Clarence Birdseye and the Rise of Frozen Foods

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy he Wilson. So, when writing about
Clarence Birdseye, who is our topic today? For his full

(00:22):
length biography on him, author Mark Kurlanski 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 Bird's Eye, 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

(00:45):
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 birds who eventually went by Bob, and we'll mention
that in the episode, really changed the way that people

(01:06):
thought about and prepared food in the twentieth century. There are,
for the sake of clarity, up top to Clarence Bird's Eyes.
In this episode, father and Son, we will refer to
the main focus just as Clarence birds Eye or sometimes
Bob Bird's Eye and his father we will refer to

(01:26):
as Clarence Senior. Also, we have to give you a
little heads up here because Bird's Eye 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 a naturalist
often included killing animals. We're not lingering on any of that,

(01:50):
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 in to this episode, Sorry,
I was dwelling on the idea that an American image
includes audacity and pioneer spirit, but not intellect. I know.

(02:12):
Clarence Birdseye was born on December ninth, eighteen eighty six,
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 eighteen seventy eight when she was twenty three. Birdseye
grew up in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, and

(02:34):
had eight siblings, so Clarence was the sixth of the
nine total kids, 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 Windycote. His mother

(02:57):
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 ten, 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 taxi derby. At

(03:20):
the age of eleven, when Clarence was in high school,
the family moved to Montclair, New Jersey. One of the
interesting things he did 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 Yeah. That class was part of his high school curriculum.

(03:41):
It was kind of like opting into a home at
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 nineteen,
Clarence enrolled at Amherst College in Massachusetts with the goal
of getting a biology degree. This is interesting as Amherst

(04:02):
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. It was
in danger of extinction, and he actually got Columbia University

(04:25):
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. 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

(04:46):
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 fan of humble means.
His father was a high profile New York lawyer. It
seems like the family did have a significant financial crisis, though,

(05:09):
and that was around the time that birds Eye 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. 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

(05:33):
knowing that that one is coming, I was a little like, hm,
I wonder what exactly happened here. Birds Eye, 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 in
New Mexico during this time, and he also became keenly

(05:53):
aware while he was there of the value of animal firs,
and that would drive some of his moves later. He
worked various jobs in New York after the survey was
completed and he returned to the East Coast, but he
also started a new side hustle, importing animal firs from
contacts he had made in the American Southwest and then

(06:13):
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.
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

(06:36):
five year courtship before the couple married in August of
nineteen fifteen. But before that, the Department of Agriculture sent
Bob Bird's Eye to Montana in nineteen ten, and this
actually brushes up against our recent episode on eponymous diseases
because he was there to collect tics for the study
of Rocky Mountain spotted fever. We mentioned already that he

(06:58):
loved to hunt, and this job involved a lot of
hunting because he collected the tics 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

(07:20):
someone like Bird's Eye, it was also a perfect fit.
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

(07:43):
Rocky Mountain spotted fever titled Some Common Mammals of Western
Montana in relation to Agriculture and Spotted Fever. After the study,
he stayed in Montana and he continued to trap animals
to eliminate predators for the local farmers. The sounds really
awful by modern standards, probably even standards of the time.

(08:05):
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 by experimentation on
the animals. Yeah, In nineteen twelve, Bird's Eye moved on
to a new assignment in Labrador, on the eastern coast

(08:26):
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

(08:49):
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. While he was there.
Birds Eye also taxadermied birds to send to Washington, d c.
For the US Biological Survey, and that soon expanded to

(09:13):
also preserving various insects and really anything that was requested.
The trapping in particular was interesting to birds Eye. 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

(09:34):
fur trader. Ultimately, new legislation in Newfouland 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.

(09:55):
This was also a time when Birdseye was in a
unique situation regarding food 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

(10:18):
culinary experiences and he was willing to try just about anything,
anything even polar bear, seal meat, and skunk. Coming up,
we will talk about Bird's Eyes returned to the US,
but first we will take a quick sponsor break. Bird's

(10:42):
Eye returned to the US in nineteen fifteen, 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

(11:04):
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

(11:25):
old enough to go on the journey. Their son, Kellogg,
was born on September sixth, and by mid October he
and Eleanor were headed north and settled into family life
in the cold. There were a couple of different stories
about what led Bird's Eye to thinking about the way
foods freeze. One is that while he was ice fishing

(11:47):
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
marked and 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

(12:09):
harsh winters when the fresh fruits and vegetables would be
less successible. Biographer Mark Kurlansky shared in his book about
Bird's Eye the naturalist's fascination with water, finding what he
called a quote state of equilibrium, by which he meant
that it would stabilize the point right before freezing, and

(12:30):
then would seem to freeze instantly when it was poured
into another vessel. The reality is that Bird's Eye 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

(12:52):
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 experience 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

(13:15):
then moving up to meats, 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. When the United States entered World
War One in the spring of nineteen seventeen, Bird's Eye
returned home, but there was a more personal battle bubbling

(13:37):
up in the Bird's Eye family. A news article from
May of nineteen seventeen that appeared in multiple newspapers ran
with the headline quote alleged cleanup of one point nine
million dollars 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.

(14:01):
According to a statement issued, Clarence Birdseye of New York,
in a period of two days, milked the company of
one point nine million dollars through a board of dummy directors.
Warrants have been issued for the arrest of Bird's Eye
and his five alleged associates, all of New York. One
of those five associates was Birdseye Junior's brother, Kellogg. By

(14:25):
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 Bird's Eye were eventually
sentenced to two years in prison. Yeah, just in case
it's not obvious, the Kellogg name was popular in the
birds Eye family. Both Clarence the younger, Clarence's brother and

(14:47):
his son were named Kellogg. Birdseye Junior was never particularly
interested in the world of finance in 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 somewhere and 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

(15:09):
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, d c. As
this was going on, which was close to her family
rather than his. When they were there, birds Eye first
worked for a construction company and then he moved on
to the US Housing Corporation, and then another shift to

(15:32):
work for the US Fisheries Association. Working for the Fisheries
made Bird's Eye 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
Bird's Eye investigated the industry, he was appalled at how
sloppy things were in terms of production and sanitation. He

(15:55):
thought he could do better and ensure that clean, fresh
tasting fish made it to consumers tables. 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

(16:16):
was living in Labrador. In nineteen twenty two, 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. Birdseye was not the
first person to work on freezing food for the consumer market,

(16:38):
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. In
nineteen twenty three, Birdseye drummed up investors to start his

(16:59):
first frozen and food company. This venture was focused on
the food he had gained expertise in through his various
jobs in the preceding years, exclusively fish. Bird's Ic 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

(17:21):
the problems that were facing the industry. He had to
rethink the freezing process on a large scale. In nineteen
twenty four, 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

(17:42):
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 Bird's Eye method and his competitors

(18:04):
was in the temperature. A lot of other companies froze
their foods just below freezing, but recalling the harsh winters
and Labrador, Bird's Eye froze his foods colder than forty
five degrees below zero fahrenheit. 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

(18:26):
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

(18:47):
patent for the cartons that he was using in the process.
But though this was all clearly innovative it was a
huge step forward for frozen foods, it did not meet
with success, and an echo of the abrupt end to
his college education, he just ran out of money, but
this time birds Eye had insurance, literally he had cashed

(19:08):
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 nineteen twenty
five 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.

(19:30):
He and Eleanor also had a fourth child during this
financially precarious time. Yeah, he basically was like, I'm going
to keep going, so let's sell our house and let's
go to Gloucester. Uh. He clearly had a vision. Things
didn't luckily stay precarious for terribly long, though, because birds
Eye got several high profile investors, including JP Morgan, to

(19:53):
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

(20:15):
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 Bird's
Eye had invented, and he named this new enterprise General
Seafoods Corporation, and there he worked constantly to innovate what
frozen food could be. This was an expansive effort that

(20:39):
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 fill aid
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 times. Yeah, he had a

(21:01):
scaler and a you know, a fish flayer. He just
invented so many pieces of this process. In nineteen twenty seven,
he filed for another patent method of preparing food product,
which he touted as follows quote. A method of freezing
which requires more than a very short space of time
for freezing impairs the natural qualities and flavors of comestibles.

(21:25):
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 any
desired degree of refrigeration, but to quick freeze a comestible

(21:47):
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 nineteen thirty.
Bird's Eye, like many inventors we have talked about before,

(22:08):
continued to refine his process in 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.
There were more things than belts that had to be
refined and rethought. For one, all of this innovation didn't

(22:31):
erase the years of concerns people had developed regarding frozen foods.
Birds I 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.
I worked with partner companies to develop all these things.

(22:53):
Bird's Eye's company still was not making any money. They
needed investors or a buyout. One of the things that
Bob Bird's Eye was known to do, and the hopes
of drumming up interest from financial sources, was to send
them frozen foods to show them how effective his process was. Yeah,
there are stories of him like serving big wigs of

(23:15):
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 Bird'seyees company out in
nineteen twenty nine for twenty three point five million dollars,

(23:36):
which was absolutely unheard of for the time. His company
had actually been valued just a couple of years earlier
at less than two million dollars, so this seemed absolutely
bananas to a lot of people. Marjorie Meriweather post the
post and Foods heiress who is often credited with brokering
this deal is on my short list. I became very

(23:57):
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 Bird'seye had

(24:19):
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 nineteen twenty nine stock market crash, Goldman Sacks let

(24:39):
the Posts buy out their shares in the company. We'll
talk about how Bird's Eye's life changed once he was
a millionaire, but first we will hear from the sponsors
that keep the show going. Whereas Bird's Eye maintained a

(25:01):
role in the General Foods Corporation after the buyout, working
as president of the division that retained the name, Bird's
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

(25:23):
the frozen food market. He also built himself a beautiful
new house in the early nineteen thirties. 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.
He also managed to keep a couple dozen other people

(25:45):
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 a
sorbic acid. Yeah, it's just vitamin C. What the Post
and Company had brought to that huge deal that Bird's

(26:05):
Eye 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
nineteen twenty nine titled food that is fresh though frozen.

(26:29):
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 seemed so simple and its advantage is
so great that one's imagination need not be stretched at
all to visualize many startling outgrowths of its adoption of

(26:52):
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. You
heard that right. At the time, there was a belief

(27:12):
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. Mirror packing, an insulated,
nearly air tight container such as a sealed corrugated pasteboard

(27:35):
carton is all that is necessary to assure first class
condition for long periods. We knowed that was wrong, but
at the time it seemed feasible. Even with the pr
nohow of the Postum team, frozen food still had a
slow acceptance rate. A handful of grocery stores, and I

(27:55):
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

(28:16):
supplying the costly refrigerated cases that the food could be
stocked in. Those cases cost fifteen hundred dollars each, but
they were also expensive for the store because they used
a lot of electricity. 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

(28:39):
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.
In nineteen thirty five, birds 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

(29:00):
for display uses. He patented the reflecting electric lamp in
nineteen thirty five, and it has continued to be used
to the present day. He sold the electrical company to
Wabash Appliance Corporation in nineteen thirty nine. Also in nineteen
thirty nine, he invented a gravity froster, which froze individual

(29:21):
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

(29:42):
frost machine to other companies that were making frozen foods.
In nineteen thirty eight, interest in frozen food had grown
to the point that a magazine called Quick Frozen Foods
was launched. Bird's Eye 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

(30:03):
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

(30:24):
Drug Act of nineteen oh six, which put stronger requirements
in place for quality standards related to frozen foods, something
that he and other people in the industry saw as
vital to rehabilitating the way frozen food was perceived. Birds
Eye once again innovated the way frozen foods were offered
in nineteen forty four. At that point, he started exploring

(30:47):
refrigerated train cars as a way to ship foods. He
ended up leasing box cars that the Bird's Eye Frozen
Food Company could pack and prep This is a huge
moment in the way frozen foods were handled because it
made it possible for companies like Bird's Eye to vastly
expand their customer territory and it inspired a lot of

(31:07):
other companies to start thinking about similar initiatives. In nineteen
forty nine, 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

(31:29):
being employed by other people working in the field to
fine tune his quote anhydrous food preparation. Over the course
of six years, he started a company and marketed it
and got some interest, but the novelty kind of wore off,
and birds Eye recognized that it would take a massive
effort to get anhydros food to be anywhere near as

(31:51):
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. But at this
point Bird's Eye was also starting to slow down. He

(32:15):
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

(32:37):
Woodland Plants in nineteen fifty one. Over his life, Bird's
Eye was granted hundreds of patents, almost three hundred. 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 nineteen fifties, Bird's Eye started

(32:58):
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 stock scrap that remained after sugar production. He
got a financial backer, which was W. R. Grace and Company,
who produced sugar. This resulted in a late in life

(33:20):
move for Bob and Eleanor. They went to Peru, where
the Grace Company had huge sugarcane fields and had built
a paper plant. In nineteen fifty five. The Bird's Eyes
moved back to New York, where Bob's work with the
Grace 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

(33:43):
died of heart failure on October seventh, nineteen fifty six.
Bird's Eye had received an honorary degree from AMers fifteen
years earlier, and in his end of life planning, he
requested that instead of flowers, anyone wishing to pay their
respects should donate a college fund that he established at
the school to prevent other students from cutting their education

(34:05):
short as he had done. Today, ninety nine percent of
households in the US report purchasing frozen foods, and the
global frozen food industry is valued at more than two
hundred and thirty billion dollars. Yeah, he was right. He
made some scary moves, but he was ultimately right. And
even post THEMS buyout, which a lot of people kind

(34:27):
of criticized them over and being like, why did you
pay twenty three million dollars for a company that's not
worth two And they were like, we see the future,
and they were right. 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

(34:48):
mail because it's about spiders. This is from our listener, Shandra,
and I love it, Shandra Wrights. Since you were talking
about spiders a few weeks ago in a behind the
scenes episode, I wanted to share 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.

(35:10):
I watched it clean a fallen leaf out of its
web one day. Neat creature. It's absolutely adorable. In my opinion,
this little bdonk looks like a kiddy face. Come on here,
don't want that. The second picture is only the second
tarantula I've ever seen. 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.

(35:32):
I think they're very beautiful. We all know I love spiders.
Char Angela is very cute. When I was very, very tiny,
I lived in Arizona, and I love 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. Uh, if you were a weird child

(35:53):
who loved tarantula's or if you're a weird child now,
or if you just love Taranngela's or anything else you
can write and tell us about that. You can do
that at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can
also subscribe to the show if you haven't gotten around
to that yet. That is easiest pie to do on
the iHeartRadio app, or really anywhere you listen to your
favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a

(36:19):
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Stuff You Missed in History Class News

Follow Us On

Hosts And Creators

Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

Show Links

Popular Podcasts

Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang

The Joe Rogan Experience

Stuff You Should Know

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Clarence Birdseye and the Rise of Frozen Foods