A book blog with Maggie Galehouse

Review: How Clarence Birdseye changed our food terrain


‘Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man’
By Mark Kurlansky.
Doubleday, 251 pp., $25.95.

Reviewed by Steve Weinberg

Clarence Birdseye invented a process to freeze various foods and ship them around the world.

Blessed with a relentlessly inquiring mind, Birdseye was a world-class inventor who died holding at least 200 patents, ranging from a type of electric light bulb to a whaling harpoon. He would marry and father four children. A conventional family man in many ways, Birdseye managed to explore regions of the world and regions of his mind closed to less curious individuals.

It is no surprise that Mark Kurlansky, a prolific, talented author of nonfiction and three books of fiction, would write a biography of Birdseye (1886-1956). After all, Birdseye figures in three of Kurlansky’s previous books—“Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World”; “Salt: A World History”; and “The Last Fish Tale: The Fate of the Atlantic and Survival in Gloucester, America’s Oldest Fishing Port and Most Original Town.”

Gloucester, Mass., became the adopted home of Birdseye, a native of Brooklyn. Fish, including cod, were among the foods with which he experimented. As for salt, well, salt is a key ingredient in almost everything food-related, including keeping food fresh. It makes food freeze at a lower temperature than it otherwise would and makes water boil at a higher temperature.

As a young man, Birdseye traveled throughout the western United States as an employee of the federal government. He tended to specialize in studying insect-borne diseases involving ticks. Later generations built on his field work to devise cures for deadly illnesses contracted outdoors.

His interests were so varied and his travel so broadly based, Birdseye found it difficult to make a career choice, making life difficult for his family. He could not have known in those early adult years that he really could earn a living as an inventor.

Kurlansky recounts the decades in which Birdseye found his balance while quietly becoming famous. He started experimenting with preserving food through freezing while living in the harsh climate of Labrador. Frozen food was nothing new, but after thawing it was unusually unappealing. Birdseye figured out how to eliminate the shortcomings.


By modernizing food preservation and thus food distribution, Birdseye contributed to the decline of localized agriculture. The “fresh frozen” process he perfected meant food consumers no longer needed to purchase most of what they ate from the farmer down the road. Circa 2012, plenty of foodies, especially locavores, bemoan the shipments of frozen goods across the globe. Kurlansky speculates that Birdseye would find such moaning inexplicable.

“Why, Birdseye would have wondered, would you want to be limited by local production when the food of the world is available?,” Kurlansky writes. Birdseye would not have understood a consumer in, say, Houston buying local produce at inflated prices when that consumer could walk into a supermarket to purchase delicious items from China or France or California at lower prices, thanks to his freezing technology feeding into “the miracles of agribusiness.”

Kurlansky taps into the deep well of human nature as he discusses Birdseye’s seemingly backward ethos. Speaking of his own family, Kurlansky writes: “…my grandfather was a tailor, and he hand made all of my father’s clothes. And so my father grew up dreaming of someday owning a factory-made suit. We are all more reactive against the conditions we inherit than we realize. In the post-industrial world we have become anti-industry, and it is useful and fascinating to get to know a man of vision and imagination who genuinely believed in industrial answers to life’s problems.”

Steve Weinberg is a biographer and a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

Maggie Galehouse | Books editor, features reporter