Have you ever wondered how frozen food came to be?
Focusing on fish, writer Mark Kurlansky explains the contributions of frozen food innovator Clarence Birdseye in an excerpt from Eater’s article “The Strange History of Frozen Food.”
As it turns out, the “technology” was already in place, and had been known for a very long time.
As a young engineer in Labrador, an eastern province in Canada, Birdseye often froze his catch after a day of fishing to keep it fresh. He learned this from the Inuit who would fish from holes in the ice and let it freeze instantly in the frigid temperatures, Mark Kurlansky writes in Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man. Birdseye noticed that when the fish thawed, it wasn’t mushy like other frozen foods he had tried before. This was around 1912.
“When he lived in Labrador, the food he froze for his family was really good — not...
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