How Freezing Some Fish Transformed the World

During the 1920s, defrosted food was mushy and tasteless.

But because a man named Birdseye figured out a better way, he continues to transform our world.

Creating the Cold Chain

Our story starts in Labrador during 1915. After fishing through an ice hole, Clarence Birdseye was delighted that, weeks later, his frozen fish were tasty. The key was the instant freeze. Copying the Inuit, the moment Birdseye removed his catch from the water, he let the minus 30° air instantly freeze it.

Birdseye was always a tinkerer, a scientist, and an entrepreneur. Inspired by the potential of good tasting frozen food, he developed a fast-freezing machine:

About so much more than fish, the Birdseye fast freeze inspired a national market that now had a way to connect two disparate regions. As you can see below, we just had to transport the strawberries to the Pop-Tarts:

Our Bottom Line: Externalities

In the United States, during the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century, the spread of refrigeration through an expanding cold chain created a slew of externalities. Defined as the impact of a transaction between two parties upon a third uninvolved individual or group, externalities can be positive and negative.

Identifying the externalities that Birdseye created, we can direct our lens to production, preservation, and distribution. While these three words summarize his impact, they do not come close to the gargantuan changes he initiated. Even just focusing on the cold chain only hints at the externalities that involve countless industries and jobs for businesses and lifestyle changes at home.

Our modern cold chain began during the early 1900s when we replaced ice blocks with more dependable mechanical devices. Only the first step, we eventually developed the refrigerated shipping containers that extended the cold chain for foods and medications. At the same time, we purchased the home freezers that let us drink frozen orange juice and eat frozen dinners.

Leaping through history to last week, we had the Lineage IPO (initial public offering). As the world’s biggest cold storage company, they own specially cooled warehouses that enable food to hopscotch the world before it gets to those of us that own freezers.

And that leaves us where we began. Clarence Birdseye lived in a world without home freezers. Shown by our econlife post on Rwanda, the developing world is waiting for cold storage.

My sources and more: Thanks to WSJ for yesterday’s cold storage article. From there it made sense to go back with NPR and the BBC and also move forward with this New Yorker article. (Please note that several of today’s sentences were in a past econlife post.)