National Frozen Foods Day

Okay, so frozen food wasn't really invented. If you chuck a handful of peas out your door in a snow storm, then chances are...you'll have frozen peas. It is what naturally occurs when fresh food enters a cold environment. It works on toes and fingers too. We have another name for it though...frostbite. Let's just stick with food though. Before there was Clarence Birdseye (yes, the name is not just a product line), there was frozen food. It was mushy and tasted terrible. No one really ate the stuff. It was actually banned from New York state prisons! They called feeding the stuff to their prisoners "inhumane". Wow! It must have been bad!! The idea for GOOD frozen food came from salt mills. The workers knew that the quicker crystals formed, then the smaller they were. That was the problem with frozen food. It took a while to freeze the food therefore the ice crystals that were forming were larger and ripped and deformed the food tissue making the food mushy and gross. Flash freezing created smaller ice crystals and not so much tissue damage leading to tasty, right-out-of-field flavor! Clarence Birdseye figured this stuff out (he must have been eating his veggies) and created a whole manufacturing line. He commissioned DuPont to invent cellophane for wrapping everything up and then there would have to be freezer cars for transportation and freezers for storage. The first line of frozen food began in 1930.

During WWII, refrigerators got a little better and there was a shortage of tin due to the war effort (you don't want to eat from those tin cans anyway - too much sodium). The popularity of frozen food began to soar and the varieties began to grow which included orange juice. In the 50's Americans developed a love for the TV! Families would gather around the TV together. Besides a TV, what else brings a family together? Dinner! Frozen dinners, aka TV dinners, become a family favorite with the compartments for complete meals. As time went on, frozen food has taken on a life of it's own. Now it occupies some prime real estate in the grocery store. There are more than just veggies! Snacks, low-fat dinners, pizza, fruit...anything you can pretty much imagine!! So open another bag of frozen peas and salute Clarence Birdseye for starting the frozen food revolution!