Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man

195 Pages·2012·3.38 MB·English

by  Mark Kurlansky

Copyright © 2012 by Mark Kurlansky
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House,
Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random
House, Inc.
this page–this page constitute an extension to this copyright page.
Jacket design by Michael J. Windsor
Jacket photograph courtesy of Pinnacle Foods. Birds Eye® is a registered trademark of Pinnacle Foods
LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kurlansky, Mark.
Birdseye : the adventures of a curious man / Mark Kurlansky.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Birdseye, Clarence, 1886–1956. 2. Frozen foods industry—United States—History. 3. Inventors
—United States—Biography. 4. Businessmen—United States—Biography. I. Title.
HD9217.U52B575 2012
338.7’66402853092—dc23
[B]
2011044891
eISBN: 978-0-38553588-5
v3.1
To the memory of Linda Perney.
The best of friends, who always listened and laughed
but left too soon.
To be perfectly honest, I am best described as just a guy with a very
large bump of curiosity and a gambling instinct.
—C B , The American Magazine,
LARENCE IRDSEYE
February 1951
Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a
vigorous intellect.
—S J , The Rambler,
AMUEL OHNSON
March 12, 1751
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Preface
Prologue: A Curious End
Chapter 1: A Nineteenth-Century Man
Chapter 2: Bugs Begins
Chapter 3: Bob Goes West
Chapter 4: Ticks
Chapter 5: Frozen
Chapter 6: Freezing
Chapter 7: The Idea
Chapter 8: The Deal
Chapter 9: The Magic
Chapter 10: The Inventor
Chapter 11: Beyond the Sunset, and the Baths
Illustration Insert
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Illustration Credits
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Preface
I never met Clarence Birdseye, who died shortly before I turned eight
years old in 1956. I never met any of his seven siblings nor his wife,
Eleanor. I met only one of his four children, the eldest, Kellogg, whom I
interviewed when researching my book about cod. His grandchildren
were all very young when Birdseye died and know little of him. I did
interview two surviving sisters-in-law and numerous people who had
known him.
The work of a biographer often seems to resemble that of a detective,
chasing down clues. Birdseye left a scattered and incomplete record.
There is no autobiography or memoir. Surprisingly, the only book
Birdseye has left us is a small volume on gardening, which was mostly
written by his wife. Huge help was provided by one of the grandsons,
Henry, who had more than twenty unopened boxes, which, once he was
easily persuaded to open them, revealed a few treasures, including
numerous letters from Labrador and Peru. Another grandson, Michael,
had a few pieces of the puzzle, such as a collection of his patents and
some lost magazine articles. Kellogg, the son, had eight leather-bound
handwritten journals from Birdseye’s time in Labrador, which Kellogg’s
widow, Gypsy, donated to Amherst College. They show a great deal
about his quirks and interests as well as activities but were not laid out
in a way to give a later historian a clear picture of events.
Birdseye’s colleagues and collaborators wrote about him. Birdseye
wrote numerous articles about himself and his ideas. But the subject
himself is not always an infallible source either, especially a man like
Birdseye who had an image of himself that he wanted to promote—a
very American image of a lot of audacity, not much intellect, and a
pioneer spirit. The first and last of these were largely true, the second
manifestly not. There are many brief articles on the life of Clarence
Birdseye, some written in his lifetime, some at the time of his death,
some later. Most of these articles say the exact same things—some true
and some not, often with incorrect dates. Unfortunately, these articles
appear to have been the source for more articles, and so often the errors
are repeated. There are at least forty encyclopedias and dictionaries that
contain entries on Clarence Birdseye ranging from general, to business,
to inventors, to food. But these too are full of errors and conflicting
information.
When I decided to write this book, I had already written about
Birdseye in three of my books—the history of cod, the history of salt,
and the history of Gloucester. It was time to separate myth from truth
and find out who this man with the funny name who changed our way
of life really was.
Undeniably, Birdseye changed our civilization. He created an industry
by modernizing the process of food preservation and in so doing
nationalized and then internationalized food distribution. Birdseye was
among the first to talk about that internationalization. In a speech at
Montreal’s McGill University in 1943, he predicted the postwar world
when he announced, “Tomorrow the industry will become truly
international.” And he was right. This facilitated urban living and helped
to take people away from the farms, so that by the early years of the
twenty-first century, for the first time in human history, the majority of
people on earth lived in an urban area. This would have been no surprise
to Birdseye, who often spoke of how improved food preservation made
urban life possible.
For many people a major issue is the internationalization of food
distribution. Birdseye greatly contributed to the development of
industrial-scale agriculture. He even worked with farmers to make their
products more suitable for industry. But unlike people today who have
grown distrustful of big business, for Birdseye, a product of the zenith of
the Industrial Revolution, “industry” was always a good word, without
negative connotations. Today’s locavore movement—the movement to
shun food from afar and eat what is produced locally—would have
perplexed him. Why, Birdseye would have wondered, would you want to
be limited by local production when the food of the world is available?
What would he have thought to see that in his hometown of Brooklyn
and his adopted home of Gloucester, there are open-air markets selling
local produce when consumers could go to a supermarket and buy the
food of California, France, and China for less money? It would have
made little sense to Birdseye to prefer small artisanal farms with low and
inconsistent yields to the miracles of agribusiness.