Where would the world be without refrigerated and frozen food? Hungrier, that’s for sure.

Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man by Mark Kurlansky is a biography of Clarence Birdseye. And he was indeed a curious man. Best known as the inventor of frozen food, he had a variety of adventures in his life that spanned the rise of America as a consumer economy (he lived from 1886 to 1956).

Unfortunately, not much is really known about Birdseye. Kurlansky admits in the opening how difficult it was to get authoritative information about the man and thus had to rely on a lot of secondary sources. The information that does exist is often contradictory or wrong. Somehow he still managed to fill 272 pages.

Which is a shame. The book should be shorter. And better written. There is far too much detail about meaningless things, and far too little time spent on what made Birdseye tick. Still, Birdseye changed the way we live and eat … so he deserves all the recognition he can get.