Birdseye ─ The Adventures of a Curious Man

Sometimes a groundbreaking idea is not enough. Sometimes a brilliant notion slouches along until an innovator with a nose for the entrepreneurial realizes its potential, perfects its contours and gives it mass appeal. For cars, it was Henry Ford. For electric light, it was Thomas Edison. For computers, it was Steve Jobs. And for the global food market, it was Clarence Birdseye.

Birdseye, whose name is synonymous with frozen food, revolutionized the way we eat. Generations of Americans have become familiar with the tidy little packages that bear his name in supermarket refrigerators. By perfecting a flash-freeze method — a technique he learned from Inuit of the North Sea — Birdseye single-handedly transformed the American diet and took the food industry from local to global in the course of a decade.

Kurlansky is best known for epic portraits of small-scale subjects, among them “Salt,”“Cod” and “The Basque History of the World.” He brings a nimble, no-frills journalism to these tasks, and the result is a series of eye-opening books on worlds we might otherwise never see. “Salt” becomes a history of humankind, complete with explorers and revolutionaries. “Cod” is a rollicking tale of adventure, with a fish as its celebrated star. “The Basque History” ends up being a paean to a highly inventive people: Europe’s earliest explorers, Spain’s first bankers, a race defined by curiosity, ingenuity and grit.


Likewise, “Birdseye” turns out to be less a biography than a glimpse into an exuberantly inventive time in America. Little is known about Birdseye’s personal life, and Kurlansky is quick to admit it. But the impact of the man’s inventions is on full view here: the whaling harpoon, the dipping of livestock to control ticks, the science of crystallization and cryonics, innovations in food packaging, advances in refrigeration, the birth of the sunlamp, the production of dried edibles, the papermaking revolution. We see a tireless tinkerer, a restless mind, a quintessentially American inventor, driven by two questions about the world around him: Why? and Why not?

Marie Arana,June 08, 2012, Washington Post

Mark Kurlansky is the New York Times bestselling author of many books, including The Food of a Younger Land, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, Salt: A World History, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World, and The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell. He lives in New York City.