Depending on your point of view, you might want to thank — or blame — Clarence Birdseye.
“He’s kind of the enemy of the modern foodie,” said Mark Kurlansky, author of “Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man.” “Beause he had everything to do with the industrialization of food. But he came out of the industrial revolution, which was an age in which people believed that industry made everything wonderful.”
It was in 1908, after dropping out of Amherst College, that this particular young man went west, seeking — if not fame and fortune — at least adventure. These were the waning days of the frontier. Birdseye eradicated coyotes for the U.S. government in Arizona and New Mexico. In Colorado, he hunted game so scientists could collect ticks to study Rocky Mountain spotted fever.
“He loved to hunt and he just shot animals for them, shot an unbelievable number of animals,” Kurlansky said.
But it was his years in the fur trade in frigid Labrador that would open a new — and unexpected — frontier for the young adventurer.
“He noticed from watching the Inuits that you catch a fish and as soon as you pull it out into the air — because it’s 40 degrees below zero — it instantly freezes,” Kurlansky said. “And he noticed that this food, when you thawed it out, was unlike any frozen food he’d had, that it was a much better-quality.”
At the time, food was frozen slowly, and that slow process damaged the food, and sapped its flavor. Birdseye relocated to Gloucester, where he developed a his “quick-freeze machine” that could flash freeze first fresh fish, then fresh vegetables, to remarkable results.
“I mean, it took him a number of years to arrive at this process,” Kurlansky said.
The Post cereal folks saw a future in Birdseye’s method, and bought his company in 1929 — keeping him on staff, and his name on their frozen foods. But there was still one big problem. Nobody wanted to buy frozen food. The company convinced 10 grocery stores in Springfield to help them change that. They provided the freezers, technicians, and people to train the staff.
“The 10 stores that went with it were stores that thought, you know, this might be the future and I should try to get in on it,” Kurlansky said.
On March 6, 1930, the experiment began. Convincing the public was labor intensive.
“They hand sold this stuff,” Kurlansky said. “They would spend something like a half an hour on each consumer trying to convince them to try this stuff.
But the proof was, so to speak, in the frozen pudding.
”They found that three out of four of them came back to buy more,“ Kurlansky said. ”It absolutely worked.“
Over the next few decades, Birds Eye was built into an empire, expanding from fish and vegetables into everything from baby food to ice cream sodas.
Today, at just about any grocery store, you’ll still find his name on everything from bags of peas to pasta primavera in the frozen food aisle that exists, in large part, because of him.
”It’s an interesting thing about inventors,“ Kurlansky said. ”Thomas Edison, Robert Fulton, Gutenberg. They didn’t really invent the things they invented. They just made them work. So Clarence Birdseye did not invent frozen food, but he showed how you could make it work and make it a viable industry. And it changed everything about the food world.“
All it took was one giant leap taken into the frozen future taken — thanks to Clarence Birdseye — right here in Massachusetts, 85 years ago this week.
If you have a tale of forgotten Massachusetts history to share, or there’s something that’s made you just plain curious, email Edgar at curiositydesk@wgbh.org. He might just look into it for you.
