The Disruptors by Alan Axelrod

Author:Alan Axelrod
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sterling

DISRUPTION:

By making frozen food good food, Birdseye created the frozen food industry and gave the world a new way to eat

Clarence Birdseye

(1886–1956)

Clarence Birdseye was a lot of things in his career. He grew up poor but not impoverished in Brooklyn and New Jersey, number six of nine children. He was always looking for ways to make money, and at the age of ten he heard about an English lord seeking wild game for his Long Island estate. The boy trapped a dozen muskrats, shipped them to the lord, and made a nine-dollar profit on the venture.

He was, it seems, not just a born entrepreneur, but a born naturalist. After graduating from Montclair High School in New Jersey, he enrolled in Amherst College, alma mater of both his father and older brother, where he majored in biology. To pay his tuition, he went trapping—always looking for animals within easy reach. He rounded up baby frogs, which he sold in bulk to the Bronx Zoo for use as reptile food. When an Amherst genetics professor was willing to pay for relatively rare black rats, to be used in a study, young Birdseye knew that a local butcher shop had a rat problem, and he offered to trap the pests. He killed all but the black ones.

But the money Birdseye made as a part-time trapper could not pay the bills past his sophomore year. So Birdseye dropped out and took a job as a taxidermist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This led to a position as an assistant naturalist with the department, stationed in New Mexico and Arizona. (Mostly, he shot surplus coyotes.) He moved on to Montana, where, during 1910–1911, he assisted the entomologist Orsdel King, who was attempting to isolate the vectors that spread Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Birdseye’s task was to trap any and all small varmints, so that Orsdel could comb them for ticks to use in his research.

In 1912, Birdseye left the USDA to freelance for a New York furrier in search of pelts. For the next three years, he trekked by dogsled throughout Labrador, Newfoundland, trapping beavers for their pelts. His interest, however, was soon drawn to the Inuit Indians’ methods of “quick freezing” the fish they caught. In the Arctic climate, this was not an especially complex procedure. Inuit fishermen just laid their catch on the ice, where the brisk wind froze the fish in an instant. Birdseye noticed that when the quick-frozen fish were cooked and eaten, they were as tender and flaky as fresh-caught. The fish frozen down south, in a process that took hours, were just awful by contrast: soggy, mealy, and tasteless.

Curious to see if the virtues of quick-freezing extended to foodstuffs other than fish, Birdseye stored cabbage heads, caribou meat, and geese outside his cabin. He took each item, laid it out on ice, and let the wind and air temperature do its work. These foods also held their taste and texture. Birdseye’s two years at Amherst had taught him

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