Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man
About
While working as a fur trapper in Labrador, Canada, Clarence Birdseye encountered an age-old problem: bad food and an unappealing, unhealthy diet. However, he observed that fresh vegetables wetted and left outside in the Arctic winds froze in a way that maintained their integrity after thawing. As a result, he developed his patented Birdseye freezing process and started the company that still bears his name. Birdseye forever changed the way we preserve, store, and distribute food, and the way we eat. Mark Kurlanskys vibrant and affectionate narrative reveals Clarence Birdseye as a quintessential can-do American inventorhis other patents include an electric sunlamp, a harpoon gun to tag finback whales, and an improved incandescent lightbulband shows how the greatest of changes can come from the simplest of ideas and the unlikeliest of places.
Why it’s great
From fur trapper to frozen food pioneer, Clarence Birdseye's life was one long, restless experiment. Mark Kurlansky's full adult biography traces how a perpetually curious, perpetually tinkering man stumbled onto the idea that changed how the world eats, and then had the persistence to build a business around it. A compelling read about curiosity, observation, and the unexpected places scientific thinking can lead.
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