Cod_ A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World - Mark Kurlansky [43]
But technology never reverses itself. It creates new technology to confront new sets of problems. The greatest problem in commercial fishing has always been how to get the fish to market in good condition. For centuries, affluent people kept live fish in natural or man-made ponds. To keep saltwater species, they used tidal ponds where they built wooden cages. “Wet wells,” watertight ship holds with holes for circulating seawater, were used as early as the sixteenth century in Holland. In the seventeenth century, British shipbuilders started including wet wells because the British did not like saltfish and there was always a greater demand for fresh fish. New Englanders also built “well smacks,” ships with wet wells to transport fish to Boston and New York. But mortality was high in the crowded, sloshing, oxygen-deprived wells. Cod, ling, and other gadiforms caught in deep water could not survive in wells. The fish’s sounds would fill with gas, and the disoriented fish would float to the surface and die. Fishermen tried to puncture the sounds to keep them from rising in the well.
Engines opened up new opportunities. The British experimented with wells of pumped water so that the oxygen content would be maintained. Engines also made railroads possible, which enabled landed fish to get to inland markets quickly. British ports became railroad centers.
With few people noticing, the next idea that would change North Atlantic fishing forever was being contemplated by a somewhat eccentric New Yorker, passing the winter in Labrador. Clarence Birdseye, born in Brooklyn in 1886, had dropped out of Amherst’s class of 1910 because of a lack of money and, impatient with low-paying New York office jobs, had moved to Labrador with his wife, Eleanor, and their infant son to work as a fur trapper. He found that if he froze greens, they would last through the winter without losing their flavor. He filled his baby’s washbasin with salted water, put cabbage in it, and exposed it to Labrador’s arctic wind. The Birdseyes were the first people in Labrador to eat “fresh” vegetables all winter. This was the beginning of years of home kitchen experiments. Though the couple worked together, their son recalled Eleanor’s regular irritation at finding food experiments throughout the house. He particularly remembered the fight over live pickerel in the bathtub.
Birdseye gave up trapping and moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked for the U.S. Fisheries Association. He was concerned about the practice of icing fish. In the 1820s, it had been discovered that packing fish in ice prolonged freshness. Ice, Birdseye explained, melts and becomes water, which encourages the growth of bacteria. After several more years of filling the household’s sinks and tubs with experiments, Birdseye unveiled a new technology. It required three pieces of equipment: an electric fan, a pile of ice, and a bucket of brine. Birdseye was reproducing a Labrador winter.
Postcard, 1910, schooner (Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts)
In 1925, he moved to Gloucester to work with fish and founded General Seafoods Company. Starting with groundfish, he also experimented with other seafood, then went on to meat, then fruits and vegetables.
It was a goose that made his fortune. The daughter of the founder of a food processing company, the Postum Company, was yachting off Massachusetts and tied up in Gloucester. She was served a goose, which she found to be a marvelously delectable bird, and after making inquiries, discovered that it had been frozen by the local eccentric, Clarence Birdseye. She met Birdseye and learned more about the little company, which her father then bought, paying Birdseye twenty-two million dollars. Postum renamed his company General Foods, a name derived from Birdseye’s General Seafoods. Birdseye believed his ideas would produce a corporate giant in the food