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You might not think about the food in your freezer much, except when trying to find room
between the bags of peas and carrots for one more bag of French fries.
But those frozen fries — and everything else in your freezer — are surprisingly worthy
of pondering, given that they’re the end result of a pretty clever innovation.
As it turns out, getting things from where they were grown or harvested into your freezer is
harder than you would think, and doing it wrong leaves you with food that’s basically ruined.
The technique that keeps your frozen broccoli green and your dumplings fresh
helped solve major problems with nutrition in the 20th century.
And it all started with a guy going fishing.
[♪ INTRO]
We know that things like meat and produce can spoil quickly.
In warm temperatures, organic matter becomes an ideal breeding place
for decomposers and pathogenic bacteria.
Those microbes can make you sick, or at the very least, make your food look and taste bad.
So preventing foods from spoiling has been an important thing for us for an extremely long time.
One particular concern is Staphylococcus,
which is the kind of food poisoning you are most likely most familiar with.
It causes sudden onset of nausea and vomiting that usually lasts around a day.
I had it earlier this year…meatballs!
Staphylococcus thrives when food is kept at temperatures between 4 and 60 degrees Celsius
for more than two hours, so inconsistently cold temperatures are somewhat risky.
There’s also another food illness classic, E. coli.
E. coli can even survive in dried meat,
so lots of food storage methods that work on a lot of things still can’t beat it.
Fermenting and canning might be tricky, too.
If you don't do it right, you could end up accidentally making the perfect breeding ground
for the bacteria that causes botulism.
Botulism is an especially dangerous kind of food poisoning that affects the nervous system
and may even lead to paralysis and death.
The only method of food storage that prevents your food from wilting
and keeps you from getting sick is freezing it.
So you’d think that once we had the technology to keep stuff cold,
we’d be freezing our food all the time, right?
Well, not so much.
It turns out that freezing food is harder than you’d think.
At least, it’s difficult if you want that food to still taste good at the end.
Early efforts at bringing frozen foods to the masses turned once-delicious veggies
into a soggy, tasteless mess when they thawed.
When food freezes slowly, the water can form large ice crystals that puncture the cell
membranes of whatever’s being frozen, causing those changes in texture and quality.
This is especially noticeable in things like frozen produce, because the plants’ cell walls get
broken apart by the ice crystals and they lose all their structure, leading to gross, mushy veggies.
Plus, when these foods thaw they release a lot of water, and with it, a lot of their flavor.
So frozen food wasn’t exactly appealing to most consumers, and there just wasn’t demand for it.
But then, along came Clarence Birdseye.
And you may have heard that name before.
It might even be on one or two packages of frozen veggies in your freezer right now.
While living in northeast Canada, he noticed that when he went ice fishing
with some Inuit people, their fish that they caught would freeze almost immediately
after it got tossed onto the ice.
And, those fish tasted perfectly fresh when they were thawed out and cooked,
even for months after being caught.
Birdseye realized that fast-freezing leads to smaller ice crystals,
which cause less damage to the food and results in a better product.
So beginning in the 1920’s, he used that knowledge
to develop two novel ways to freeze food quickly.
In the first, packages of food were placed between two metal plates that had been cooled
with a calcium chloride solution to around minus 40 degrees celsius.
The second method used a combination of both temperature and pressure.
They used ammonia to cool hollow metal plates,
and the food was pressurized between the cooled plates.
And that process could chill some foods down to minus 32 degrees celsius in just 30 minutes.
But the key to Birdseye’s success wasn’t just in getting things cold.
Birdseye also developed new ways to package food,
including using waterproof containers and removing air before sealing.
All of these innovations helped keep moisture in the food, so when it was thawed
it would still retain its quality, making frozen food a much better option all around!
Still, it took some time for frozen foods to catch on.
Or rather, it took some time for the technology to catch up with what Birdseye was selling,
since in the 1930’s most people didn’t have a freezer at home to store frozen foods in.
Freezers didn’t start finding their way into people’s homes until after World War II.
And eventually, frozen foods finally started to gain traction in American homes.
Birdseye’s innovations matter for a lot of reasons,
and not just because they gave us all unfettered access to frozen French fries.
Before Birdseye’s frozen food, lots of people weren’t able to eat produce year-round.
Instead, they ate what they could during the growing season,
and then the rest of the time produce just wasn’t available.
Frozen food gave people access to produce all year long.
This was great for providing culinary variety, but it was also important
because it helped people maintain healthier, more nutritious diets year-round.
So that guy whose name might very well be on your frozen peas and carrots
wasn’t just the founder of a profitable business, he was also a guy who saved us all
from long winters with nothing to eat except bread and pickles.
Who knew there was so much interesting food history hiding behind those ice cream pints?
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