This hunger for the taste of freshness had a lasting effect on Birdseye. It is easy with the wisdom of hindsight to say that naturally a young man looking for commercial opportunities who had an obsession with food and a passion for the taste of freshness would make his fortune developing better-preserved food, and that, coming from Labrador, where everything froze, he would work with frozen food.
But that is not what happened. His food concerns were much more immediate. He was not thinking of ambitious plans to launch a new food industry. He was just trying to make sure his young son and his wife ate well. Making that task even more difficult, Bob was reluctant to travel and leave Eleanor and Kellogg alone. He wrote in a 1917 letter, “Pulling teeth would have been a mild process compared to running off and leaving E. and Sonny.”
The Birdseyes brought live hens with them from Newfoundland and also a large supply of fresh potatoes, turnips, beets, carrots, parsnips, cabbage, onions, apples, and grapes. Also thirty dozen eggs because they did not anticipate the Rhode Island Red hens would start laying until the spring. They also shipped with them from Newfoundland two whole beef hindquarters and a whole lamb.
“So you see that our larder is going to be well-stocked,” Bob wrote home to New Jersey, “and we needn’t fear scurvy or rickets, or pip, or beriberi or any of those little ailments which come of a too salt diet!”
All he had to do now was figure out how to keep this trove in reasonably fresh condition throughout a long winter. In the event of failure, they also shipped a large supply of canned fruits and vegetables. The grapes froze on the way to Sandwich Bay, and the eggs spoiled quickly and could not even be fed to the foxes. But by the following spring the hens were producing. Birdseye froze several hundred partridge in the fall. Another reason why freezing, snow packing in barrels, became more important with the arrival of Eleanor was that she disliked gamy-tasting meat, so a wild goose or a partridge kept unfrozen even a few days was too ripe for her taste.
All of this was driving Birdseye’s lively intellect to ponder on the science of freezing. He spent endless time reflecting on things that would have barely registered in most minds. In December 1914, when he was still single, he made a simple observation on something that had plagued his curiosity for years. He wrote to his father:
Practically every morning throughout the winter the water in my pitcher is frozen—often so hard that it has to be thawed out with hot water. So a few mornings ago, after a cold night, I was much surprised to find, upon thrusting a hand into the pitcher to find it filled with water instead of ice. When, however I poured some of the water into my bowl and some more into a glass, and then scooped up a handful I found that the bowl was full of a spongy mass of ice crystals; and the same formation had taken place in the glass and the water pitcher—yet a few seconds before there had been no sign of ice in the water. Evidently the water had been in a state of equilibrium—at the freezing point, and all ready to congeal, but needing some little stirring up to start the crystallization. I seem to remember seeing the same thing done in a physics lab experiment, but certainly never ran across it before “in nature.” Did you?
Some days later he commented on the phenomenon to his family again, adding, “Some of you physics-sharks please give me an explanation of this happening.” This is the earliest record of Birdseye contemplating the science of freezing and the laws of crystallization.
Freezing was not new. There had been frozen food available all of his life. But when it thawed, it was mushy and less appealing than even canned food. Frozen food was a last resort. No one wanted to eat frozen food. But to Birdseye’s surprise the frozen food in Labrador was not unpleasant. In fact, in his judgment, it tasted just like fresh food. What accounted for the difference? The Inuit had traditionally enjoyed this high-quality frozen food. They fished in holes in the ice and pulled out a trout, and it instantly froze in the thirty-below-zero air. When they cooked it, it tasted like fresh fish. In fact, sometimes the Inuit would put the frozen fish in water and thaw it, and the fish would start swimming in the water, still alive. According to Birdseye, some fish were still alive after being frozen for months. Birdseye spent years trying to understand the mystery of the live frozen fish, but he did learn to ice fish, instantly freeze the fish in the air, store it outside in the cold, and thaw it in water when ready to cook it. And he learned to snow pack fresh meat. Frozen game was so fresh when it thawed that it did not taste in the least aged, and even Eleanor liked the taste.
He noticed that the meat and fish were not as good when frozen in the early or late winter, and he wondered why. He would cut paper-thin slices of the frozen food and see that the food frozen early and late in the winter did not have the same texture as the food frozen in the dead of winter. He could see the difference. The spring and fall food had a grainier texture and leaked juiced when thawed.
It was clear that in the dead of winter, when the air was thirty below or even colder, the food froze instantly whereas in warmer weather it took longer to freeze. This was not hard for Birdseye to understand when he thought about it. It had to do with the science of crystallization, of which everyone in Labrador had some knowledge because preserving food with salt was a way of life there. Salting food and freezing food are opposite processes. Freezing needs small crystals, and salting needs large ones for the best results. For centuries sea salt had been in great demand in places like Labrador with a great deal of fish but not a sunny enough climate for solar-evaporated sea salt. The only economically viable way to produce sea salt is by evaporating seawater in the sun. The cost of fuel made cooking it down economically unworkable. The fish required sea salt not because, like the fish, it came from the sea but because of its large crystals. Solar evaporation is a very slow way to make salt, and so the crystals are very large. This is the rule with any kind of crystallization: the more slowly the crystals form, the larger they are.
Birdseye looked at the inferior frozen food with its grainy texture and leaking juices and realized that the ice crystals were too big. If food is frozen too slowly, the larger ice crystals will damage the cellular structure, even break down cells. Everyone knew that the height of winter was the best freezing season. Birdseye figured out why.
He started experimenting with vegetables. When the weather turned very cold, he took a large barrel and put an inch of seawater at the bottom. Then he put a thin layer of cabbage leaves. He had bought a lot of cabbage in Newfoundland and had been storing it in the house until the winter got really cold. Once this was frozen, he added another layer of seawater and another layer of cabbage. He repeated this until he had a full barrel of cabbage. When he wanted some cabbage for the family, he would lob off a chunk with an ax and cook it, and he found that it tasted exactly like cooked fresh cabbage.
Not all attempts at freezing food were successful. He butchered a caribou and froze it inside blocks of ice, only to find out months later that it had not been frozen cold enough; the natural salt in the animal blood had melted the interior of the blocks and the meat had rotted. Birdseye liked to joke years later that this was the original “Birdseye Frosted Meat.”
On April 6, 1917, the United States, despite President Woodrow Wilson’s election campaign promise not to, entered World War I. Birdseye always said that he returned to the United States because of the war. But he did not clarify why. Others said the motivation was patriotism, but what patriotic act was he returning to perform? He did register for the draft from the new Birdseye family home in Englewood, New Jersey, but he applied for an exemption as the father of an infant, and the military was not interested in a thirty-year-old father.
It may have just felt like the right time to go home. He had been Buffalo Bill and Admiral Peary, and he was planning on more adventures. He was married and a father, and he intended to have more children. Their second child, Ruth, was born in 1918. It was time for a different kind of life.
Bob and Eleanor Birdseye had left Labrador, and they were no longer preoccupied with the issues of subarcti
c survival. They were no longer confronted with problems such as fresh food supply. Birdseye had no reason to think about freezing food anymore. He was now living in a world in which frozen food could be completely avoided, which was exactly what most people wanted to do. He had no more reason to think of the commercial possibilities of freezing than he did about snowshoes or dogsleds. He later said of what he had learned about freezing, “I tucked this knowledge away in my subconscious mind, but its commercial possibilities did not dawn on me at that time.”
There was something else on Bob’s mind. In May 1917 Bob’s father, Clarence, and older brother Kellogg were arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit fraud. Whether or not this was a factor in Bob’s return to the United States is not known. Bob had seldom taken an important step without consulting both his father and his brother Kellogg. They had been his regular advisers in his years in the Labrador fur trade and the two family members most often mentioned in his Labrador writings. Bob and Eleanor had named their first son after Kellogg.
The arrest got some press attention. On May 5, the Standard, a weekly that covered the insurance industry, reported the allegations in great detail and said, “The story is one of the most extraordinary in the history of life insurance.” Another newspaper covering the industry, the Insurance Press, on May 9, under the headline “The Looting of the Pittsburgh Life and Trust,” wrote, “A narrative of astounding effrontery and rascality.”
Clarence senior and Kellogg had become involved in a life insurance company, Pittsburgh Life and Trust, of which Kellogg became treasurer. Clarence managed to get control of the company and establish his own board of directors, who let him dip into their safe-deposit box and take securities, which he sold and pocketed the proceeds of, amounting to some $1.9 million, worth almost $22 million today. But this was only part of a far more complicated plot that involved luring in a lumber company and numerous other players to cover up what the prosecution termed looting. They were gutting the company, and New York and Pennsylvania authorities stepped in to protect the insured. Accounts of the trial make clear that this was not a small oversight or a slight brush with the law but an elaborate conspiracy to steal a fortune. It appeared that Clarence Birdseye Sr., a leading authority on New York State law whose books were studied by law students and lawyers, was the ringleader in a scheme involving lying to and deceiving a considerable number of business associates, many of whom testified against him.
Bob and Eleanor and young Kellogg did not settle in New York or New Jersey to be by their troubled relatives. They went back to Eleanor’s town, Washington, D.C., where Bob worked for the firm of Stone and Webster, a Massachusetts-based engineering and construction company, with which Bob’s Wall Street uncle, Henry Ebenezer, had a business involvement. In 1919, Bob left this growing firm for a position as an assistant purchasing agent for the U.S. Housing Corporation. For a time he also worked for a bottled-water producer. The life of adventure seemed well behind Birdseye in 1920, when he switched jobs again and became the assistant to the president of the U.S. Fisheries Association.
This frequent switching of positions seems to have been essentially a search for a new direction. Perhaps he was distracted by the trial. It was not immediately apparent, but the decision in 1920 to work for the fisheries was another one of those serendipitous moves that so often directed Birdseye toward his destiny. The U.S. Fisheries Association was a lobbying group for commercial fishermen that worked on improving the fishing industry on a wide range of matters from proposing legislation to Congress to improving transportation for fresh fish to devising a code with fewer letters so that fishermen could telegraph reports for smaller fees.
This position with the Fisheries Association came as the trial was ending. On March 5, Bob’s father and brother were sentenced to prison for two years. Their sentencing was covered in the New York Times. Clarence Frank Birdseye Sr. was a powerful, well-respected man and the patriarch of the Birdseye family. His new book denouncing Marxism was about to be published.
On April 30, 1920, Birdseye, aged sixty-five, was received at the Western State Penitentiary in Pittsburgh, prisoner 10849. His occupation was given as lawyer/author. He surrendered his gold cuff links, gold collar buttons, gold penknife, and gold ring and began his two-year sentence. In his mug shot he strikingly resembles the son who was named after him—same balding round head, wire glasses, gray eyes. His eyebrows are a bit thicker, his build heavier, and he had a thick mustache. But in the side-view mug shot the profile is identical.
Though Kellogg was sentenced alongside him, he did not report to the state penitentiary, and it is not clear if he ever served his sentence.
His father’s and his brother’s convictions must have been devastating to Bob. No one remembers him ever speaking about this event. In fact, the incident is not well known among his descendants. His father served his two years in the Pittsburgh penitentiary and was released in 1922; he died five years later in 1927 at the age of seventy-three—two years too soon to see his namesake son become wealthy and famous. His widow, Ada, moved in with Bob’s sister Miriam in Washington, D.C., where Miriam did nutritional studies for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But by then Bob and Eleanor were gone from Washington.
Those years while his father was in prison, 1920 to 1922, were formative ones for Bob Birdseye. As assistant to the president of the Fisheries Association, he was confronted with the full range of fishery issues, from sea to market. And so he was back to being involved with the two issues that always drove his interest, wildlife and food.
What caught his attention, what excited his imagination, was the problem of getting fresh fish to market in good condition. Most fish lost its value while being transported. “The inefficiency and lack of sanitation in the distribution of whole fresh fish so disgusted me,” Birdseye explained twenty years later in a speech at Montreal’s McGill University, “that I set out to develop a method which would permit the removal of inedible waste from perishable foods at production points, packaging them in compact and convenient containers, and distributing them to the housewife with their intrinsic freshness intact.”
That was the big Birdseye idea. If he could find a way to deliver fish to the customer in the same condition as it landed on the docks, many more people would eat fish, and the fishing business could greatly expand. Birdseye developed a container, inexpensive in its design, that would keep fish chilled until it arrived at market. With Birdseye’s box, fish arrived in considerably better condition, but it was still not comparable to fresh fish, and a great deal of it was still lost to spoilage. There had to be a better solution.
Later in life, Birdseye developed a pet theory that the subconscious resembled an electronic calculating machine. “If you feed the right information into it,” he would say, “it will quietly go to work in mysterious ways of its own and, by-and-by, produce the answer to your problem.”
He kept thinking about his constant struggle for “fresh food” in Labrador. As Birdseye retold the story, after much reflection on the problem following the failure of his container device, “My subconscious suddenly told me that perishable foods could be kept perfectly preserved in the same way I had kept them in Labrador—by quick freezing!”
The more Birdseye thought about this, the more he became convinced this was an idea with a huge potential. In 1922 he left his job with the Fisheries Association and moved to New Jersey, where he persuaded an ice cream company to loan him the use of an area in its plant to conduct experiments in freezing. Eleanor was about to give birth to their third child, Eleanor. Ruth, their second, was a frail child with a cleft palate, a fairly common birth defect, and it was uncertain what medical expenses that condition might require. But Bob and Eleanor, after a quiet five years, were off on another adventure.
To Bob Birdseye, fast freezing was a traditional idea that came from the Inuit. All his life he credited them. But it also has other deep roots in human history. The use of fire and heat developed much faster than the harnessing
of ice and cold. This may have been because heat, associated with life, is more appealing than cold, which is associated with death. Or it may simply be that it is much easier to learn how to make fire than to make ice. While human beings were relatively quick to heat their food, it took a long time before they learned to chill it, even though this lack of cold meant that a great deal of food was spoiled and discarded. Spoilage was simply an accepted fact of life. Even in the twentieth century, after commercial freezing was developed, it was a struggle to convince markets that the money saved by less spoilage was a savings to be factored into the cost of freezing. For centuries the primary method to reduce the spoilage in transit caused by warm temperatures was to bring food to market at night. Animals would be slaughtered at the market to avoid having the meat spoil on its way there. Fish were brought to market in ships with tanks to deliver them live.
Ice was largely a luxury for the rich. The members of the Medici court in Florence enjoyed iced drinks. Not knowing how to produce ice artificially, they used natural ice from the mountains in their drinks. They had not advanced one step beyond the Romans, who also served drinks with ice. Pliny invented the ice bucket so that wine could be chilled without being diluted by melting ice. The Romans had icehouses insulated with straw. In China houses for storing winter ice date back to the seventh century B.C.
Frozen food had an inauspicious beginning with Sir Francis Bacon, lord chancellor of England, one of the first English scientists, perhaps the first, and the first martyr to the frozen-food industry. Bacon speculated that a number of “magic” stunts that produced cold were done through the use of salt (sodium chloride) or saltpeter (potassium nitrate) to intensify the cold of snow or ice.
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