America, an important idea is an idea that makes money. Europeans did not always like the American attitude. Albert Einstein, essentially a nineteenth century European scientists and pure theoreticians who found himself in twentieth century America wrote of this pragmatic

Mark Kurlansky (04:19):
side of American thinking, there is visible in this process of relative fruitless but heroic endeavors a systematic trend of development, namely, an increasing skepticism concerning every attempt by means of pure thought to learn something about the objective world, about the

Mark Kurlansky (04:40):
world of things, in contrast to the world of mere concepts and ideas. Birdseye grew up in a world in which mere concepts and ideas were not enough. An American inventor solved the problem, formed a company, and he hoped earned a fortune. Alexander Graham Bell, Scot and Canadian who

Mark Kurlansky (05:01):
then came to America, was most known at the time of Birdseye’s birth as not only the inventor of the telephone, but the founder of the first telephone company, Bell Telephone, in eighteen seventy seven. By the time Birdseye was born, the Bell Telephone Company had placed phones in one hundred and fifty thousand homes and offices. Ten

Mark Kurlansky (05:22):
years before Birdseye was born, Thomas Edison came to the public attention for selling his telegraph idea to Western Union for surprising ten thousand dollars. Then in eighteen eighty he created another industry, Edison Lamp Works, which manufactured fifty thousand light bulbs annually. When Edison developed an idea, which

Mark Kurlansky (05:43):
he did with astounding regularity, he built a company, and he usually made money. Inventors were founders of industry, not intellectuals. The epitome of the late nineteenth century American inventor. You don’t just invent light bulb, you sell it. Birdseye did all kinds of things, trapped animals and sold them,

Mark Kurlansky (06:06):
sold a bunch of muskrats to somebody who wanted the farm. And then he went off to Amherst, which was the family college, and he was a science major, and he there again found commercial purposes for things. Found a bunch of frogs and sold them to the Bronx Zoo, because reptiles eat frogs, but you had to ship them live.

Mark Kurlansky (06:27):
He loved challenges like that. He eventually dropped out of college. He never graduated. He had a fascination with the wild West, as many people of his generation did. He grew up reading these adventure novels about Western heroes, and he wanted to be one. And he got a job with the Department of Agriculture, had a division that was supposedly monitoring

Mark Kurlansky (06:50):
wildlife in the West, but what they were really doing was killing all the predators that farmers and rancheston life. And he was in Arizona, New Mexico, which are still territory. The wandering you’re out on horseback is shooting tons of coyotes and wolves. I mean in the nineteen seventies. The Endangered Species Act was an attempt to recuperate all that

Mark Kurlansky (07:11):
was lost by this program back in the nineteen twenties. And then he got a job in the Rockies with Rocky Mountain spotted fever, which was a deadly disease, and his job was to shoot animals so that they could collect the ticks, and he just killed enormous amounts of wildlife. He loved doing this. Nobody else wanted to do it

Mark Kurlansky (07:33):
because it was kind of dangerous because the ticks could give you a fatal disease. But he thought it was great and he did that for a while, went back to New York and worked on Wall Street briefly. His family, I should say, were were lawyers going back several generations, and then he discovered this opportunity to go to Labrador. The Labrador which was a territory of Newfoundland, which was

Mark Kurlansky (07:55):
a separate dominion in the British Empire at the time. It was one of the wildest plays on earth, certainly one of the wildest places in North America. Not many people who lived there except for Inuit. He got this idea that he could farm foxes for the fur. He had gotten into the fur business when he was out west because he shot all these wolves and coyotes

Mark Kurlansky (08:16):
and he thought, geez, somebody must want these pelts. He went back to New York and found somebody who would buy them. In the meantime, his wife had a son, and his wife and son moved up to this wilderness because his wife, Eleanor, was a bit of an adventure also, she came from a family of inventors actually, so now a family man with a wife and kid. He became

Mark Kurlansky (08:36):
concerned about getting good food to eat because there wasn’t much around. But he saw that the Inuits froze their food, and they would catch a fish pull it up in the air. The air was so cold it was quickly froze, and then he packed it in snow, and when he wanted something, you just took it out and thawed it out. This

Mark Kurlansky (08:56):
frozen food was better than any frozen food that he knew. Frozen food had been around for some time, but they didn’t freeze it at a very low temperature, and it took a long time to freeze, and by the time you got it and thawed it out, it was kind of mushy and horrible. Everybody hated frozen food. This frozen food tasted to him as good as fresh, which is

Mark Kurlansky (09:19):
something he kept saying all of his life. We of course know that frozen food isn’t really as good as fresh, but it’s a lot better that frozen food used to be.

Lee Habeeb (09:28):
And you’ve been listening to author Mark Kurlansky tell the story of Clarence Birdseye, born at the height of the Industrial Revolution, and this was an American ethos in the end that Kurlansky was talking about, this idea that simply to have ideas and invent ideas, but not have practical use application and to make a profit, well, that

Lee Habeeb (09:50):
just seems wasteful. When we come back more of the story of Clarence Birdseye here and Our American Stories, and we continue with Our American Stories and author Mark

Lee Habeeb (10:12):
Kurlansky. His book is Frozen in Time Clarence Bird’s eyes outrageous idea about frozen food. Let’s pick up where we last left off, take it away more.

Mark Kurlansky (10:23):
They lived like this until World War One broke out, and then they decided he had to go back to New York, and he didn’t really think about the freezing process or what they’d been doing with the food, or any of that at all. It was back in New York working for a company that worked with fish with fish markets, and he was trying to improve the quality

Mark Kurlansky (10:44):
of fish, to do something about the deterioration of fish between when it was caught and when it got to the market, and he experimented with different kinds of improved packaging. And then suddenly one day he remembered the snowpacked fish in Labrador, and he said, well, the Inuits had the right idea. That’s what we need to do. We need

Mark Kurlansky (11:04):
to freeze this fish very quickly. The mechanism of crystallization is why fast freezing works, because the faster crystals are formed, the smaller they are. If you do it slowly, the ice crystals are quite large and they damage the meat or whatever you’re freezing. So if you do it really fast,

Mark Kurlansky (11:24):
the ice crystals are really small and it doesn’t damage the food. And so he developed machines to do that. You know, the largest use for salt in the world today is for de icing roads. And people think, or I live in New York, the dormant put salt out on the sidewalk to melt the ice. People think that

Mark Kurlansky (11:44):
salt melts ice. That’s not exactly true. What happens is that salt has a lower freezing temperature than water, and so if you are like thirty degrees, you’ll have ice. But if it’s a salt in it, it doesn’t freeze at You have to get much colder. And this is a favorite experiment that I teach kids. You take a

Mark Kurlansky (12:05):
glass of ice and you put a thermometer in it, and you put salt in it, and the ice melts, but the temperature doesn’t go down much. So this quality of salt meant that you could work at a much colder temperature. And he started producing this quick frozen fish, which was not selling very well because frozen food had

Mark Kurlansky (12:26):
such a bad reputation, but he got some money. He went to Gloucester, Massachusetts, the oldest fishing port in America, and he set up a seafood company, got some investors and started freezing mostly haddock and occasionally experimenting with other stuff. And this company wasn’t doing terribly well either. And they

Mark Kurlansky (12:46):
had this plant on the harbor. Yeah, it breaks my heart. This bird’s eye plant was an iconic feature of Gloucester Harbor and had a tower which was your way of finding your way home when you were out at sea. Few years ago they tore it down and built a hotel. Completely ignored my objections at this machine that was many,

Mark Kurlansky (13:09):
many feet long and weighed something like twenty thousand pounds and housed in this building. And he sort of struggled along, and along came Marjorie Merriweather Post, the daughter of the Post who was the food tycoon, Post Cereal and all these things. Oh, the cereals that happened to be just a little bit better.

Greg Hengler (13:31):
Lost material.

Mark Kurlansky (13:33):
It’s fine with me, any fellos. She was a very unusual woman for her age. She took over the company when her father died, and she was very business oriented, and she went around the country buying up food companies, and she sailed her yacht into Gloucester harbor and sent somebody into town for some food, and he came back

Mark Kurlansky (13:55):
with this frozen goose and it was delicious, and who frozes, let’s go talk to him. This is probably not completely true. On the other hand, Birdseye once gave a whole meal to people on Wall Street, given to likely investors. In any event, she got interested in this company, and

Mark Kurlansky (14:15):
she bought it for almost twenty three million dollars, which was a huge, huge amount of money at the time. This was right before the depression, so Birdseye, unlike everybody else, spent the Depression as a multimillionaire. If you were making a big industrial company, you called it General something. So his was General Seafood, and the later posts named

Mark Kurlansky (14:36):
their whole food division General Foods. And the reason for this is this is what big companies were doing at the time. There was General Electric, and there was General Motors and General everything. And they produced frozen food. And this was kind of a difficult thing to do because nobody had freezers. So they went around to stores and

Mark Kurlansky (14:57):
got stores to let them install freeze the very expensive machines with glass tops for display to get people to buy frozen food. And he would sometimes go to these stores and work with people and tell them about the fish and stuff. And he was becoming kind of a celebrity because the Post Company named their general foods the division Birdseye, and people were fascinated. As I was

Mark Kurlansky (15:21):
way back when when I first heard of it, that there actually was a person named Birdseye. It sounds like it’s just a brand that’s made up. Now here was Birdseye himself in the store telling him about frozen food. The other problem was that one of the advantages of frozen food was that you can take it home and keep it forever if you have a freezer at home, which nobody did, so it was kind of

Mark Kurlansky (15:42):
a struggling company until World War Two. And after World War two, people got freezers and frozen food became huge. Now, one of the interesting things to me about Clarence Birdseye is that he was what we would call today a foodie. He loved food, he cooked, he talked about it. He was just fascinated by food. But he was almost the reverse of what a modern day food

Mark Kurlansky (16:05):
he is. He believed that we were stuck with all this farm fresh food and what we really needed was industrialized food. Prior to his age, he believed that industrialization was the answer to everything, and he was going to make food industrial.

Greg Hengler (16:20):
So after he became a millionaire, he built this huge house that still stands in Gloucester on the Eastern Point, but is still the same guy inventing all sorts of gadgets in the basement and setting up experiments on the lawn, looking for a wildlife to hunt and things to sell.

Mark Kurlansky (16:39):
Just really his own unique man. But he thought that his new coup move over frozen food. He was going to do dehydrated food, which he worked on in his house with a coffee maker and eventually put out this line of dehydrated food that nobody wanted. During World War Two, the Army had actually dehydrated food fed to soldiers and

Mark Kurlansky (17:02):
they hated it, so it had this horrible reputation. And he thought dehydrated food would take over the way frozen food had, but no. And then he was experimenting with paper making and how you could make paper from sugar cane scraps, and he got a company to hire him to do this in Peru, and this was just wonderful for

Mark Kurlansky (17:22):
him and Eleanor because they were reliving their Labrador days, going down through Peru and having an adventure, and they did produce paper, and to this day there’s paper produced from sugar cane scraps in South America. And that was his last adventure. Died of a heart attack, not particularly old and was just known as this kind of charming

Mark Kurlansky (17:42):
but nutty guy who went around inventing things. Birds Eye really changed the way we live because of Birdseye. First of all, I mean completely changed the food industry. Because of Birdseye. There’s much more export of food than there ever was before because you can freeze it and ship. He’s a flick at all of the European and Asian fish that’s in American fish markets. But also

Mark Kurlansky (18:07):
it made ice cream available to everyone. People had freezers in their homes where they could keep ice cream, where they could keep frozen food, and it just created a whole different way of living. You know, there’s a movement against industrialized food and to get fresh stuff from the market. We all have freezers and in one way or another

Mark Kurlansky (18:27):
lived from him.

Lee Habeeb (18:31):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler, and a special thanks to Mark Kurlansky. His book is Frozen in Time Clarence Birdseye outrageous idea about frozen food, and what a story he told about Birdseye. He comes back to New York, gets a job at a fish market. One thing leads to another, and the inventor always is trying to solve

Lee Habeeb (18:54):
a problem and make money. When Marjorie Merriweather Post went into Gloucester to look to buy a company, well, Birdseye’s company was it. And it made bird’s Eye a very rich man, but also changed America. It would take till World War Two in the advent of freezers to change everything, but my goodness, frozen food changed the way we lived

Lee Habeeb (19:16):
and changed the food industry forever. The story of Clarence Birdseye, the story of frozen food. Here on our American Stories