Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man by Mark Kurlansky Doubleday
The setting was unlikely, as world-changing events go: a frozen lake in Labrador, a group of Inuit fishermen hauling startled fish through a hole in the ice into the impossibly frigid, minus 40 degrees Celsius air.
The Inuit had a guest on that January day in 1913, a sharp-eyed young American named Clarence Birdseye, a man blessed with a broad streak of curiosity and inventiveness. He watched, fascinated, as the wriggling fish stiffened and flash-froze solid within seconds, in the perishing air.
Days, weeks and months later, Birdseye marvelled at the flavour of the fish when thawed and cooked. He immediately began experiments in his Labrador cabin, freezing cabbage, berries, moose and fish. But it would take well more than a decade before this unlikely man - small, bespectacled, meek-looking - would set up the ultimately happy marriage between a doubting and suspicious American populace and frozen food.
'Undeniably Clarence Birdseye changed our civilisation,' writes Mark Kurlansky in his colourful book about this adventurous and generally admirable fellow with an odd surname. Try to imagine Hong Kong's sushi bars without the flash-frozen tuna. So thanks, Mr Birdseye.
Kurlansky had previously tackled subjects as unpromising as salt and codfish and turned them into successful books. In Birdseye, he found a subject who symbolises the American zeal for finding ingenious mechanical solutions to problems, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when inventors were the icons of the day. The telephone, phonograph and photographic film were just a few of the breakthroughs around the time of Birdseye's birth in 1886 in Brooklyn, New York. 'Many Europeans were content in the world of the theoretical, whereas Americans had a Puritan belief that anyone who invented something had a moral obligation to put it to useful service,' writes Kurlansky. 'The press would criticise inventors who failed to do this ... Inventors were founders of industries, not intellectuals.'