Clarence Birdseye
| Clarence Birdseye | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
Clarence Frank Birdseye II December 9, 1886 Brooklyn, New York City, US |
| Died | October 7, 1956 (aged 69) Gramercy Park Hotel Manhattan, New York City, US |
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | Frozen food |
| Parent(s) | Clarence Frank Birdseye I Ada Jane Underwood |
Clarence Frank Birdseye II (December 9, 1886 – October 7, 1956) was an American inventor, entrepreneur, and naturalist, and is considered to be the founder of the modern frozen food industry.
Clarence Birdseye was born in Brooklyn, New York, on December 9, 1886, the sixth of nine children of Clarence Frank Birdseye I and Ada Jane Underwood.
Birdseye attended Montclair High School in New Jersey, and due to financial difficulties completed only two years at Amherst College, where his father and elder brother had earned degrees. He subsequently moved west for the United States Agriculture Department.
Birdseye began his career as a taxidermist. He also worked in New Mexico and Arizona as an “assistant naturalist”, a job that involved killing off coyotes. He also worked with entomologist Willard Van Orsdel King (1888-1970) in Montana, where, in 1910 and 1911, Birdseye captured several hundred small mammals, and King removed several thousand ticks for research, isolating them as the cause of Rocky Mountain spotted fever.
Birdseye's next field assignment, off and on from 1912 to 1915, was in Labrador in the Dominion of Newfoundland (now part of Canada), where he became further interested in food preservation by freezing, especially fast freezing. He was taught by the Inuit how to ice fish under very thick ice. In -40 °C weather, he discovered that the fish he caught froze almost instantly, and, when thawed, tasted fresh. He recognized immediately that the frozen seafood sold in New York was of lower quality than the frozen fish of Labrador, and saw that applying this knowledge would be lucrative. His journals from this period, which record these observations, are held in the Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College.
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