This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. Spending time outdoors, then let's talk about skin cancer. Non-melanoma skin cancers, or NMSCs, including basal cell carcinoma and cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma, are the most common cancers in the U.S. and can become harder to treat if left undetected.
That's why sun protection and timely detection matter. Our sponsor, Regeneron, is raising awareness about advanced NMSCs. Learn more and take the pledge to see a dermatologist annually at let's get real about skincancer.com. Saturday, August 22nd in Tampa. Witness an MMA Legends final fight.
Chris Cyborg, one of the greatest in history. She's an absolute pioneer in the sport. Defends her PFL world title. One last time. Unforgettable and got you marginal.
To an unforgettable career. Saturday, August 22nd, live from Benchmark International Arena. For tickets, visit pfl.info/slash tampa. Yeah. Yeah.
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If you're like me, your freezer is packed with frozen foods. Frozen OJ, TV dinners, frozen pizzas, snacks, Snickers bars, ice cream. But it's an enormous operation to get it all there. And it all started with a man named Clarence Birdseye. The story behind the bird's eye logo we see in every frozen food section is the key to understanding how one idea completely changed how we eat and cook.
and how it created a $300 billion industry. Here to tell the story is Mark Krolensky. Author of Frozen in Time, Clarence Birdseye's outrageous idea about frozen food. Take it away, Mark. New York City was being reshaped.
The Statue of Liberty was installed in the harbor. and dedicated the year of Bird Di's birth. Eight years later, the city began digging tunnels for subways. These were exciting times in New York and in America. In the 19th century, there was a notable difference between the culture of American inventors and that of Europeans.
European inventors reveled in the theoretical.
sometimes even shunning patents, lest they give the impression of harboring low-brow commercial interests. Whereas Americans Thought inventions were pointless without practical and commercial application. There were of course exceptions, Daimler. Who is an engineer and not a scientist? Did start producing automobiles in Chardonnay.
who was a scientist and colleague of Louis Basteur, did start synthetic textile milk, the inventor of rayon actually. But Many Europeans were content In the world of the theoretical, whereas Americans had a Puritan belief that anyone who invented something had a moral obligation to put it to useful purpose. The press would criticize inventors who failed to do this. Clarence Birdseye was born in Brooklyn in the 1880s. And so he was a 19th century man, although he lived into the 1950s.
He was shaped by the 19th century in many ways you could see this.
So he was born into the age of the Industrial Revolution and an age of inventing. Light bulbs, cars, fountain pens, rolled film, all sorts of things were invented in his childhood or just before he was born.
So he grew up with this idea that the really exciting people were inventors. Brooklyn and Manhattan. They were separate cities and they were among the fastest growing cities in America. And the reason for this was they had gotten refrigeration, mainly ice boxes. Which I remember from my grandparents when I was a kid.
This big refrigerator-looking thing. Where somebody would come along with a huge block of ice and you kept things cold in it. And what this meant was it was much easier for urban people to have food. Up until then, most people lived in agriculture areas because that's where the food was.
So now in fast-growing Brooklyn and New York, people were having refrigerated food. I think over a million tons of ice was sold every year in Brooklyn. This was the most ice-consuming place in the world. Bird's eye was unusual. Oh, it was from the time he was a kid.
He was fascinated by nature. He loved hunting and he loved doing things that that would show a profit. He was a very commercially minded person. In America, an important idea is an idea that makes money. Europeans did not always like the American attitude.
Albert Einstein, essentially a 19th century European scientist and pure theoretician who found himself in 20th century America, wrote of this pragmatic side of American thinking. Take it. There is visible in this process of relative fruitless but heroic endeavors a systematic trend of development. namely, an increasing skepticism concerning every attempt By means of pure thought, to learn something about the objective world, about the world of things, in contrast to the world of mere concepts and ideas. Birdseye grew up in a world in which mere concepts and ideas were not enough.
An American inventor solved the problem, formed a company, and he hoped. Earned a fortune. Alexander Grambell, a Scot-turned-Canadian who then came to America, was most known at the time of Birdseye's birth. Is not only the inventor of the telephone, but the founder of the first telephone company, Bell Telephone. In eighteen seventy seven.
By the time Birds Eye was born, the Bell Telephone Company had placed phones in 150,000 homes and offices. Ten years before Bird's Eye was born, Thomas Edison came to the public attention for selling his telegraph idea to Western Union for a surprising $10,000. Then in eighteen eighty he created another industry, Edison Lamp Works, which manufactured fifty thousand light bulbs annually. When Edison developed an idea, which he did with astounding regularity, he built a company. and he usually made money.
Inventors were founders of industry, not intellectuals. The epitome of the late nineteenth century American inventor. You don't just invent a light bulb, you sell it. Bird's eye did all kinds of things, trapped animals and sold them, sold a bunch of muskrats to somebody who wanted them for its farm. And then he went off to Amherst.
which was the family college. And he was a science major. And he there again found commercial purposes for things, found a bunch of frogs and sold them to the Bronx Zoo. Because reptiles eat frogs, but you had to ship them live. He loved challenges like that.
He eventually dropped out of college, he never graduated. Yeah. He had a fascination with the Wild West, as many people of his generation did. He grew up reading these adventure novels about Western heroes. He wanted to be one.
And he got a job with the Department of Agriculture, had a division that was supposedly monitoring wildlife in the West. But what they were really doing was killing all the predators that farmers and ranchers didn't like. And he was in Arizona and New Mexico, which were still territories then, wandering around on horseback, just shooting tons of coyotes and wolves. I mean, in the 1970s, the Endangered Species Act was an attempt to recuperate all that was lost by this program back in the 1920s. And then he got a job in the Rockies with Rocky Mountain spotted fever, which was a deadly disease.
And his job was to shoot animals so that they could collect the ticks. And he just killed enormous amounts of wildlife. He loved doing this. Nobody else wanted to do it because it was kind of dangerous because the ticks could give you a fatal disease. But he thought it was great.
And he did that for a while, went back to New York, worked on Wall Street briefly. His family, I should say, were lawyers going back several generations. And then he discovered this opportunity to go to Labrador. Labrador, which was a territory of Newfoundland, which was a separate dominion in the British Empire at the time, was one of the wildest places on earth, certainly one of the wildest places in North America. Not many people lived there except for Inwitz.
He got this idea that he could farm foxes for the fur. He had gotten into the furring business when he was out west because he shot all these wolves and coyotes and he thought, geez, somebody must want these pelts. He went back to New York and found somebody who would buy them. In the meantime, his wife had a son, and his wife and son moved up to this wilderness because his wife Eleanor was a bit of an adventurer, also. She came from a family of inventors, actually.
So now a family man with a wife and kid. he became concerned about getting good food to eat, because there wasn't much around. But he saw that the Inuits froze their food. They would catch a fish. Pull it up in the air.
The air was so cold it would quickly freeze, and then you pack it in snow. And when you wanted something, you just took it out and thawed it out. This frozen food was better than any frozen food that he knew of. Mm. Frozen food had been around for some time, but they didn't freeze it at a very low temperature, and it took a long time to freeze.
And by the time you got it and thought it out, it was kind of mushy and horrible.
So everybody hated frozen food. This frozen food tasted to him as good as fresh, which is something he kept saying all of his life. We of course know that frozen food isn't really as good as fresh, but it's a lot better than frozen food used to be. And you've been listening to author Mark Kurlansky tell the story of Clarence Birdseye, born at the height of the Industrial Revolution. And this was an American ethos in the end that Kurlansky was talking about.
This idea that simply to have ideas and invent ideas, but not have practical use application and to make a profit.
Well, that just seems wasteful. When we come back, More of the story of Clarence Birdseye here. and our American stories. Spending time outdoors, then let's talk about skin cancer. Non-melanoma skin cancers, or NMSCs, including basal cell carcinoma and cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma, are the most common cancers in the U.S.
and can become harder to treat if left undetected. That's why sun protection and timely detection matter. Our sponsor, Regeneron, is raising awareness about advanced NMSCs. Learn more and take the pledge to see a dermatologist annually at let's get real about skincancer.com. Saturday, August 22nd in Tampa, witnessing MMA Legends final fight.
Chris Cyborg, one of the greatest in history. She's an absolute pioneer in the sport. Defends her PFL world title? One last time. Unforgettable and got your murder.
To an unforgettable career. Saturday, August 22nd, live from Benchmark International Arena. For tickets, visit pfl.info/slash tampa. Upgrade to Elite Checking from America's Christian Credit Union and earn up to 4% APY, plus everyday perks and access to your paycheck up to two days early with early pay. Don't settle.
Choose checking that rewards you and aligns with your values. Visit America's ChristianCU.com forward slash iHeart. Minimum balance of one cent required to earn advertised APY. Early pay not guaranteed. APY equals annual percentage yield.
Membership eligibility required. And CUA insured. Hmm. Keeping a working forest growing takes a massive commitment. That's why working forest professionals plant over 1 billion seedlings annually in the US, ensuring more trees are planted than harvested.
But it takes more than planting to sustain these ecosystems. It means caring for everything in the forest, from clean water to thriving wildlife. Because when we take care of our forests, they'll thrive for generations. Learn more at WorkingForestsInitiative.com. And we continue with Our American Stories and author Mark Perlansky, his book, Frozen in Time, Clarence Birds Eye's outrageous idea about frozen food.
Let's pick up where we last left off. Take it away, Mark. They lived like this until World War I broke out and then they decided they had to go back to New York. And he didn't really think about the freezing process or what they'd been doing with the food or any of that at all. He was back in New York working for a company that worked with fish, with fish markets, and he was trying to improve the quality of fish to do something about the deterioration of fish between when it was caught and when it got to the market.
And he experimented with different kinds of improved packaging. And then, suddenly, one day. He remembered the snow-packed fish in Labrador and he said, Well, the Inuits had the right idea. That's what we need to do. We need to freeze this fish very quickly.
The mechanism of crystallization is why fast freezing works. Because the faster crystals are formed, the smaller they are. If you do it slowly, the ice crystals are quite large and they damage the meat or whatever you're freezing.
So if you can do it really fast, the ice crystals are really small and it doesn't damage the food. And so he developed machines to do that. You know, the largest use for salt in the world today is for de-icing roads. And people think. Or I live in New York, the Dorman, put salt out on the sidewalk to melt the ice.
People think that salt melts ice. That's not exactly true. What happens? Is that salt has a lower freezing temperature than water? And so if you are like 30 degrees, you'll have ice, but if it has salt in it, It doesn't freeze at 30 degrees.
You have to get much colder. And this is a favorite experiment that I teach kids. You take a glass of ice and you put a thermometer in it and you put salt in it and the ice melts, but the temperature doesn't go down.
Okay.
So, this quality of salt meant that you could work at a much colder temperature. And he started producing this quick frozen fish, which was not selling very well because frozen food had such a bad reputation. But he got some money. He went to Gloucester, Massachusetts, the oldest fishing port in America. And he set up a seafood company, got some investors, and started freezing mostly haddock and occasionally experimenting with other stuff.
And this company wasn't doing terribly well either. They had this plant on the harbor. Yeah, it breaks my heart. This this bird's eye plant is an iconic feature of Gloucester Harbor. It had a tower, which was your way of finding your way home when you were out at sea.
And a few years ago, they tore it down and built a hotel. Completely ignored my objections. It had this machine. That was many, many feet long and weighed something like 20,000 pounds and housed in this building. And he sort of struggled along.
And along came Meriwether Post, the daughter of the Post who was the food tycoon, pro-Cereal and all these things. Post, the cereals that happened to be just a little bit better. Most fancy cereal is fine with me as long as you spell it. She was a very unusual woman for her age. She took over the company when her father died, and she was very business-oriented.
She went around the country buying up food companies. And she sailed her yacht into Gloucester Harbor and sent somebody into town for some food. He came back with this frozen goose, and it was delicious. And who froze this goose? Let's go talk to him.
This is probably not completely true. On the other hand, Birdseye once gave a whole meal to people in Wall Street, given to likely investors. In any event, she got interested in this company and she bought it for almost $23 million, which was a huge, huge amount of money at the time. This was right before the Depression.
So Birdseye, unlike everybody else, spent the Depression as a multimillionaire. If you were making a big industrial company, you called it General something.
So his was general seafood. And later Post named their whole food division General Foods. And the reason for this is this is what big companies were doing at the time. There was General Electric and there was General Motors and General Everything. And they produced frozen food.
And this was kind of a difficult thing to do because nobody had freezers.
So they went around to stores and got stores to let them install freezers, very expensive machines with glass tops for display to get people to buy frozen food. And he would sometimes go to these stores and work with people and tell them about the fish and stuff. And he was becoming kind of a celebrity because the post company named their general foods division Birdseye. And people were fascinated, as I was way back when, when I first heard of it, that there actually was a person named Birdseye. It sounds like it's just a brand that was made up.
Now, here was Birdseye himself in the store telling them about frozen food. The other problem was that one of the advantages of frozen food was that you can take it home and keep it forever if you have a freezer at home, which nobody did.
So it was kind of a struggling company until World War II. And after World War II, people got freezers, and frozen food became huge. One of the interesting things to me about Clarence Birdseye is that he was what we would call today a foodie. He loved food, he cooked, he talked about it, he was just fascinated by food. But he was almost the reverse of what a modern day foodie is.
He believed that we were stuck with all this farm fresh food. And what we really needed was industrialized food. Product of his age, he believed that industrialization was the answer to everything, and he was going to make food industrial.
So after he became a millionaire, he built this huge house that still stands in Gloucester and Eastern Point. But he's still the same guy, inventing all sorts of gadgets in the basement and setting up experiments on the lawn, looking for wildlife to hunt and things to sell. Just really his own unique man. But he thought that his new coup, move over frozen food, he was going to do dehydrated food. Which he worked on in his house with a coffee maker, and eventually put out this line of dehydrated food that nobody wanted.
During World War II, the Army had actually dehydrated food and fed it to soldiers, and they hated it.
So it had this horrible reputation that he thought dehydrated food would take over the way frozen food had, but nope. And then he was experimenting with paper making. And how you could make paper from sugarcane scraps. And he got a company to hire him to do this in Peru. And this was just wonderful for him and Eleanor, because they were reliving their Labrador days, going down to Peru and having an adventure.
And they did produce paper. And to this day, there's paper produced from sugarcane scraps in South America. And that was his last adventure. Died of a heart attack, not particularly old, and was just known as this kind of charming but nutty guy who went around inventing things. Bird's eye really changed the way we live.
Because of bird's eye, first of all, I mean, completely changed the food industry. Because of bird's eye, there's much more export of food than there ever was before because you can freeze it and ship it. You just look at all of the European and Asian fish that's in American fish markets. But also, it made ice cream available to everyone. People had freezers in their homes where they could keep ice cream and where they could keep frozen food.
And it just created a whole different way of living. You know, there's a movement against industrialized food and to get fresh stuff from the market. We all have freezers and one way or another live from them. And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler. And a special thanks to Mark Kurlansky, his book Frozen in Time, Clarence Birdseye's Outrageous Idea About Frozen Food.
And what a story he told about Birdseye. He comes back to New York, gets a job at a fish market. One thing leads to another, and the inventor always is trying to solve a problem and make money. When Meriwether Post went into Gloucester to look to buy a company, Well, Birdseye's company was it. And it made Birdseye a very rich man, but also changed America.
It would take till World War II and the advent of freezers to change everything, but my goodness, frozen food changed the way we live. and changed the food industry forever. The story of Clarence Birdseye. The story of frozen food. Here on Our American Stories.
Spending time outdoors, then let's talk about skin cancer. Non-melanoma skin cancers, or NMSCs, including basal cell carcinoma and cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma, are the most common cancers in the U.S. and can become harder to treat if left undetected. That's why sun protection and timely detection matter. Our sponsor, Regeneron, is raising awareness about advanced NMSCs.
Learn more and take the pledge to see a dermatologist annually at Let's Get RealaboutskinCancer.com. Saturday, August 22nd in Tampa. Witness an MMA Legends final fight. Chris Cyborg, one of the greatest in history. She's an absolute pioneer in the sport.
Defends her PFL world title. One last time. Unforgettable and got your martyrdom. To an unforgettable career. Saturday, August 22nd, live from Benchmark International Arena.
For tickets, visit pfl.info/slash tampa. Upgrade to Elite Checking from America's Christian Credit Union and earn up to 4% APY, plus everyday perks and access to your paycheck up to two days early with early pay. Don't settle. Choose checking that rewards you and aligns with your values. Visit America's ChristianCU.com forward slash iHeart.
Minimum balance of one cent required to earn advertised APY. Early pay not guaranteed. APY equals annual percentage yield. Membership eligibility required. And CUA insured.
Working forest professionals in the U.S. plant more than they harvest, while also caring for water, wildlife, and more. It's how we grow a sustainable future. Learn more at WorkingForestsIniative.com. Uh
