Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Clarence Birdseye and the Rise of Frozen Foods About this episode Before Clarence Birdseye, frozen food was perceived as being low-quality and kind of gross. But after spending time in extremely cold climates, Birdseye figured out that speed freezing was the key to retaining freshness.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:04 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:35 Tracy V. Wilson? The Old Gays are back with Silver Linings, their lovable podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Robert, Mick, Bill, and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love, and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune in to Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
2:03 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.
2:14 Holly Frey? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey.
2:17 Tracy V. Wilson? And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
2:19 Holly Frey? So when writing about Clarence Birdseye, who is our topic today for his full-length biography on him, author Mark Kurlansky wrote, quote, "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." But regardless of whether he fudged some details in his life story to make it more appealing, Clarence
3:02 Holly Frey? Birdseye, who eventually went by Bob, and we'll mention that in the episode, really changed the way that people thought about and prepared food in the 20th century. There are, for the sake of clarity up top, two Clarence Birdseyes in this episode, father and son. We will refer to the main focus, just as Clarence Birdseye, or sometimes Bob Birdseye, and his father, we will refer to as Clarence Senior. Also, we have to give you a little heads up here, because Birdseye was a very interesting and eccentric man, and he's often touted as a naturalist and worked as one, but maybe not the image you have in your head when you hear that word today. He was part of that era where being
3:47 Holly Frey? a naturalist often included killing animals. We're not lingering on any of that, but he did a lot of things that would be seen as deeply problematic by today's standards, particularly regarding animal cruelty. So just know that going into this episode.
4:04 Tracy V. Wilson? Sorry, I was dwelling on the idea that an American image includes audacity and pioneer spirit, but not intellect.
4:12 Holly Frey? I know.
4:14 Tracy V. Wilson? Clarence Birdseye was born on December 9, 1886, in Brooklyn, New York. His father was Clarence Frank Birdseye, who was a very successful lawyer and wrote several textbooks. His mother was Ada Jane Underwood, who married Clarence Senior in 1878, when she was 23.
4:33 Tracy V. Wilson? Birdseye grew up in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn and had eight siblings. So Clarence was the sixth of the nine total kids.
4:42 Holly Frey? And from an early age, Clarence was deeply interested in nature. The younger Clarence Birdseye was not an athletic boy, and instead, he preferred to spend time by himself outside on the family farm that Clarence Senior bought on Long Island, which they called Windy Coat. His mother saw a budding naturalist in Clarence, and he seemed to agree. But this was not a case of a sensitive child who was one with nature. He was a boy who liked to shoot and hunt. When he was 10, he trapped live muskrats and shipped them to an English estate that was stalking their grounds with animals for hunting. He also advertised that he offered lessons in taxidermy at the age of 11.
5:25 Tracy V. Wilson? When Clarence was in high school, the family moved to Montclair, New Jersey. One of the interesting things he did as a teenager was take a cooking class. And that was something that was considered unusual for boys at this time. He also started going by the name Bob.
5:41 Holly Frey? Yeah, that class was part of his high school curriculum. It was kind of like opting into a home ec. class that was other than him, all girls. Which is just an interesting choice. But sometimes that's cited as the beginning of his fascination with food. At the age of 19, Clarence enrolled at Amherst College in Massachusetts with the goal of getting a biology degree. This is interesting, as Amherst didn't and doesn't offer science degrees. So he was still going to get a BA even with a biology major. And during college, he rescued an infestation of rats behind the Amherst butcher shop that were going to be exterminated. This wasn't because he was soft about animals being killed. He recognized them as being a rare species that was in danger of extinction.
6:26 Holly Frey? And he actually got Columbia University interested in this colony of rats. He got paid to ship the school a batch of them, in fact. He sort of always seemed to be mixing his love of nature with his love of a good hustle.
6:39 Tracy V. Wilson? He never got that college degree, though. He ran out of money after his second year, and he had to drop out and join the workforce. There's also some suggestion that he got hired away from his biology program by the US government, and that is why he didn't finish. The idea of a financial hardship in particular is interesting because Birdseye was just, he was not from a family of humble means. His father was a high-profile New York lawyer. It seems like the family did have a significant financial crisis, though, and that was around the time that Birdseye dropped out of college because he didn't have money, apparently. He tried to get a loan to continue college, but that loan was denied.
7:22 Holly Frey? Yeah, there are some question marks around Clarence Senior's business dealings. We're going to talk about a big financial crisis that comes a few years later. But knowing that that one is coming, I was a little like, hmm, I wonder what exactly happened here. Birdseye, though, did get hired by the US Department of Agriculture after school, and he was sent to the US Southwest for work on a biological survey. He was living in Arizona and New Mexico during this time. And he also became keenly aware, while he was there, of the value of animal furs, and that would drive some of his moves later. He worked various jobs in New York after the survey was completed, and he returned
8:07 Holly Frey? to the East Coast. But he also started a new side hustle importing animal furs from contacts he had made in the American Southwest and then selling them in the city. He also worked in an office job for the US Department of Agriculture, but he was really too restless to be happy working in an office.
8:26 Tracy V. Wilson? During this phase of his life, Clarence also met the daughter of cartographer Samuel Gannett. Eleanor Gannett was an undergrad at George Washington University when they met. That started a five-year courtship before the couple married in August of 1915.
8:43 Holly Frey? But before that, the Department of Agriculture sent Bob Birdseye to Montana in 1910. And this actually brushes up against our recent episode on eponymous diseases because he was there to collect ticks for the study of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. We mentioned already that he loved to hunt and this job involved a lot of hunting because he collected the ticks off of wild game that he shot. He apparently throughout his life touted how lucky he was that he could hunt with no limitations while he was there. This was a job that came with a high degree of risk for all the reasons we talked about in that eponymous diseases episode, but for someone like Bird's Eye, it was also a perfect fit.
9:26 Holly Frey? In interviews throughout his life, he downplayed his work on that project as insignificant and he tended to talk about the hunting part of it. But he is recognized as being hugely important to the study of it that enabled treatments to be developed. Among other things, he wrote a report with recommendations on how to control the spread of Rocky Mountain spotted fever titled, "Some Common Mammals of Western Montana in Relation to Agriculture and Spotted Fever."
9:54 Tracy V. Wilson? After the study, he stayed in Montana and he continued to trap animals to eliminate predators for the local farmers. Some of this sounds really awful by modern standards, probably even standards of the time. One of his projects was testing poisons to see which of them was most effective. Reminds me a little bit of when they tried to figure out how much arsenic needed to go in the tick dip.
10:18 Holly Frey? Yeah.
10:19 Tracy V. Wilson? By experimentation on the animals.
10:22 Holly Frey? Yeah. In 1912, Bird's Eye moved on to a new assignment in Labrador on the eastern coast of Canada, although at the time Newfoundland and Labrador were not part of Canada yet. Really, this assignment was an invitation proffered by Wilfred Grenfell, a British-born medical missionary. Grenfell had been working in Labrador for years by this point. He worked to develop the availability of medical care and other necessities to areas that were sparsely populated and depended on fishing and trapping for food and for income. And he needed help in this work and this was exactly the kind of job that Bird's Eye was drawn to. So it was a great fit and these two men reportedly got along really, really well.
11:07 Holly Frey? While he was there, Birdseye also taxidermied birds to send to Washington DC for the US Biological Survey. And that soon expanded to also preserving various insects and really, anything that was requested.
11:20 Tracy V. Wilson? The trapping in particular was interesting to Birdseye. He saw the potential of starting a business venture if he could get investors from New York to buy in on it. After researching and studying the health and habits of foxes, he was in business as a fox breeder and a fur trader. Ultimately, new legislation in Newfoundland put an end to the fox breeding business. He did continue having them processed for fur, though. Birdseye also started writing about this work and published some articles as a possible start to another career, but that did not really get off the ground.
11:57 Holly Frey? This was also a time when Birdseye was in a unique situation regarding food. He didn't really have access to fresh fruits and vegetables. Those had to be imported at very great expense. He ate a lot of canned food, which he actually liked. And he also learned a lot about how to prepare the foods that were available locally, like salmon and game in new ways. He welcomed new culinary experiences and he was willing to try just about anything, anything, even polar bear, seal meat, and skunk.
12:30 Tracy V. Wilson? Coming up, we will talk about Birdseye's return to the US. But first, we will take a quick sponsor break.
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15:16 Holly Frey? We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.
15:58 Holly Frey? Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
16:25 Holly Frey? Birdseye returned to the US in 1915. And at that point, he felt like he had made enough money through his fur business that he was ready to truly start a life with his beloved Eleanor. So, once the pair got married, Bob and Eleanor planned to travel to Labrador together. This was an adjustment for Eleanor, but she completely rolled with it and she learned all the skills needed to survive in the wintery climate. By the time their first winter there was over, Eleanor was pregnant and they returned to New York. Bob actually went back to Labrador pretty quickly after making sure that Eleanor's needs were taken care of. The couple had made a plan. She was going to have the baby in New York and then she would travel to Labrador once the baby was old enough to go on the journey.
17:10 Holly Frey? Their son Kellogg was born on September 6th, and by mid-October, he and Eleanor were headed north and settled into family life in the cold.
17:19 Tracy V. Wilson? There were a couple of different stories about what led Birdseye to thinking about the way foods freeze. One is that while he was ice fishing with some of the indigenous people of Labrador, he noticed that because of the freezing temperatures, fish were freezing almost as soon as they were pulled out of the water. The fish would then be stored that way, and he marveled at how fresh they tasted when they were thawed and cooked later. Another version of this is that the people who lived there were freezing their food for the harsh winters, when the fresh fruits and vegetables would be less accessible. Biographer Mark Kralansky shared in his book about Birdseye, "The naturalist's fascination
18:02 Tracy V. Wilson? with water," finding what he called a, quote, "state of equilibrium," by which he meant that it would stabilize to the point right before freezing, and then would seem to freeze instantly when it was poured into another vessel.
18:18 Holly Frey? The reality is that Birdseye was noticing and studying all these things and performing tests on meats that were frozen at different times of the year by thinly slicing them and observing the different textures on the interior of the frozen food. He did start thinking about why the fish and other meat that he saw frozen in Canada stayed delicious, which is not the case with other frozen foods that he had experienced back home. He noticed the variables that were in place during freezing there, the temperature, the ice, and the wind. And he ruminated on these factors a lot, and he started performing his own experiments. He started first with vegetables like cabbage and then moving up to meats.
18:59 Holly Frey? And eventually, he realized that instant freezing meant that the crystals that formed in those foods were much smaller, and they wouldn't damage the cellular walls of the food.
19:11 Tracy V. Wilson? When the United States entered World War I in the spring of 1917, Birdseye returned home. But there was a more personal battle bubbling up in the Birdseye family. A news article from May of 1917 that appeared in multiple newspapers ran with the headline, quote, "Alleged cleanup of $1.9 million in two days." This was about the finances of the Life and Trust Company of Pittsburgh. The article read in part, quote, "The institution is believed to have been wrecked." According to a statement issued, Clarence Birdseye of New York, in a period of two days, milked the company of $1.9 million through a board
19:53 Tracy V. Wilson? of dummy directors. Warrants have been issued for the arrest of Birdseye and his five alleged associates, all of New York. One of those five associates was Birdseye Jr.'s brother, Kellogg. By the end of the year, the insurance company had been liquidated and Clarence Senior was being sued to recover the lost money. Birdseye Senior and Kellogg Birdseye were eventually sentenced to two years in prison.
20:21 Holly Frey? Yeah, just in case it's not obvious, the Kellogg name was popular in the Birdseye family. Both Clarence, the younger Clarence's brother and his son were named Kellogg. Birdseye Jr. was never particularly interested in the worlds of finance and law like his father and brother. And we don't actually know what his personal feelings about all these legal troubles were. We'll talk about it some more in behind the scenes, but this was not an openly demonstrative person. So we really don't have a lot of insight about how he felt about much of anything. It is possible that he wanted to distance himself from the entire situation. He and Eleanor and their young son chose to move to Washington DC as this was going on, which was close to
21:04 Holly Frey? her family rather than his. When they were there, Birdseye first worked for a construction company, and then he moved on to the US Housing Corporation, and then another shift to work for the US Fisheries Association.
21:17 Tracy V. Wilson? Working for the fisheries made Birdseye once again focus on frozen food because part of the work of the Fisheries Association was looking at ways to improve the shipping of fish. As Bob Birdseye investigated the industry, he was appalled at how sloppy things were in terms of production and sanitation. He thought he could do better and ensure that clean, fresh tasting fish made it to consumers' tables.
21:44 Holly Frey? Initially, he focused his work on packaging and he developed a shipping container to keep fish cold in transit, but it was not as effective as he hoped. And he started to contemplate the things that he had noticed and studied when he was living in Labrador. In 1922, he quit his job to start working full-time on developing his ideas for food freezing techniques. This was a huge gamble. At this point, he and Eleanor had two kids and they had another on the way.
22:15 Tracy V. Wilson? Birdseye was not the first person to work on freezing food for the consumer market, and specifically, not fish. But previous efforts tended to have a bad, grainy texture. Frozen food did not have good associations on the consumer market at this point, even with other inventors also trying to figure out fast freezing.
22:38 Holly Frey? In 1923, Birdseye drummed up investors to start his first frozen food company. This venture was focused on the food he had gained expertise in through his various jobs in the preceding years, exclusively fish. Birdseye Seafood opened its door in Lower Manhattan that same year. He once again focused on packaging, but he realized that innovating the container for the fish wasn't really going to solve the problems that were facing the industry. He had to rethink the freezing process on a large scale.
23:11 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1924, he was granted a patent for his food freezing machine. His basic process flash-froze foods, which were already packed into waxed cardboard packaging. This packaged food would run through a pressurized space between two frozen plates. The process enabled the foods to be frozen so quickly that they didn't develop water crystals in them, which was part of what helped them retain their original, fresh flavor. And this process worked on vegetables and fruits as well as fish. The big differentiator between Birdseye's method and his competitors was in the temperature. A lot of other companies froze their foods just below freezing, but recalling the harsh winters
23:54 Tracy V. Wilson? in Labrador, Birdseye froze his foods colder than 45 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
24:00 Holly Frey? His patent titled "Method of Preserving Piscatorial Products," which I love, makes clear that the benefit is to consumers that are not in close proximity to fresh seafood, stating, quote, "Of great importance is the fact that the ability to freeze fish without in any way adversely affecting it as an article of food makes it possible to supply this highly-desired commodity to inland points far removed from the greater rivers and the oceans where the fish is caught." Soon, he actually had another patent for the cartons that he was using in the process.
24:33 Tracy V. Wilson? But though this was all clearly innovative, it was a huge step forward for frozen foods, it did not meet with success. In an echo of the abrupt end to his college education, he just ran out of money. But this time, Birdseye had insurance. Literally, he had cashed out his life insurance policy for more money so that he could keep working on his frozen seafood company. It also didn't sustain the company, though, and as 1925 loomed, the money once again ran out. This time, he sold his house and he moved the family to Gloucester, Massachusetts, to be in a port city with a busy fishing industry.
25:13 Tracy V. Wilson? He and Eleanor also had a fourth child during this financially precarious time.
25:19 Holly Frey? Yeah, he basically was like, "I'm gonna keep going, so let's sell our house."
25:23 Tracy V. Wilson? And let's go to Gloucester.
25:24 Holly Frey? Uh, he clearly had a vision. Things didn't luckily stay precarious for terribly long, though, because Birdseye got several high-profile investors, including JP Morgan, to fund a new venture. This time, he was not planning on opening a storefront to offer his frozen food product. Bob Birdseye was planning to create machines to sell to the food processing industry. By this point, the legal problems that Clarence Senior and his brother Kellogg had been involved in had more or less been resolved. And for the first several years of this new venture, Kellogg became the vice president of Bob's new company. The new facility that he built was customized to handle the process that Birdseye had invented,
26:09 Holly Frey? and he named this new enterprise General Seafoods Corporation. And there, he worked constantly to innovate what frozen food could be.
26:19 Tracy V. Wilson? This was an expansive effort that worked to innovate the entire seafood industry, not just in freezing, but in packaging, and even prepping the product before freezing. The idea of a fish already scaled and filleted before it was frozen for an easy consumer use didn't really exist before Birdseye worked with engineers to develop the machines that could perform those tasks.
26:43 Holly Frey? Yeah, he had a scaler and a, you know, a fish filayer. He just invented so many pieces of this process. In 1927, he filed for another patent, "Method of Preparing Food Product," which he touted as follows: "A method of freezing which requires more than a very short space of time. For freezing impairs the natural qualities and flavors of comestibles. In the case of fish or meat, for instance, slow freezing disrupts the cells of the animal tissue, with loss of the pristine qualities and flavors, and rapid deterioration after thawing. By my new method, I am able, by means which are economical and commercially practical, not only to affect
27:25 Holly Frey? any desired degree of refrigeration, but to quick freeze a comestible into a compacted frozen block, having comparatively fewer spaces in which the pristine qualities and flavor of the comestible are retained and remain unimpaired for a substantial period after the block has been thawed." That patent was granted in 1930. Birdseye, like many inventors we have talked about before, continued to refine his process and his machinery, and he filed a lot of update patents, including one for a continuous belt on his freezing apparatus. He didn't invent fast freezing, but he never stopped looking for ways to improve it.
28:06 Tracy V. Wilson? There were more things than belts that had to be refined and rethought. For one, all of this innovation didn't erase the years of concerns people had developed regarding frozen foods. Birds Eye kept working to address this distrust, paying for food safety tests to show the food was free from problems and contaminants. And all of the packaging had to be rethought, from plastic wraps to packaging inks. And Birds Eye worked with partner companies to develop all these things. Birds Eye's company still was not making any money. They needed investors or a buyout. One of the things that Bob Birds Eye was known to do in the hopes of drumming up interest
28:47 Tracy V. Wilson? from financial sources was to send them frozen foods to show them how effective his process was.
28:54 Holly Frey? Yeah, there are stories of him, like, serving bigwigs of industry, like fancy lunches, and then saying, "All of this was frozen food once," to watch them go, "Ooh." Eventually, that desired deal came through, and it was a huge one. A company called Postum Incorporated bought Birds Eye's company out in 1929 for $23.5 million, which was absolutely unheard of for the time. His company had actually been valued, just a couple of years earlier, at less than $2 million, so this seemed absolutely bananas to a lot of people. Marjorie Meriwether Post, the Postum Foods heiress, who is often credited with brokering this deal, is on my shortlist.
29:39 Holly Frey? I became very interested in her in a little side rabbit hole while I was working on this episode. But the Postum Company worked with Goldman Sachs to secure funding for this massive buyout. Part of the huge expense was that the patents were included in the deal, along with all the company's machinery and other assets. Postum really thought that Clarence Birds Eye had developed the future of food. Postum changed its name to General Foods Corporation shortly after the buy and started selling on the New York Stock Exchange two and a half months after the deal was announced. Within two years, as the company continued to lose money in the wake of the 1929 stock
30:19 Holly Frey? market crash, Goldman Sachs let the Posts buy out their shares in the company.
30:25 Tracy V. Wilson? We'll talk about how Birds Eye's life changed once he was a millionaire, but first we will hear from the sponsors that keep the show going.
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31:06 Holly Frey? We've all done it. Tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.
31:48 Holly Frey? Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
32:09 Holly Frey? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your Elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy only
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34:19 Holly Frey? Clarence Birds-Eye maintained a role in the General Foods Corporation after the buyout, working as president of the division that retained the name Birds-Eye Frosted Foods. And then he also worked as a high-level consultant. Because of the timing of that buyout, he managed to weather the Great Depression quite well, as he had a steady salary with the company and he was able to continue his work developing new areas of the frozen food market. He also built himself a beautiful new house in the early 1930s while most people were struggling. He continued to hunt game because he loved it, sometimes shooting things right from his porch, although he was certainly wealthy enough to not need to hunt for food.
35:01 Tracy V. Wilson? He also managed to keep a couple dozen other people employed in his lab at a time when jobs were really sparse. A lot of the techniques used in the frozen food industry today were initially worked out in his Gloucester lab, like keeping fruit from browning by using ascorbic acid.
35:19 Holly Frey? Yeah, it's just vitamin C. What the posthum company had brought to that huge deal that Birdseye had never really managed well on his own was advertising and public relations. Over the course of several years immediately after the buyout, newspapers started running stories about a new quick freezing process that kept foods tasting fresh. The Baltimore Sun, for example, ran a piece in November of 1929 titled "Food That Is Fresh Though Frozen: New Preserving Process Aims To Maintain Cell Structure." Already, the tide was turning in the way frozen food was perceived, as evidenced by this passage from the article. Quote, "The quick freezing principle seems so simple and its advantage is so great that
36:04 Holly Frey? one's imagination need not be stretched at all to visualize many startling outgrowths of its adoption of fresh food distributing agencies. With the airplane to furnish quick transportation and the light, practicable packages possible where no refrigerant is required, the range of fancy fresh meats and fruits made available to centers of population is vastly expanded."
36:28 Tracy V. Wilson? You heard that right. At the time, there was a belief that the food packaging could be all that was needed to keep the frozen food ice cold. That same article notes, quote, "It is asserted the excessive coldness of the food packaging itself makes it possible to hold it for days without icing or other refrigerant. Mere packing an insulated, nearly airtight container, such as a sealed corrugated pasteboard carton, is all that is necessary to assure first-class condition for long periods."
37:02 Holly Frey? We know that was wrong, but at the time, it seemed feasible. Even with the PR know-how of the Postum team, frozen food still had a slow acceptance rate. A handful of grocery stores, and I mean a handful, it was less than a dozen, agreed to stock frozen foods through their company, but it was a really hard sell. Customers came in and they asked a lot of questions, but purchases were a lot less frequent. Over time, though, the numbers crept up, but General Foods spent a lot of money to get those numbers, including supplying the costly refrigerated cases that the food could be stocked in. Those cases cost $1,500 each, but they were also expensive for the store because they used a lot of electricity.
37:48 Holly Frey? This caused a whole lot of consternation in the industry. So eventually, Bird's Eye Foods contracted with another company to make less burdensome freezers. They were less expensive for Bird's Eye, and then they rented those to the stores, and they were less expensive to run. So the end result was a better financial situation for everyone.
38:08 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1935, Bird's Eye founded the Bird's Eye Electric Company. It started with a desire to add reflectors to the insides of light bulbs to offer greater illumination for display uses. He patented the reflecting electric lamp in 1935, and it has continued to be used to the present day. He sold the electrical company to Wabash Appliance Corporation in 1939.
38:35 Holly Frey? Also in 1939, he invented a gravity froster, which froze individual items a single piece at a time. That sounds like it would be slow and weird, but it was totally automated. So ultimately, it ended up being faster than previous freezing machines. It also needed less effort from an operator, so one person could run multiple machines at a time. This turned into a new company that built and leased the Gravity Frost machine to other companies that were making frozen foods.
39:06 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1938, interest in frozen food had grown to the point that a magazine called Quick Frozen Foods was launched. Birdseye was not the one who started it, but he did serve as an advisor. This was one of many things he became involved in as frozen foods became more of an established industry and he had more time for other projects. One of the other things he was involved in was whaling. He had invented a harpoon that had a thrust mechanism to give it greater force than throwing a harpoon by hand. That same year, his advocacy helped initiate an update to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which put stronger requirements in place for quality standards related to frozen
39:51 Tracy V. Wilson? foods, something that he and other people in the industry saw as vital to rehabilitating the way frozen food was perceived.
39:59 Holly Frey? Birdseye once again innovated the way frozen foods were offered in 1944. At that point, he started exploring refrigerated train cars as a way to ship foods. He ended up leasing box cars that the Birdseye Frozen Food Company could pack and prep. This was a huge moment in the way frozen foods were handled because it made it possible for companies like Birdseye to vastly expand their customer territory, and it inspired a lot of other companies to start thinking about similar initiatives.
40:30 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1949, he started working on dehydrating foods. This work started out simply, just with a hot plate flipped to be an overhead heater for some cubed bread and an electric fan blowing on the cubes at the same time. From those basic beginnings, he started to combine various methods being employed by other people working in the field to fine-tune his, quote, "anhydrous food preparation" over the course of six years.
40:58 Tracy V. Wilson? He started a company and marketed it and got some interest, but the novelty kind of wore off and Birdseye recognized that it would take a massive effort to get anhydrous food to be anywhere near as successful as frozen food. He turned his focus to other things, including Holly's beloved topic of hydroponics. He was one of the early proponents of the idea that cities like New York could produce all the food plants they needed if they converted the rooftops to hydroponic gardens.
41:29 Holly Frey? But at this point, Birdseye was also starting to slow down. He developed angina and he was encouraged to relax and stop his constant busy ways for the benefit of his heart health. This is actually the opposite of what people with angina would be told today, but at the time, that's what the medical advice was. So this resulted in an interest in gardening, which his wife Eleanor was already very interested in. The couple ended up co-authoring a book titled Growing Woodland Plants in 1951.
42:00 Tracy V. Wilson? Over his life, Birdseye was granted hundreds of patents, almost 300. Some of these were improvements to existing inventions, but others were ventures into areas that were completely separate from his food processing work. In the early 1950s, Birdseye started working on another project, which was making paper, but not in any way that it had been made before. He was working on a way to make paper pulp using leftover cane stalk scrap that remained after sugar production. He got a financial backer, which was W.R. Grayson Company, who produced sugar. This resulted in a late in life move for Bob and Eleanor.
42:41 Tracy V. Wilson? They went to Peru, where the Grayson Company had huge sugarcane fields and had built a paper plant.
42:48 Holly Frey? In 1955, the Birdseyes moved back to New York, where Bob's work with the Grayson Company shifted to marketing the new process he had developed over the preceding several years. But while those efforts were underway, his health took a sharp decline and he died of heart failure on October 7, 1956. Birdseye had received an honorary degree from Amherst 15 years earlier, and in his end of life planning, he requested that instead of flowers, anyone wishing to pay their respects should donate to a college fund that he established at the school to prevent other students from cutting their education short as he had done.
43:26 Tracy V. Wilson? Today, 99% of households in the US report purchasing frozen foods and the global frozen food industry is valued at more than $230 billion.
43:38 Holly Frey? Yeah, he was right. He made some scary moves, but he was ultimately right. And even Postum's buyout, which a lot of people kind of criticized them over and being like, why did you pay $23 million for a company that's not worth two? And they were like, we see the future and they were right.
43:59 Holly Frey? Listen, it takes a lot of bravado to gamble that way. It might take some people a little bit of bravado to deal with today's listener mail because it's about spiders. This is from our listener, Shandra, and I love it. Shandra writes, since you were talking about spiders a few weeks ago in a behind the scenes episode, I wanted to share a couple of pictures from New Mexico. The first is a cat-faced spider, which is a type of orb weaver. It's been hanging out on my patio for weeks, maybe months at this point. I watched it clean a fallen leaf out of its web one day. Neat creature. It's absolutely adorable, in my opinion. Its little badonk looks like a kitty face. Come on, who doesn't want that? The second picture is only the second tarantula I've ever seen.
44:43 Holly Frey? It's cool to see them walking down the trail. That is all. Happy October. Look at that pretty tarantula. I know not everybody loves a tarantula. I think they're very beautiful. We all know I love spiders. Tarantulas are very cute. When I was very, very tiny, I lived in Arizona and I loved seeing the tarantulas running around. Like after the rare rain, they would all come up from their little burrows and be in the streets and I thought it was the cutest thing ever. Because I was a weird child. I don't know what else to tell you. If you were a weird child who loved tarantulas, or if you're a weird child now, or if you just love tarantulas, or anything else, you can write and tell us about that. You can do that at [email protected] . You can also subscribe to the show if you haven't gotten around to that yet.
45:26 Holly Frey? That is as easy as pie to do on the iHeartRadio app, or really anywhere you listen to your favorite shows.
45:37 Tracy V. Wilson? Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
45:51 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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