Labrador

Mainland region of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. In Cod it is where Clarence Birdseye discovers quick freezing.

At a glance

Source	Author	Role	In one line
Cod	Mark Kurlansky	turning point	Fur trapper Clarence Birdseye freezes cabbage in the Arctic wind and finds it keeps its flavour.

Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World — Mark Kurlansky (1997)

Source: Cod · Original · Readwise highlight

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.

• Role: turning point
• In the book: Birdseye moves to Labrador with his family to trap furs. He finds that greens frozen in salted water in the Arctic wind keep their flavour through the winter, experiments that lead to his frozen-food process.
• Why it matters: The origin of the freezing that transformed the cod industry.