Clarence Birdseye proved you possibly can’t decide a e-book by its cowl.
The Brooklyn native and frozen meals pioneer appeared scholarly in his spectacles, as if he belonged on the head of a faculty lecture corridor.
He was the truth is a university dropout. The slight, narrow-shouldered free spirit as an alternative lived a lifetime of journey. He explored distant areas of the world, from the frigid coast of Newfoundland to the steamy sugarcane plantations of South America.
Humble-looking ol’ Clarence craved the outside and cherished searching.
Birdseye, amongst many different quirks, possessed a voracious urge for food for harvesting and consuming something that walked, waddled, chirped, crawled, swam or slithered.
In his years of exploring Labrador, Canada, or working for the U.S. authorities within the American West, he trapped and cooked mice, chipmunks, porcupine, otter and rattlesnake, to call just some of his uncommon edibles.
He raved about sherry-brined lynx and the “positive” style of gull gravy.
“I arrived by canine staff on the North West River,” he wrote in a single notably enthusiastic account of his carnivorous Canadian food regimen.
“And after thawing out, sat right down to one of the vital delicious meals I ever ate. The pièce de résistance was lynx meat, which had been soaked for a month in sherry, pan-stewed and served in a brown gravy.’”
Birdseye’s eager style buds wound up reshaping the best way People store, eat — and even plan for catastrophe.
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He based Birdseye Seafood Inc. in 1924, pioneering and patenting new methods to each flash-freeze and market meals for American customers.
There’s a superb likelihood you even have frozen greens bearing his title in your freezer proper now.
Birds Eye — two phrases — is a outstanding label within the frozen meals aisle of American and British supermarkets, owned right now by worldwide powerhouse Conagra Manufacturers.
The attraction of frozen meals was evident through the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when customers stockpiled long-lasting sustenance for the unknown days forward.
The American Frozen Meals Institute reported $65.1 billion in retail gross sales in 2020, a 21% improve over gross sales in 2019. Frozen meals stays purple scorching, with $74 billion in gross sales in 2023.
Clarence “Bob” Birdseye was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Dec. 9, 1886, to legal professional Clarence Frank and Ada Underwood Birdseye.
His household moved to Montclair, N.J., when he was an adolescent. Highschool cooking lessons there fueled his innate curiosity in meals.
“On the age of 10 he was searching and exporting dwell muskrats and educating himself taxidermy,” NPR wrote in a 2012 biography.
“He studied science in faculty, however needed to drop out for monetary causes. Compelled to help himself, he joined varied scientific expeditions that took him to distant locations, together with Labrador, the place he spent a number of years within the fur enterprise.”
Celebrated meals historian and Birdseye biographer Mark Kurlansky instructed Fox Information Digital, “He was an odd type of man who had an affect on a whole lot of various things, together with an enormous affect on American meals.”
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“He was a product of the economic revolution and thought all the things, together with meals, must be industrialized.”
The creator was impressed to jot down about Clarence Birdseye after the innovator made frequent appearances in a lot of Kurlansky’s different works, together with his landmark meals historical past, “Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Modified the World.”
Kurlansky wrote two books about him: “Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man” in 2013; and, for middle-school college students, “Frozen in Time: Clarence Birdseye’s Outrageous Thought About Frozen Meals” in 2014.
Birdseye’s pursuits and innovations prolonged far past meals, Kurlansky stated.
He patented the reflecting lamps generally used on job websites right now. He helped the federal authorities fight Rocky Mountain noticed fever by displaying that it was transmitted to people by way of animals.
Later in life, he additionally discovered new journey in Colombia, growing a course of to show sugarcane residue into paper.
Birdseye developed some 300 patents and innovations in his lifetime, Kurlansky stated.
None had extra affect on the nation, nevertheless, than his work in frozen meals.
Birdseye’s Eureka second got here throughout dog-sled expeditions throughout Labrador.
He seen that native Inuit fishermen harnessed the facility of wind and ice to flash-freeze their catch.
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“Recent meals was a really pressing downside in Labrador,” Birdseye wrote, in an oft-repeated account of his work.
“I discovered that meals frozen in a short time within the lifeless of winter saved their freshness so long as they had been held at a low temperature.”
The issue was replicating the flash-freezing course of removed from the icy shores of the Canadian coast.
“Birdseye, the biologist, noticed that the fish had been frozen too shortly for ice crystals to type and wreck their mobile construction,” writes the Lemelson-MIT Program, an educational group dedicated to cultivating inventors and innovators.
“Birdseye, the businessman, noticed that the general public again dwelling would gladly pay for such frozen meals if he may ship them. He returned to New York and, in 1924, based Birdseye Seafoods, Inc.”
He arrange Normal Seafood Corp. a 12 months later in Gloucester, Mass., to be close to one of many nation’s most outstanding and productive fishing ports.
He developed a course of that will quickly freeze fish and greens.
“Within the case of fish or meat,” the appliance acknowledged, “sluggish freezing disrupts the cells of the animal tissue, with lack of the pristine qualities and flavors and fast deterioration after thawing.”
His rapid-freezing course of ensured “the pristine qualities and flavors of the product are retained,” he wrote on a 1927 patent software.
Birdseye desperately lacked capital, nevertheless, when an opportunity encounter with enterprise tycoon Marjorie Merriweather Submit modified his fortunes.
The encounter additionally modified the worldwide meals {industry}.
Submit had inherited Postum Cereal Firm from her father in 1914. It’s identified right now as Normal Meals. She was a massively influential businesswoman.
Amongst different notable accomplishments, Submit constructed a mansion in Palm Seaside, Fla., within the Twenties that she dubbed Mar-A-Lago.
Submit occurred to be crusing by way of Gloucester in 1926 when she found Birdseye’s frozen meals firm, at the very least in accordance with firm legend.
Particulars of the story are sketchy, writes Kurlansky in “Frozen in Time.”
What’s not disputed is the end result: Birdseye’s “firm was of apparent attraction to the Postum Cereal Firm. Normal Seafoods had developed the concepts and expertise for a completely new meals {industry},” Kurlansky writes.
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“Finally, Postum secured [Birdseye’s] firm for a document $22 million.”
The deal in 1929 gave Birdseye the assets wanted to convey frozen meals to American customers.
Clarence Birdseye died on Oct. 7, 1956 at a house he saved on the Gramercy Park Resort in Manhattan.
He spent his closing days, after a lifetime of journey and innovation, battling a coronary heart ailment within the metropolis during which he was born.
He was lauded for his imaginative and prescient and talent to show his concepts conceived on the ice of Labrador into a world food-industry empire.
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“At the beginning he may afford to spend solely $7 on tools, together with an electrical fan, ice and salt. Later, a pal lent him the nook of an ice home to hold on his work,” The New York Instances reported in his obituary.
“After his return from [Labrador], Mr. Birdseye started the experiment that led to the event of his [flash-freezing] course of. The event not solely introduced a fortune to Mr. Birdseye, however helped revive the Massachusetts fishing {industry}.”
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Frozen meals right now is a goliath of world shopper tradition, with $252.2 billion in worldwide income in 2021, in accordance with Polaris Market Analysis.
The corporate predicts international frozen meals gross sales to succeed in $389.9 billion by 2030.
Birdseye “is credited with rising the standard of the American food regimen by offering high-quality meals for long-term preservation with out drying, pickling or canning,” proclaims the Inventors Corridor of Fame, which inducted the innovator in 2005.
“At the moment, we particularly respect that Birdseye’s course of, nonetheless principally in use, preserves meals’s vitamins in addition to its taste,” stated the Lemelson-MIT Program for innovators.
To learn extra tales on this distinctive “Meet the American Who…” sequence from Fox Information Digital, click on right here.
“In reality, we will say that Clarence Birdseye has not directly improved each the well being and comfort of just about everybody within the industrialized world.”
