This is my third Mark Kurlansky book and I marvel at his enthusiasm for his subjects and for his love of factual information. And a firehose of information it was; this time he writes about “The Adventures of a Curious Man,” Bob Birdseye, the man associated with frozen food, for whom the Birds Eye brand of frozen vegetables is named. When I wrote about Kurlansky’s book Cod, I acknowledged that I didn’t come away with full picture of the role of that fish in world history, but I wanted to remember certain bits (for example, what is the Hanseatic League?). This one seems to range around even more, and I suspect that is an accurate picture of that “curious man.”
We learn that Bob Birdseye was not so much an inventor, but a person who worked to find ways to make scientific inventions work in a practical way for people. For example, he did not invent “fast freezing,” the process that makes frozen foods tasty, but helped popularize frozen food. He worked to change the regulations of the Pure Food and Drug Act to make the requirements more stringent. He did that to insure that the poor quality foods that had given frozen food a bad name would no longer be on the market.
He was born in 1886 and died in 1956; his father’s finances required him to drop out of Amherst College after his second year and subsequently his father and older brother went to prison for defrauding their employer. Birdseye took a job with the US Department of Agriculture, capturing animals in Montana as part of a project to study diseases caused by ticks. As background, Kurlansky describes the work done in the decades after Birdseye was born that changed medical science for such epidemics as typhoid and malaria, showing that microorganisms caused disease and in the case of malaria the microorganisms were spread by mosquitoes.
So it was that the study of the Bitterroot Valley, a 100-mile stretch of wooded flatland near the Bitterroot Mountains in southwestern Montana came to be. Beginning in 1873 Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever became a problem and its growth coincided with the expansion of the lumber industry. The success of public health work reached this area by the beginning of the 20th century and the agencies in the area noted an increase in the disease with the shocking rate of mortality of 72%. It was learned that all those with the disease had been bitten by a wood tick shortly before the onset of symptoms. Birdseye’s role in this was to capture the animals that carried ticks, a dangerous business, given the mortality rate of those bitten by the ticks. His thorough reports helped guide the direction that reduced the disease in that area. Many gophers were killed and large farm animals were treated with preventative dips, and humans benefitted. The curious man moved on to his next adventure.
The combination of the firehose of factual information and a fast audiobook reader made it harder for me to take in all that information.
Mark Kurlansky, Birdseye, Doubleday, 2012, 272 pages (I listened to the audiobook). Available in the public library.