Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man by Mark Kurlansky

(Doubleday, $26)

The man who made frozen vegetables edible “might not seem an interesting subject for a biography,” said Susannah Nesmith in The Miami Herald. In that respect, Mark Kurlansky’s slim biography of Clarence Birdseye is a happy surprise. The author of the best-sellers Salt and Cod uses Birdseye’s life story to lead readers on “a pleasant romp through the early 20th century, a time when an inventor could get rich by figuring out marketable solutions to everyday problems.” Birdseye, an inveterate tinkerer who worked for the U.S. Biological Survey before taking up fox breeding in northeastern Canada, hit on his packaging innovations after watching the Inuit preserve fish by exposing it to subzero temperatures immediately after catching it. Food distribution would never be the same.

“Birdseye invented nearly nothing, per se,” said Brian Thomas Gallagher in Bloomberg Businessweek. He didn’t invent frozen food and wasn’t even the first to realize that the smaller the ice crystals that formed during freezing, the more palatable the food would be once thawed. But he was the first to bring all the elements of the packaging and distribution process together so that a relatively tasty product could make it into the iceboxes of kitchens across America and, eventually, the world. Before Birdseye, frozen foods were so bad that New York state deemed them unsuitable for prisoners. After Birdseye, it suddenly made sense that a top chef would offer the following advice: “Wait till peas are in season, then use frozen.”

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Kurlansky’s book is at its best when detailing the problem-solving Birdseye had to do,

said Janet Maslin in The New York Times. The ingenuity of this business pioneer was summoned for innumerable tasks—from creating individual containers for the food to determining what kind of ink wouldn’t run when the packages were thawed. Unfortunately, Kurlansky’s larger profile of Birdseye “goes nowhere.” We do learn that this godfather of frozen foods was such a culinary adventurer that he at least once sampled fried rattlesnake, sherry-marinated lynx, and the front end of a skunk. But Kurlansky has far more trouble teasing out Birdseye’s personality than he does making a case that we should never take for granted such “everyday miracles” as frozen foods.