In "Birdseye," Mark Kurlansky writes of Clarence Birdseye, the man behind frozen food.  In the early 1900s Birdseye discovered that by freezing fish in lower temperatures than what was used at the time, he was able to retain the freshness of seafood.  He discovered this accidentally while ice fishing with Inuit, Eskimos in Newfoundland, Canada.  Upon catching fish in the -40 degree weather, he saw that the fish froze almost immediately, and tasted fresh after it thawed.

The light bulb went off for Birdseye who had never finished college but who had a natural curiosity and intelligence about him. He used this discovery to perfect flash-freezing. By doing so, he changed the way people around the world would consume food for generations to come.  

Without Birdseye's inventions, we probably wouldn't be using the terms "local" or "locally grown or harvested" to describe certain foods because all food would be grown and consumed locally.

But it wasn't flash-freezing that made Birdseye an American success story as much as it was his deciding to take it a step further by packaging frozen food.  In fact, before he made this move, his company had gone bankrupt.

Kurlansky is the author of "Salt: A World History" and "Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World," which means that this book is as much about Birdseye as an illumination of his time.  Marie Arana writes in the Washington Post, "Birdseye" turns out to be less a biography than a glimpse into an exuberantly inventive time in America. Little is known about Birdseye's personal life, and Kurlansky is quick to admit it. But the impact of the man's inventions is on full view here: the whaling harpoon, the dipping of livestock to control ticks, the science of crystallization and cryonics, innovations in food packaging, advances in refrigeration, the birth of the sunlamp, the production of dried edibles, the papermaking revolution. We see a tireless tinkerer, a restless mind, a quintessentially American inventor, driven by two questions about the world around him: Why? and Why not?