One of my happiest dinnertime memories from my 1960s childhood is of those nights when my mother would announce that she was "taking a vacation" from cooking. Out would pop the TV trays and a defrosted silver foil dinner of breaded haddock cut into two isosceles triangles, neon green peas and a smattering of tater tots. Yum. The dinner may have been Swanson's but the man to thank is Clarence Birdseye.

Birdseye was the father of frozen food and his extraordinary story — as an amateur inventor and world traveler — is told in a new biography by Mark Kurlansky, who himself might be thought of as the father of the historical food narrative given his bestsellers, Cod and Salt. This biography, called Birdseye, follows our man as he travels to Labrador in the early 20th century and discovers the trick, long known to the native Inuit population, of deep freezing trout and cabbages in ice and sea water. As Kurlansky points out, these days the "locavore movement" recoils from food harvested from far away, but Birdseye was "a nineteenth-century foodie ... who dreamed of making food industrial" and available to America's burgeoning cities.