DAILY DIRT: We will forever be indebted to Clarence Birdseye, Rose and Jim Totino and others like them

Daily Dirt for Sunday, May 28, 2023

All things considered, this might be my favorite hall of fame of them all … Welcome to today’s three thoughts that make up Vol. 621 of The Daily Dirt.

1. The next time you are walking through the frozen food areas of your local supermarket, feel free to offer a private thanks to those pioneers of the frozen food industry who helped make what you are about to purchase possible.

Many of those who helped frozen food(s) became an important part of our daily existence have been enshrined in the Frozen Food Hall of Fame.

No, I’m not kidding. There really is such a place, and if you ever visit Harrisburg, Pa., you can see it.

While it lacks the prestige of, say, the National Baseball Hall of Fame, the Frozen Food Hall of Fame at least bestows a measure of immortality on the trailblazers who shaped this well-preserved corner of the culinary market. 

The Frozen Food Hall of Fame was established in 1990 by the Distinguished Order of Zerocrats, a very real and presumably tongue-in-cheek-named organization of industry insiders who gather every year to celebrate the latest round of inductees. 

Clarence Birdseye was among the headliners of the hall’s first class, while Rose Totino became the first woman to be enshrined in 1993.

Here would be my own personal medal stand for Frozen Food Hall of Famers:

Gold medal: It was Birdseye who introduced the first commercial frozen foods. He was an obvious first-ballot hall of famer. 

The frozen food business as we know it can be traced to the efforts of Birdseye, who was a naturalist, businessman and inventor who enjoyed his fill of thawed-out fish during an early 20th-century summer spent in eastern Canada. Recognizing that quick freezing was the key to preserving a food’s freshness and texture, Birdseye patented two methods for doing so by the late 1920s. 

Aided by the sale of his General Foods Company to Postum Cereal, which offered superior infrastructure for distribution and marketing, the first line of Birdseye “frosted” fish, meats, fruits and vegetables began appearing in stores in 1930.

Silver medal: Back in the early 1960s, Rose and Jim Totino were emerging as the big dogs of the developing frozen-pizza business, after shuttering their restaurant to focus on a frozen pizza line that would accent their specialty. 

While Totino’s soon faced healthy competition from Tombstone and Red Baron, and was eventually surpassed by the rising crust innovation of DiGiorno, the unveiling of Totino’s Pizza Rolls in 1993 ensured that the brand name would endure among snackers everywhere.

Bronze medal: The Swanson Co. popularized the TV dinner, although the first fully realized, ready-to-be-thawed was developed by inventor William Maxson, who began supplying the U.S. military and airlines with his “Strato-Plates” in the mid-1940s. 

Swanson eventually cornered this portion of the market with the introduction of its famous “TV dinner” in 1954. The actual creator of this item, however, remains up for debate. For decades, Swanson salesman Gerry Thomas claimed the TV dinner was his idea, although other employees have since stepped forward to credit the company’s founders, Gilbert and Clarke Swanson.

2. Fun fact I

 Cows kill an average of 20 Americans a year, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. That’s one more, on the average, than dogs.

3. Fun Fact II

Fingernails are always growing. In the second it took you to read the previous sentence, your nails grew one nanometer (or one-billionth of a meter). But even with 86,400 seconds in a 24-hour period, it’s virtually impossible to notice any day-to-day growth without a microscope. 

In a month, the average human’s fingernails grow roughly 3.47 millimeters (and toenails grow even more slowly, an average of just 1.62 millimeters). 

Some research suggests our nails grow faster when we’re younger, and then slow down as we age. There also appears to be a correlation between faster nail growth and a person’s dominant hand. And many people experience rapid nail growth during pregnancy, due to increases in the hormones estrogen and progesterone.

Steve Thought O’ The Day — I’m not sure what interested me most today, the information about the frozen pizzas or fingernails.

Steve Eighinger writes daily for Muddy River News. TV dinners were better when they were in foil and prepared in a conventional oven.