In essence, the machine squeezed waterproof cartons holding two inch blocks of fish between freezing plates that were kept between 20 and 50 degrees below Farenheit, for 75 minutes.The cartons never came into contact with the refrigerant and the neat packages were suitable for marketing to individual customers. And with a few tweaks, this new machine could be used to freeze anything from berries to pork sausages." By now, Birdseye's own ambitions had soared way beyond fish fillets, but it didn't happen quite as Birdseye had imagined. His haddock fillets were slow to catch on.
Kurlansky explains that people distrusted frozen food, railroads worried that they might be sued if the fish thawed in transit, public health officials fretted about bugs new-lights and germs. Stores had nowhere to store the frozen fillets and customers had no way to keep them frozen. The boxes piled up in the factory. Birdseye ran out of money and sold his company to the Post company. But Birdseye, now a newly minted millionaire, continued to work for the new Birds Eye Frosted Foods division of the Post company. It shared Birdseye's vision that this was the food of the future. Convincing The Public To win over customers, the company started with ten stores in Springfield Massachusetts in March 1930. They gave them display freezers, put their staff through a three-day training course, and offered the food on consignment. These included 27 different frozen items: The original haddock fillets, porterhouse steak, spring lamb chops, loganberries and raspberries, spinach and June peas advertised "as gloriously green as any you will see next summer." Gradually, the world came to realize that frozen food was safe, and could provide an appealing and often more nutritious alternative to canned, salted and smoked foods.
It overcame the limitations of local and seasonal food in unprecedented ways. Stores and domestic kitchens began to , and after World War II, frozen food got a huge boost, because it made it possible to put entire meals on the table without women having to spend hours in the kitchen. It even helped shaped current as Allison Aubrey reported. There was no going back. Kurlansky argues that "by modernizing the process of food preservation, Birdseye nationalized and then internationalized food distribution... facilitated urban living and helped to take people away from the farms... and greatly contributed to the development of industrial -scale agriculture." Birdseye, he says, would have seen all these as positive things. Not everyone would agree with that verdict of course, but it's harder to disagree with Kurlansky's claim that "Undeniably, Birdseye changed our civilization."