But all of these techniques resulted in losing flavor and nutrients. There were three known ways of transferring heat—convection, conduction, and radiation. Traditional dehydration had used only one, convection, the transfer of heat by moving warmed matter, in this case air. But there were also conduction—the movement of heat from atom to atom, thereby moving heat through the matter that is being warmed; and radiation—heating through heat waves such as the sun gives off, or in Birdseye’s case from an infrared bulb. Birdseye thought that the drying process could be greatly sped up and the quality better preserved if all three techniques, instead of just one, were applied at once. It took him six years to work this out, but he did find a way to substantially reduce the drying time.
Always an astute marketer, he called his process anhydrous food as opposed to dehydrated, just as his food was called frosted rather than frozen. Dehydrated food was dried in eighteen hours, but anhydrous food was dried in only ninety minutes. Dried that rapidly, Birdseye claimed, the food did not have time to deteriorate and could be restored to its fresh state in between four and ten minutes.
He drew on his experience as a lamp manufacturer, using an infrared heat lamp of his own design. He gave demonstrations using his lamp and sometimes would hold up a beaker of water he had extracted from an anhydrous carrot. But the food was also heated and had air blown on it. Understanding his times, he promised that his food process would save the housewife time because the food was already partially cooked. It would also save kitchen space because a package the size of two cigarette packs would be food for a family and the small packets could be stored without risk of spoilage, saving continual trips to the market. He claimed tremendous savings for wholesalers when “five truckloads of farm produce can be processed into one truck load.” The grocer, he promised, could save 80 percent of his shelf space.
Birdseye built gigantic drying machines in Gloucester. One almost twice his height was used to process carrots. He would stand on a ladder to feed the roots in. His weight sometimes less than 140 pounds, Birdseye’s size made his equipment look huge.
After the outbreak of World War II, Birdseye thought his moment had come because lightweight portable non-spoiling food seemed ideal for soldiers in the field. He intensified his research in his stainless-steel-outfitted basement, installing machinery with trays of vegetables along the wall awaiting processing. By his own account, during the war he traveled thousands of miles to gather information and ideas about dehydration.
At the time, the Coast Guard was stationed on Eastern Point, patrolling for German submarines along the passage to Boston. Eleanor decided it would be a patriotic gesture to entertain these boys, have them over to the house and invite some local girls for them to meet. She hosted several such mixers. On one occasion the Coast Guard was arriving while Birdseye was absorbed in an experiment in the basement dehydrating and restoring garlic. He invited all the Coast Guard guests down to the basement and explained what he was doing and urged them to taste samples. As the girls arrived, one by one members of the Coast Guard came up from the basement, each one reeking of garlic. “Wow, were they powerful,” said Lila Monell, one of the young women. “They smelled so much of garlic you couldn’t get near them.” It was one of those moments when Eleanor could not conceal her occasional frustration with her brilliant husband.
With wartime food shortages Birdseye was reminding people that there was lots of food out there to shoot and eat, that “food tastes are principally psychological,” and that muskrat, crows, squirrels, and (was Lila right about this?) starlings were delicious.
When World War II ended, Birdseye officially launched his anhydrous food line in November 1945. The name Birdseye was taken seriously in the food industry. If Clarence Birdseye said that the future was dehydrated food, the press was prepared to accept that possibility. The New York Times ran a story with the headline “A New Page Is Turned in the History of Food.” Birdseye established his Gloucester company Process Incorporated and had a number of companies signed on to distribute his anhydrous foods. Up to his old tricks, he invited two hundred food experts to lunch at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. Not until the meal was over did he reveal that the broccoli, carrots, mashed potatoes, and apple tarts were all anhydrous.
Anhydrous food did better than the “nondripping paint brush,” granted a patent on the same May day in 1947, but it was not a huge success. Soon all the new companies dealing in anhydrous food were gone. The army had used a great deal of dehydrated soups, vegetables, and stews during the war, and the soldiers had found them unsatisfactory.
Birdseye had predicted “unprecedented growth” for both frozen and dehydrated food after the war. Now he admitted that for dehydrated to keep up with frozen, the products would have to be improved. It was frozen food that was set to explode in the postwar world.
Americans bought 800 million pounds of frozen food in 1945 and 1946. The New Yorker ran an article on the future of frozen food that began: “Not since the appearance of the first glacier, a few aeons ago, has there been any phenomenon to compare with the frigid giant that is now looming on the horizon of the American housewife, in the shape of the frozen-foods industry.” The article excitedly pointed out that there were now forty retail stores in Manhattan that sold nothing but frozen food and that twenty-two of them had opened in the past six months. Such stores were “popping up” all over the United States. Freezer manufacturing was booming, and more and more people were buying them for their homes.
By 1950, after frozen orange juice came on the market, U.S. annual frozen-food sales went to $1 billion and were projected to reach $50 billion by 1957. Frozen food now came in endless variety, though some foods still could not be successfully frozen, such as cantaloupes, grapes, lettuce, and whole onions. And others were widely recognized as inferior to fresh such as frozen eggs, cheese, and certain fish such as sole. Once the recipients of castoffs, frozen-food companies were now the customer of choice for many farmers because they paid well, bought with regularity, and gave guidance on soil and other technical issues.
Birds Eye now had stiff competition. There were more than five hundred brands of frozen food. A leading competitor was William L. Maxson, a New Yorker who made frozen meals and sold them to the Naval Air Transport Service. The navy continued to use his frozen meals after the war, serving them on navy flights. They did not sell well when offered in New York’s Macy’s department store, but the market was slowly growing for frozen meals. By 1950, Maxson had his first competitor, Frigid Dinners Inc. in Philadelphia. Maxson had also invented the Maxson Whirlwind, an oven to quickly thaw and cook the meals. This was the beginning of a new age. This step had been accidentally discovered in 1945 when an engineer at Raytheon working on radar discovered that resulting microwaves cooked food. In fact, Bell Laboratories had done work on this in the 1930s.
In another harbinger of the future, after the war the United States became interested in receiving frozen seafood from Asia. Small amounts of frozen seafood had been imported before the war from India and Japan. After the war the United States started importing frozen seafood from its new friend, Japan. Today frozen Asian seafood has become a major component of the American fish market.
With all the increased competition, Birds Eye, in a tradition going back to C. W. Post in the nineteenth century, fought back with aggressive and innovative advertising campaigns. In 1940 it was one of the first to advertise in color, in Life magazine, and it then became one of the pioneer television advertisers in the 1950s, sponsoring its own situation comedy, Our Miss Brooks, in which Eve Arden played a schoolteacher. Launched in 1952, it was one of the first television hits.
Birdseye always believed in the central concept of agribusiness, that through technology hunger in the world would one day vanish. He followed new industrial food ideas with great excitement. He was well aware of progress in microwaves and often mentioned it as one of the ideas of the future. Birdseye also believed in hydroponic farming. Plants grow by extracting nutri
ents from the soil, but if they are provided these nutrients in water, they have no need of soil, which means that fields are not necessary for growing crops. This is not a new idea. The sixteenth-century English father of science Francis Bacon wrote about it toward the end of his life, and hydroponics became very popular in the 1930s. Birdseye envisioned a New York City whose produce needs were locally supplied by rooftop hydroponic farming. He predicted that “eventually we shall learn to manufacture food from sunlight, as plants do.” He also believed in the increasing use of antibiotics in food to inhibit decay.
In 1946, Birdseye telephoned twelve-year-old Don Wonson, the boy next door who was a frequent visitor, and told him to come over for pheasant. But he also told him to comb his hair and dress up. When Don went over, he found a Look magazine photographer in the living room. The photographer shot a picture of them in that room, with its mahogany and Persian rugs. In the caption Birdseye was quoted saying, “This is the one spot in the world we want to live in.”
He was a famous and respected personality, and the world always seemed interested in hearing the next idea to come out of his kitchen or basement. He found closure to nagging unfinished business in 1941, when he finally got his Amherst degree, an honorary master of arts (Amherst still didn’t give science degrees).
But his good life in Gloucester was changing. The Sealoafer was destroyed in a gale in 1938. He could have bought or even had built another boat, but he started to experience acute pains in his chest and was diagnosed with angina pectoris. Angina is a condition caused by an obstruction of the coronary arteries, preventing a sufficient supply of oxygen to the heart. The standard treatment at the time was nitroglycerin pills—which the body breaks down into nitric oxide, which provides the necessary oxygen—and a calmer, more sedentary life.
On the advice of his doctors, Birdseye was in search of that calmer life. There were no more whaling and no more horseback riding in West Gloucester. Bob started paying more attention to Eleanor’s hobby of gardening wild plants and flowers. After they built the house, she joined the local garden club, of which she soon became president, and became increasingly passionate about filling her spacious grounds with local wild species with the help of a gifted gardener, Andrea Barletta from neighboring Rockport.
Barletta had grown up on a farm in Italy and had the knack for growing anything. It was said in Rockport that Andrea Barletta could make leaves sprout on a broomstick. He did not always earn his living gardening. For years he worked for Birdseye Electric, which is why he always called Bob “Mr. Birdseye” while Bob called him “Andy.” Barletta did maintenance work, drove a truck, and frosted lightbulbs using a spray gun and a turntable to which the bulb was fastened. The machine was a Birdseye invention.
But gardening was Barletta’s talent and passion. People used to drive by his home to look at and shoot photographs of his gardens with their pear trees, Japanese cherry trees, grapevines, and raspberry and blackberry bushes.
Eleanor started hosting the garden club, and one day during a meeting someone asked Bob the name of a particular fern on his grounds. Barletta remembers, “He didn’t know the name. So he studied wild plants and learned the names and characteristics.” Bob was probably joking when he wrote about his wife in the introduction to their 1951 coauthored gardening book, “Soon she began identifying wildflowers and ferns about which I knew nothing. That was bad for family discipline because I was supposed to be the naturalist of the clan.” Whether or not it really bothered him that Eleanor was more knowledgeable than he, his ignorance on the subject certainly bothered him.
So he became deeply knowledgeable about plants, and his relaxing hobby for his new sedentary way of life started to become physically active. He began prowling Cape Ann and digging up wild species. “Hey, Andy,” Bob would say, “let’s go in the woods and dig up some wildflowers.” All the time they were searching, Bob would question Andy about plants, his ideas, his farm in Italy.
Barletta recalled, “Mr. Birdseye and I used to go into the southern woods near the Rockport Country Club and find plants like the cowslip and wild aster.” Naturally, when out collecting plants or working in his garden, Bob wore a tie.
Reports on Bob and Eleanor’s garden say there were 100 or 150 varieties of wild flowers and plants. They also planted beds of domestic flowers, especially Bob’s favorite, dahlias.
The grounds were greened with Japanese pine. A friend in Nantucket, where the variety had been brought by a nineteenth-century clipper ship captain, had sent the seedlings. By 1950 the Birdseye grounds had seventy-four tall Japanese pines. Between these pines Bob and Eleanor landscaped forest soil amid chunks of the local granite and planted twenty types of ferns and other wild varieties, with winding paths for visitors to wander their woodland without stepping on the spongy, dark, loosely packed soil. Bob enthusiastically invited people to come see their garden. He started talking about how they could reproduce abundant quantities of these plants and use them to restore woodland areas in the region that had fallen into decline.
One thing he loved about gardening was that it was something he and Eleanor could do together. They didn’t go whaling together, because Eleanor got terrible bouts of seasickness. But gardening was their project. In 1951 they published Growing Woodland Plants. Clarence and Eleanor G. Birdseye are listed as the authors of the book. But it appears from the writing style that while he wrote the introduction, Eleanor, the original gardener, wrote most of the very straightforward text on lady’s slippers and spiderworts and other species. But when the book came out, the press rushed to interview the colorful “father of frozen food,” not his shy wife, about his garden.
When he was sixty-four, Bob told an interviewer, “I am having just as much fun as I ever did. I am never bored because I am always prying into something which fascinates me.”
But his mind was too active, too curious, to just stay in Gloucester forever gardening. Sooner or later something else would attract his attention. Then, too, wasn’t it time for a new adventure with a new idea? The idea came to him while visiting a factory that rendered lard.
In one of the greatest poems in the English language Tennyson shows Ulysses late in life. He is getting older, has lived a domestic life for a number of years, his son is grown and doesn’t need him, and he thinks of his youth and the great adventures he had. Could he not have one last adventure?
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
And so he gathers up his old comrades and leaves on one last adventure “to sail beyond the sunset, and the baths.”
Most people who have known true adventure, when they start glimpsing old age and death, are consumed with the urge to stave off time with one last adventure.
Bob and Eleanor were such people. Perhaps they recalled the words of Bob’s friend Wilfred Grenfell, who more than thirty years before in his autobiography had advised, “If you are reasonably resistant, and want to get tough and young again, you can do far worse than come and winter on ‘the lonely Labrador.’ ”
Bob and Eleanor wanted to go to Labrador again—not literally, but to leave their house and garden and push off and sail beyond the sunset and the baths one last time.
Their children were grown and on their own, Kellogg and Eleanor with children. Kellogg had started a career with the Grand Union food chain, and he and his wife, Gypsy, had moved to New Jersey. Eleanor and her husband, LeMar Talbot, were in California. Henry, a geologist in search of uranium, which was one of the most highly valued resources of the 1950s, lived in Albuquerque, which set off Bob’s memories of those early days on horseback in the New Mexico Territory. Henry was about to marry Ernestine LaRue Lowrey, who was from New Mexico. Only Ruth was single and still in Gloucester.
Bob and Eleanor had always been sentimental about Labrador, perhaps in the same way most couples are nostalgic about their first years of marriage. All through the years of
lobster dinners and evenings of home movies and Chinese checkers, a pair of Labrador snowshoes always hung on the wall in their Gloucester home. Bob and Eleanor both frequently spoke of their time in Labrador.
The opportunity, like many opportunities, showed up unexpectedly, like an intriguing uninvited guest. Always interested in food processing, Bob was visiting a lard-rendering plant in the 1940s, and something about the process started him thinking about a better way of converting wood chips into paper pulp. Birdseye often told this story about the lard plant, but he never explained what it was about lard rendering that spoke to papermaking or, for that matter, why he was thinking about paper manufacture at all. But Birdseye was constantly thinking about industrial processes, and one thought generally led to another. Perhaps his interest in paper came from years as an innovator in food-packaging materials.
He did what he had always done: put together some financial people and some technical people and invented a new process for making paper.
By this time, when Birdseye had an idea, industrialists paid attention. The New York–based W. R. Grace and Company was interested in the Birdseye paper process. Grace was a large old international company founded by an Irish immigrant to Peru, William Russell Grace. He became involved in the guano trade, exporting bird droppings, which are rich in nitrogen and phosphorus, making it valuable material in the manufacture of gunpowder and fertilizer. Even today guano remains a prosperous South American trade. In order to ship it, a steamship company called the Grace Line was created, and it also became a commercial success. Along with guano Grace started producing and shipping sugar. The guano trade also led to the production of fertilizer. By the 1950s the company had operations in New York, London, Peru, Chile, and other places and owned the Grace National Bank, the Grace Chemical Company, and other subsidiaries around the world. As Bob explained to his daughter Eleanor and her husband, LeMar, it was “a heck of a big outfit.”
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