Sometimes a groundbreaking idea is not enough. Sometimes a brilliant notion slouches along until an innovator with a nose for the entrepreneurial realizes its potential, perfects its contours and gives it mass appeal. For cars, it was Henry Ford. For electric light, it was Thomas Edison. For computers, it was Steve Jobs. And for the global food market, it was Clarence Birdseye.
Birdseye, whose name is synonymous with frozen food, revolutionized the way we eat. Generations of Americans have become familiar with the tidy little packages that bear his name in supermarket refrigerators. By perfecting a flash-freeze method a technique he learned from Inuit of the North Sea Birdseye single-handedly transformed the American diet and took the food industry from local to global in the course of a decade.
"Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man" by Mark Kurlansky
Its because of Birdseye that Americans expect peach pie in winter, fish fillets in Kansas and TV dinners in a hurry. And it is because of him that whole communities in America left farmlands for urban life.
Birdseye was no scientist or laboratory intellectual. Like Ford, Edison and Jobs, he had no college degree; like them, he depended largely on native intelligence and an irrepressible spirit of can-do. In Birdseye, Mark Kurlanskys brisk account of the mans galvanic trajectory, we are reminded that American ingenuity has often relied less on a classroom than on insatiable curiosity and a well-lit garage.
Kurlansky is best known for epic portraits of small-scale subjects, among them Salt, Cod and The Basque History of the World. He brings a nimble, no-frills journalism to these tasks, and the result is a series of eye-opening books on worlds we might otherwise never see. Salt becomes a history of humankind, complete with explorers and revolutionaries. Cod is a rollicking tale of adventure, with a fish as its celebrated star. The Basque History ends up being a paean to a highly inventive people: Europes earliest explorers, Spains first bankers, a race defined by curiosity, ingenuity and grit.
Likewise, Birdseye turns out to be less a biography than a glimpse into an exuberantly inventive time in America. Little is known about Birdseyes personal life, and Kurlansky is quick to admit it. But the impact of the mans inventions is on full view here: the whaling harpoon, the dipping of livestock to control ticks, the science of crystallization and cryonics, innovations in food packaging, advances in refrigeration, the birth of the sunlamp, the production of dried edibles, the papermaking revolution. We see a tireless tinkerer, a restless mind, a quintessentially American inventor, driven by two questions about the world around him: Why? and Why not?
He was born in the age of the steamboat and died in the age of the satellite. In Kurlanskys hands, the arc of Birdseyes life, which spanned from 1886 to 1956, is a history of the American imagination. Birdseye came into the world alongside the telephone, the phonograph and the light bulb, and then rode to manhood on a wave of ingenuity. By the time he was 10, Americans had invented fountain pens, cash registers, Coca-Cola, washing machines, escalators, contact lenses and automobiles. By the time he was 20, factories were churning out a whole host of American products and reaping the riches of the industrial age.
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Book review: ‘Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man’ by Mark Kurlansky
Recommendation and review posted by G. Smith
