第三大脑

Submitted by on 12 September 2012
2012年9月12日提交

Clarence Birdseye found a simple, effective way to do the freezing, but that was just the first step
克拉伦斯·伯德塞发现了一种简单而有效的冷冻方法，但这只是第一步

By:

Rudi Volti

作者：Rudi Volti

Spring 1994 | Volume 9 |  Issue 4
1994年春季 | 第9卷 | 第4期

IN MARCH 1626 SIR FRANCIS Bacon tried to invent frozen food. The great British philosopher and essayist bought a hen, dressed it, and stuffed it with snow. The only thing he accomplished, though, was his own death. The sixty-five-year-old Bacon caught a chill during the experiment, came down with bronchitis, and died a few weeks later.
在1626年的三月，弗朗西斯·培根爵士试图发明冷冻食品。这位伟大的英国哲学家和散文家买了一只鸡，宰杀并用雪填充。然而，他唯一取得的成就就是自己的死亡。这位已经65岁的培根在实验过程中感冒了，患上了支气管炎，并在几周后去世。

Two centuries after, people knew well the value of freezing food, but the only way to do it was by living in a very cold climate where meat or fish would freeze unless you did something to prevent it. Meanwhile, most Americans as late as a hundred years ago still lived on a diet that depended enormously on the seasons, eating mainly meat, bread, potatoes, and whatever vegetable was available at the moment. Food supplies were extended by the drying and smoking of meat and the canning of fruits and vegetables; putting up foods was an integral and at times exhausting part of domestic life. Toward the end of the nineteenth century commercial canners were improving the variety of available foodstuffs, but their products still couldn’t begin to compete with fresh food in flavor or nutritional value.
两个世纪后，人们对冷冻食品的价值有了很好的了解，但唯一的方法是生活在非常寒冷的气候中，否则肉类或鱼类会冻结，除非你采取措施防止它。与此同时，直到一百年前，大多数美国人仍然以季节为主要依赖的饮食为生，主要食用肉类、面包、土豆和当时可获得的蔬菜。食物供应通过肉类的干燥和熏制以及水果和蔬菜的罐装得到延长；储存食物是家庭生活中不可或缺的一部分，有时也是令人筋疲力尽的。19世纪末，商业罐头制造商改进了可获得的食品种类，但他们的产品在口味和营养价值方面仍然无法与新鲜食品相媲美。

Obviously food freezing on a commercial scale would be invaluable—and would require something far better than Bacon’s technique. Simply packing food in ice would not chill it fast enough or keep it cold enough. One early effort was that of Enoch Piper of Camden, Maine, who in 1861 patented a method of freezing whole fish. Piper filled pans with salt and ice and placed them on racks of fish until they were frozen. Then he gave the fish a thin coating of ice or some other material and moved them to an insulated cabinet that was refrigerated with chilled brine. The combination of ice and salt achieved lower temperatures than ice alone, and the use of pans kept the salty slush from saturating the fish. An 1869 improvement by William Davis called for burying metal boxes filled with fish in an ice-salt mixture.
显然，商业规模的食物冷冻将是无价之宝，而且需要比Bacon的技术更好的东西。简单地将食物包装在冰中不足以使其迅速冷却或保持足够的冷度。早期的一种尝试是来自缅因州坎登的Enoch Piper于1861年获得专利的整鱼冷冻方法。Piper用盐和冰填充盘子，然后将它们放在鱼的架子上直到冻结。然后，他给鱼薄薄地涂上一层冰或其他材料，然后将它们移动到一个用冷卤水制冷的隔热柜中。冰和盐的组合比单独使用冰能够达到更低的温度，并且使用盘子可以防止咸冰浆渗透到鱼肉中。William Davis在1869年的改进方法是将装满鱼的金属盒子埋在冰盐混合物中。

In the face of a depression, General Foods had to create demand for a product that still met with deep suspicion.
面对经济萧条，通用食品公司不得不创造对一个仍然深受怀疑的产品的需求。

A few years later Daniel E. Somes, a former congressman from Maine who in 1867 had suggested a way to air-condition the Capitol, patented a scheme for spraying a cold liquid onto food in a partially evacuated chamber. The ensuing rapid evaporation would draw heat from the food quickly. These and similar methods were widely adopted by fish wholesalers, and by the end of the century ice-and-salt freezers were in use in virtually all the fishing ports of the Great Lakes, New England, and New York State, where ice cut from lakes and streams was plentiful. In other regions, where ice was scarcer, freezing was used mostly to preserve fruit intended for commercial use. During the first decade of the twentieth century, fruit destined for pies, ice cream, and jams and jellies was being frozen in small but significant quantities.
几年后，来自缅因州的前国会议员丹尼尔·E·索姆斯（Daniel E. Somes）在1867年提出了一种给国会大厦通风的方法，并获得了专利。他的方案是在一个部分抽空的室内，将冷液体喷洒到食物上。随后迅速蒸发的过程会迅速从食物中吸收热量。这些类似的方法被鱼类批发商广泛采用，到世纪末，无需冰和盐的冷冻机已经在五大湖、新英格兰和纽约州的几乎所有渔港中使用，因为这些地方湖泊和河流中的冰块很丰富。在其他地区，冰块更加稀缺，冷冻主要用于保存商业用途的水果。在20世纪的第一个十年，用于馅饼、冰淇淋、果酱和果冻的水果开始以小但显著的数量进行冷冻。

These methods somewhat evened out the seasonal fluctuations in the availability of certain foods, but they suffered from a fundamental shortcoming: They still didn’t work fast enough. When foods are frozen slowly, as happens when ice or even an ice-and-salt mixture is used, they are irreversibly damaged.
这些方法在某种程度上平衡了某些食物供应的季节性波动，但它们存在一个根本性的缺陷：它们仍然不够快速。当食物被缓慢冷冻时，就像使用冰块或者冰和盐的混合物时，它们会遭受不可逆转的损坏。

Some of the damage results from the extraction of water from colloids of individual cells, which leads to the collapse of their walls, the concentration of salts, and the precipitation of proteins. All this makes for mushy food. Even worse, slow freezing produces large ice crystals that rupture cell membranes and break up tissues. When the food is defrosted, liquid leaks out, and the flavor and texture are further harmed.
一些损害是由于从个体细胞的胶体中提取水分造成的，这导致细胞壁的坍塌、盐的浓缩和蛋白质的沉淀。所有这些都导致食物变得糊状。更糟糕的是，缓慢冷冻会产生大的冰晶，破裂细胞膜并破坏组织。当食物解冻时，液体会泄漏出来，进一步损害了口感和质地。

The solution to this problem was understood, at least in theory, early in the twentieth century. Experiments conducted in 1916 by one Z. Plank showed that maximum crystal formation occurred between 31° and 25° Fahrenheit. Damage could be minimized if a product was brought below that temperature range as fast as possible. In the following years a number of inventors tried their hands at quick-freezing processes. The best one was the work of Clarence Birdseye.
这个问题的解决方案在二十世纪初就被理解了，至少在理论上是这样。1916年，Z. Plank进行的实验表明，晶体的最大形成发生在华氏31°至25°之间。如果产品能尽快降至这个温度范围以下，损坏就能最小化。在接下来的几年里，许多发明家尝试了快速冷冻的方法，其中最好的一个是Clarence Birdseye的工作。

Upon leaving Amherst College short of graduation in 1910, Birdseye had taken a job in Montana as a field naturalist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In 1912, when the survey he was working on was over, he went to Labrador as a fur trader (continuing in a business he had pursued as a sideline in Montana) and stayed there until 1917. Birdseye later said: “That first winter I saw natives catching fish in fifty below zero weather, which froze stiff almost as soon as they were taken out of the water. Months later, when they were thawed out, some of these fish were still alive.”
1910年，伯德赛离开安赫斯特学院时尚未毕业，他在蒙大拿州找到了一份美国农业部的野外自然学家的工作。1912年，当他参与的调查结束后，他去了拉布拉多作为毛皮贸易商（这是他在蒙大拿州兼职从事的业务），并在那里待到1917年。伯德赛后来说：“那个第一个冬天，我看到土著人在零下五十度的天气中捕鱼，鱼几乎一出水就冻僵了。几个月后，当它们解冻时，其中一些鱼仍然活着。”

Birdseye’s background served him well when, after a wartime government job, he became an assistant to the president of the U.S. Fisheries Association in 1920. The fishing industry had always struggled to better preserve its highly perishable products and keep prices steady despite fluctuations in the catch. Birdseye’s stay in Labrador had impressed on him both the advantages of freezing and the disadvantages of existing methods, which weren’t efficient enough to quick-freeze fish in commercial quantities. In 1923 he began working full-time in a New Jersey icehouse on his frozen-food process. The following year he moved to Gloucester, Massachusetts, and set up a small firm called General Seafoods Corporation, which was later renamed General Foods Company.
Birdseye的背景在他成为美国渔业协会总裁助理后发挥了作用。在战时政府工作之后，他在1920年成为美国渔业协会总裁的助手。渔业一直在努力改善保存易腐产品并保持价格稳定，尽管捕捞量有所波动。Birdseye在拉布拉多的经历让他深刻认识到冷冻的优势以及现有方法的劣势，这些方法无法高效地大规模冷冻鱼类。1923年，他开始全职在新泽西的一个冰库中研究他的冷冻食品工艺。第二年，他搬到了马萨诸塞州的格洛斯特，并成立了一个名为General Seafoods Corporation的小公司，后来改名为General Foods Company。

Birdseye’s processes (he developed two), first employed in 1924, did not require new scientific knowledge or a great conceptual breakthrough. As with many successful new technologies, his systems for quick-freezing were quite straightforward. Both involved a key innovation: packing the food before freezing it. This simple idea had two main advantages: It reduced the food to convenient rectangular form, allowing direct contact with the freezing surface, and insulated it from the processing equipment, eliminating the sanitary problems of food touching processing equipment or chemicals.
Birdseye的过程（他开发了两种），最早在1924年使用，不需要新的科学知识或重大的概念突破。与许多成功的新技术一样，他的快速冷冻系统非常简单。两种方法都涉及一个关键创新：在冷冻之前将食物包装起来。这个简单的想法有两个主要优点：它将食物变成了方便的矩形形状，使其能够直接接触冷冻表面，并且使其与加工设备隔离开来，消除了食物接触加工设备或化学物质的卫生问题。

In Birdseye’s first “Method of Preserving Piscatorial Products,” as he titled his patent, the package was held between two metal belts that were chilled by a very cold (-40° to -45°) calcium chloride solution. His second method, which came to be the more widely employed, was even simpler. Packaged food was held under pressure between two hollow metal plates that were chilled to -25° by the vaporization of ammonia. A two-inch-thick package of meat could be frozen to 0° in about ninety minutes this way; fruits and vegetables required half an hour more.
在伯德赛的第一项“鱼类产品保存方法”中，他给自己的专利起了这个名字，包装被放置在两个金属带之间，这些金属带通过一种非常冷的(-40°至-45°)氯化钙溶液冷却。他的第二种方法更加简单，也更广泛应用。包装食品被放置在两个中空金属板之间，通过氨的蒸发将其冷却至-25°。这种方法可以在大约九十分钟内将两英寸厚的肉类冷冻至0°，水果和蔬菜需要多半小时。

The process was conceptually simple, yet its implementation required many auxiliary devices and procedures. Birdseye’s process was eventually covered by no fewer than 168 patents. To make the new method of freezing work also required machines to slice the food and fill and seal the boxes, as well as special paper and packages to stand up to the extreme conditions. A boost in quality came in 1930, when H. C. Diehl and C. A. Magoon, of the U.S. Bureau of Plant Industry, found that successful quick-freezing of vegetables requires the prior application of heat. Destructive enzymatic action known as autolysis, which leads to unpleasant flavors, occurs even at subfreezing temperatures, but it can be forestalled if vegetables are briefly scalded (blanched) before freezing.
这个过程在概念上很简单，但实施起来需要许多辅助设备和程序。伯德赛的方法最终被申请了不少于168项专利。为了使新的冷冻方法发挥作用，还需要机器来切割食物、填充和封口盒子，以及能够承受极端条件的特殊纸张和包装。在1930年，美国植物产业局的H.C.迪尔和C.A.马戈恩发现，成功冷冻蔬菜需要先施加热量。破坏性的酶作用，即所谓的自溶作用，会导致不愉快的味道，即使在亚冰冻温度下也会发生，但如果蔬菜在冷冻之前经过短暂的烫煮（漂白），就可以阻止这种作用。

Birdseye’s first freezer was completed in 1924 and went to work freezing haddock fillets. It was a massive device, weighing nearly twenty tons. Soon tenshelf portable freezers of one-quarter that weight were in use, allowing the quick-freezing of produce close to the point of harvest. As a result, frozen fruits and vegetables would seem fresher when thawed and served, though certain items, such as tomatoes, bananas, and lettuce, did not freeze well.
Birdseye的第一台冷冻机于1924年完成，并开始冷冻鳕鱼片。它是一台庞大的设备，重达近20吨。很快，重量只有它四分之一的十层可移动冷冻机开始使用，使得农产品在采摘点附近快速冷冻。因此，解冻后食用的冷冻水果和蔬菜看起来更加新鲜，尽管某些物品，如番茄、香蕉和生菜，不易冷冻。

After the operational details had been worked out, large-scale use of the Birdseye process still required a fair amount of money, more than Clarence Birdseye could get on his own. Fortunately he was in the right place at the right time. The 1920s were a period of rapid corporate growth, with firms expanding both in size and in the diversity of their products. One such firm was the Postum Company, which was founded upon Charles W. Post’s coffee substitute of the same name. Post had concocted this beverage in 1895, fired by the same motivation that later led him to create Grape Nuts and Post Toasties cornflakes (sold as Elijah’s Manna until 1907): to promote physical and psychological health through better nutrition. Post may have set out to do good, but he ended up doing very well besides; in 1929 the Postum Company racked up earnings of more than $19 million.
在运营细节得到解决之后，大规模使用伯德赛冷冻技术仍需要相当多的资金，而克拉伦斯·伯德赛自己无法获得这么多资金。幸运的是，他在正确的时间和地点。20世纪20年代是一个快速企业增长的时期，公司在规模和产品多样性上都在扩张。其中一家公司是Postum公司，该公司是基于查尔斯·W·波斯特同名咖啡替代品而成立的。波斯特在1895年创造了这种饮料，出发点是为了通过更好的营养促进身体和心理健康，这个动机后来也促使他创造了葡萄坚果和波斯特玉米片（直到1907年以以利亚的吗哪命名）。波斯特可能本来是想做好事的，但最终他也取得了很大的成功；在1929年，Postum公司的收入超过了1900万美元。

Solidly established on its foundation of Postum and cornflakes, the company branched out into other kinds of food. In 1929 the Postum Company and the Goldman Sachs investment house, in a complicated series of transactions, paid in the neighborhood of $22 million to acquire a firm that was turning out packages of frozen haddock with little marketing success and even less profit. (Postum later bought out Goldman Sachs.) For its money Postum got Clarence Birdseye’s patented process, the Birds Eye line of frozen food, and rights to the name General Foods, which it adopted for itself (altered slightly to General Foods Corporation ).
公司坚实地建立在Postum和玉米片的基础上，它开始涉足其他种类的食品。1929年，Postum公司和高盛投资公司通过一系列复杂的交易，支付了大约2200万美元收购了一家生产速冻鳕鱼包装的公司，该公司在市场推广方面并不成功，利润更是微乎其微。（后来，Postum公司买下了高盛投资公司。）Postum公司用这笔钱购得了克拉伦斯·伯德赛的专利工艺、Birds Eye速冻食品系列以及General Foods的商标使用权，后者稍作修改后成为了公司的名称（稍后改为General Foods Corporation）。

The financial details were complicated and more than a bit devious, with one check for $10,750,000 changing hands three times, the last two transfers going to companies that had been created purely for the purposes of these transactions. The odd financial doings came to the attention of the Senate Committee on Banking and Currency, which suspected that these operations were conducted as tax dodges, although the case was never proven.
财务细节相当复杂且有些狡猾，一张价值1075万美元的支票在三次交易中更换了三次所有权，最后两次转账都流向了专门为这些交易而设立的公司。这些奇怪的财务行为引起了参议院银行和货币委员会的注意，他们怀疑这些操作是为了逃税，尽管这个案件从未被证实。

When the Depression hit soon after, the acquisition looked foolish. In a 1934 article Fortune called Birds Eye “a white elephant on the hands of General Foods,” and with good reason. In the face of horrendous economic conditions, the company had to create a market for a kind of food that still met with deep suspicion from many consumers, for second-rate conventionally frozen meat, fish, and produce had been around for years. Not only was slow freezing harmful to the flavor and texture of food, but many producers used it as a last resort for nearly spoiled items they could not sell fresh. Others sold food as frozen when it had accidentally been exposed to cold temperatures before packing. With these practices in mind, most housewives had a low opinion of frozen food, which before the 1930s went almost entirely for institutional and industrial uses.
当大萧条来临后，这次收购看起来很愚蠢。1934年，《财富》杂志在一篇文章中称Birds Eye为“通用食品公司手中的一头白象”，这个评价是有道理的。面对可怕的经济状况，公司不得不为一种仍然受到许多消费者深深怀疑的食品创造市场，因为二流的常规冷冻肉类、鱼类和农产品已经存在多年。慢速冷冻不仅对食物的口感和质地有害，而且许多生产商将其作为最后的手段，用于销售不新鲜的商品。其他人在食品在包装之前意外暴露于低温时将其出售为冷冻食品。考虑到这些做法，大多数家庭主妇对冷冻食品持低看，直到20世纪30年代之前，冷冻食品几乎完全用于机构和工业用途。

What’s more, refrigerators capable of storing frozen foods at the proper temperature were far from universal. At the time of the acquisition, probably no more than half the homes in the United States contained a refrigerator of any sort. Of those that did, most had not mechanical refrigerators but old-fashioned iceboxes, which could not reliably maintain freezing temperatures.
而且，能够以适当温度储存冷冻食品的冰箱远未普及。在收购时，美国大约只有不到一半的家庭拥有任何类型的冰箱。其中大多数家庭使用的是老式的冰柜，而非机械冷藏设备，无法可靠地保持冷冻温度。

Just as General Foods was beginning its marketing push, though, the household environment was starting to change in its favor. In 1930 sales of refrigerators exceeded those of iceboxes for the first time. The numbers were still small—850,000 refrigerators purchased in that year—but sales increased steadily. In 1941,4,000,000 were sold, and by 1944 nearly 70 percent of American homes had mechanical refrigerators.
正当通用食品公司开始推动市场营销之际，家庭环境开始朝着有利于它的方向发生变化。1930年，冰箱的销量首次超过冰柜。当年的销量虽然仍然很小，只有85万台冰箱被购买，但销量稳步增长。到了1941年，销量达到了400万台，到了1944年，近70%的美国家庭拥有了机械冰箱。

The technology necessary for home storage of frozen foods had taken a long time to emerge. The ancient Chinese and Indians were familiar with the principle of using evaporation for cooling, and in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries various experimenters found laboratory methods of making ice by creating a vacuum over water. In 1805 Oliver Evans of Philadelphia suggested evaporating ether to produce ice. In 1834 Jacob Perkins, an American inventor living in London, built a refrigerator of sorts that demonstrated the basic principle still used in most of today’s models: evaporating a volatile fluid (in Perkins’s case, one distilled from India rubber) to draw heat from an insulated chamber, then compressing it mechanically for reuse. Although Perkins’s invention had no commercial consequences, the brewing and meatpacking industries stimulated a great deal of subsequent experimentation.
家庭冷冻食品储存所需的技术花费了很长时间才得以出现。古代中国人和印度人熟悉利用蒸发制冷的原理，18世纪和19世纪初的各种实验者通过在水上方制造真空的实验方法制冰。1805年，费城的奥利弗·埃文斯建议使用蒸发醚来制冰。1834年，美国发明家雅各布·帕金斯在伦敦建造了一种类似冰箱的设备，展示了大多数现代模型仍然使用的基本原理：通过蒸发挥发性液体（在帕金斯的情况下，是从印度橡胶中提炼的液体）从绝缘室中吸热，然后通过机械压缩以便再利用。尽管帕金斯的发明没有商业后果，但啤酒酿造和肉类加工行业刺激了大量的后续实验。

A major improvement came with the use of ammonia as a refrigerant, which was pioneered by Carl Linde of Germany in 1876. An even better refrigerant, dichlorodifluoromethane (CCl 2 F 2 ), was developed in the early 1930s by Thomas Midgely, Jr., for the Frigidaire division of General Motors. Although its apparently adverse effect on the Earth’s ozone layer has recently led to a ban on its manufacture, this product, now trade-named Freon-12, was a wonder in its day. It combined a low boiling point (-21.6°F) with nonflammability and nontoxicity, making it much safer and more efficient than the refrigerants previously used, including ammonia, ether, sulfur dioxide, and methyl chloride. At about the same time, the Electrolux Company eliminated the need for a constant supply of cold water to condense the refrigerant by developing a way to radiate excess heat directly into the air.
德国的卡尔·林德于1876年首创了以氨作为制冷剂的重大改进。更好的制冷剂二氯二氟甲烷（CCl 2 F 2 ）于20世纪30年代初由托马斯·米奇利（Thomas Midgely, Jr.）为通用汽车公司的Frigidaire部门开发。尽管它对地球的臭氧层产生了明显的不良影响，最近已经禁止其生产，但这种产品，现在被命名为Freon-12，曾经是一个奇迹。它具有低沸点（-21.6°F），不易燃和无毒的特点，比以前使用的制冷剂（包括氨、醚、二氧化硫和氯甲烷）更安全和高效。与此同时，Electrolux公司开发了一种直接将多余热量辐射到空气中的方法，从而消除了对冷水的持续供应的需求。

These technical improvements helped make the mechanical refrigerator practical and popular. At the same time, effective marketing solidified its position as a highly sought-after consumer item. Electric utilities promoted mechanical refrigerators in order to sell more electricity, while aggressive price competition by manufacturers brought them into increasing numbers of homes. In 1920 the average refrigerator cost $600, but the price declined to $275 in 1930 and $154 in 1940. Manufacturers and dealers made abundant use of credit plans as well as loss leaders, attracting prospective customers into the store so they could be sold on higher-priced models.
这些技术改进帮助使机械制冷器变得实用和受欢迎。与此同时，有效的营销巩固了它作为备受追捧的消费品的地位。电力公司推广机械制冷器以增加电力销售量，而制造商之间的激烈价格竞争使其进入越来越多的家庭。1920年，平均制冷器价格为600美元，但到1930年下降到275美元，1940年下降到154美元。制造商和经销商广泛使用信用计划和低价引导产品，吸引潜在客户进入商店，以便能够向他们销售更高价位的型号。

Useful as they were to households, however, these early refrigerators were not suited to the storage of frozen foods, for they had no freezer compartments as such. A package or two could be kept in the coldest part of the interior, inconveniently close to the unit’s evaporating coils, but that was all. Adequate storage for frozen foods was not available until 1939, when the first dual-compartment, dual-temperature refrigerator was introduced. Another boost came with the introduction of home deep-freezers at about the same time, although their widespread installation was delayed by World War II.
然而，尽管这些早期冰箱对家庭非常有用，但它们并不适合储存冷冻食品，因为它们没有冷冻室。最多只能在内部最冷的部分放置一两个包装，而且位置靠近设备的蒸发线圈，非常不方便。直到1939年，第一台双室、双温度的冰箱问世，才有了适合冷冻食品的充足储存空间。与此同时，家用冷冻柜的推出也带来了另一个提升，尽管由于二战的延迟，它们的广泛安装被推迟了。

Home refrigeration helped expand the market for frozen food, but just as critical was the need to maintain cold temperatures while the food was in transit from plant to store. Short trips from the packer or distributor to the retailer could be handled by insulated trucks or ones cooled with ice, brine, or dry ice. Long-distance rail travel was another matter, for traditional ice-cooled refrigerator cars, or “reefers,” could not always keep the food cold enough, making spoilage a problem. To meet the needs of the new market, a few railroads, starting in 1930, equipped some of their reefers with six to eight inches or more of insulation (instead of the usual one to three), as well as fans to circulate the air. They also installed special racks to keep cases of frozen food away from the walls of the cars and added salt equivalent to 30 percent of the ice capacity, but these were stopgap measures. Long-distance transport of frozen foods was not adequately addressed until 1949, when the first successful mechanically cooled refrigerator cars appeared. Nowadays mechanically refrigerated trucks, which first appeared in the late 1930s, carry most frozen food over short and long hauls.
家用冷藏设备帮助扩大了冷冻食品市场，但同样重要的是在食品从工厂到商店的运输过程中保持低温。从包装商或分销商到零售商的短途旅行可以通过绝缘卡车或用冰、盐水或干冰冷却的卡车来处理。然而，长途铁路旅行就不同了，传统的冰冷冷藏车或称为“冷藏车”无法始终保持食品足够冷，导致食品变质。为了满足新市场的需求，从1930年开始，一些铁路公司将部分冷藏车的绝缘层增加到六至八英寸甚至更多（而不是通常的一至三英寸），并安装了风扇来循环空气。他们还安装了特殊的架子，将冷冻食品的箱子与车厢的墙壁隔开，并添加了相当于冰容量30%的盐，但这些都只是权宜之计。直到1949年，第一批成功的机械制冷冷藏车出现，才能充分解决冷冻食品的长途运输问题。现如今，从20世纪30年代末开始出现的机械制冷卡车，承担了大部分短途和长途冷冻食品的运输任务。

While home refrigerators and refrigerated railway cars were essential to the frozen-food industry, no less important were display-and-storage cabinets for retailers. Here too it was necessary to begin virtually from scratch. In the early 1930s freezer cases could be found in many retail establishments, but only as covered cabinets for the storage of ice cream. These were designed for cylindrical containers and were unsuited for frozen-food packages; equally important, they kept their contents hidden, and thus did nothing to attract shoppers’ attention. Besides, they were often owned by ice-cream companies who did not want other companies’ products in their freezers. Still, most food retailers had little alternative. In the early 1930s a low-temperature display case cost anywhere from $1,000 to $2,000, a very substantial investment for hard-pressed merchants trying to ride out the Depression. It’s no surprise that in 1933 only 516 retail outlets in the United States sold frozen food. During the 1930s about 10 percent of the industry’s sales were at retail, with 60 percent to bakeries, preservers, and ice-cream makers and 30 percent to institutions.
家用冰箱和冷藏铁路车对冷冻食品行业至关重要，但对于零售商来说，展示和储存柜同样重要。在这方面，几乎需要从零开始。在20世纪30年代初，冷冻柜可以在许多零售店中找到，但只用于储存冰淇淋的封闭柜台。这些柜台设计用于圆柱形容器，不适合冷冻食品包装；同样重要的是，它们隐藏了其内容，对吸引顾客的注意力没有任何作用。此外，它们通常是由冰淇淋公司拥有，他们不希望其他公司的产品放在他们的冷冻柜中。然而，大多数食品零售商别无选择。在20世纪30年代初，低温展示柜的成本在1000到2000美元之间，对于正在努力度过经济大萧条的商人来说，这是一笔非常可观的投资。毫不奇怪，1933年，美国只有516家零售店销售冷冻食品。在20世纪30年代，该行业约有10％的销售额来自零售，60％用于面包店、保鲜剂和冰淇淋制造商，30％用于机构。

Early refrigerators couldn’t handle frozen food, and store display cases cost from $1,000 to $2,000.

To make stocking frozen food pay for shopkeepers, in the mid-1930s General Foods commissioned the American Radiator Company to design and manufacture a new freezer cabinet that could be sold for $360. The cabinet was about 6 feet long on the outside (4 feet on the inside) and came equipped with its own compressor. It could hold about 14 cubic feet, or 500 pounds, of frozen food. Even at its reduced price, a frozen-food cabinet was beyond the means of many retailers. To ensure widespread distribution of its products, General Foods rented out cabinets for $10.00 to $12.50 a month. By 1939 some 12,000 retail food stores had frozen-food cabinets, including 5,000 rentals—still a tiny fraction of the 600,000 such stores in the country.
为了让冷冻食品对店主有利可图，上世纪30年代中期，通用食品公司委托美国散热器公司设计和制造一款新的冷冻柜，售价为360美元。这款柜子外部长度约为6英尺（内部为4英尺），配备了自己的压缩机。它可以容纳大约14立方英尺或500磅的冷冻食品。即使以降价销售，冷冻柜对许多零售商来说仍然是负担不起的。为了确保产品的广泛分销，通用食品公司以每月10.00至12.50美元的价格出租柜子。到1939年，约有12,000家零售食品店拥有冷冻柜，其中包括5,000家租赁店铺，但这仍然只是全国60万家此类店铺的一小部分。

Besides the technical obstacles, there was the problem of persuading consumers to try frozen foods. They were convenient and flavorful, but they answered no pressing needs, especially when, for many families, putting any sort of food at all on the table was an accomplishment. As with most innovative consumer products, the demand for frozen foods had to be stimulated through marketing campaigns. To gain experience in selling such a novel collection of products, General Foods began to test-market its first Birds Eye products in Springfield, Massachusetts, in May 1930. The products included peas, spinach, raspberries, logan-berries, cherries, and a variety of meats and fish. Twenty selected retailers agreed to carry the line, backed by a local advertising campaign that stressed the value of frozen foods in eliminating waste, expanding variety, and diminishing preparation time. Two years of test marketing in Springfield, along with similar efforts in Washington, D.C., and Rochester, New York, showed that concentrated marketing efforts could move frozen foods, but expanding beyond the tests proved difficult. Retailers were reluctant to-carry the line, and consumers were still in the dark about costs, handling, cooking, and the nutritional value of frozen foods.
除了技术障碍之外，还存在说服消费者尝试冷冻食品的问题。虽然它们方便美味，但并没有满足紧迫需求，尤其是对于许多家庭来说，只要能在餐桌上放上任何食物就已经是一项成就了。与大多数创新的消费品一样，冷冻食品的需求必须通过营销活动来刺激。为了在销售这一系列新颖产品方面积累经验，通用食品公司于1930年5月开始在马萨诸塞州斯普林菲尔德市测试销售其第一批Birds Eye产品。这些产品包括豌豆、菠菜、覆盆子、洛根莓、樱桃以及各种肉类和鱼类。二十家精选零售商同意销售这一产品线，并得到了当地广告宣传活动的支持，强调冷冻食品在减少浪费、扩大品种和缩短准备时间方面的价值。在斯普林菲尔德进行了两年的测试销售，以及在华盛顿特区和纽约罗切斯特进行的类似努力表明，集中的营销努力可以推动冷冻食品的销售，但是扩大测试范围却很困难。 零售商不愿意销售这个产品系列，而消费者对于冷冻食品的成本、处理、烹饪和营养价值仍然一无所知。

To meet these challenges, General Foods concentrated on a few markets in the Northeast, awarded exclusive distributorships to established wholesale grocers, and increased its advertising, most of it in local newspapers. Sales in targeted areas steadily rose. In 1934, 30 million pounds of Birds Eye frozen food was sold; four years later sales had at least quintupled. Slowly building on these successes, the company began to supplement locally based advertising campaigns with national ones in early 1940, just before beginning national distribution of its products.
为了应对这些挑战，通用食品公司将重点放在东北地区的几个市场上，向已有的批发商授予独家经销权，并增加了广告投入，其中大部分投放在当地报纸上。目标地区的销售稳步增长。1934年，鸟眼冷冻食品销售了3000万磅；四年后，销售额至少增长了五倍。在这些成功的基础上，公司开始在1940年初补充本地广告活动，并开始全国范围内分销产品。

The trend was evident. If not for World War II, frozen foods produced by General Foods and others would soon have started to become staples in American homes. War halted the movement, however, as the requirements of military production pre-empted the manufacture of consumer durables like refrigerators and freezers. At the same time, the armed forces were powerful exponents of standardization, including in food, and a hitch in the Army or Navy did much to prepare a new generation of Americans for a postwar consumer society built on a foundation of standardized products.
这个趋势是显而易见的。如果不是因为第二次世界大战，由通用食品公司和其他公司生产的冷冻食品很快就会成为美国家庭的主食。然而，战争停止了这一趋势，因为军事生产的需求抢占了制造冰箱和冷冻器等耐用消费品的位置。与此同时，军队是标准化的强大倡导者，包括在食品方面，而军队或海军的参与对于培养一代新的美国人，为基于标准化产品的战后消费社会打下基础起到了很大的作用。

Frozen foods were the very embodiment of standardization; a package of peas bought in Indianapolis would be no different from one bought in Tacoma. Paradoxically, however, with standardization came variety. Consumers could soon choose from dozens of food products prepared in many different ways. By the mid-1950s complete meals, ready to be taken directly from the freezer to the oven, were very much in evidence. (See box on page 55.) In 1955 a research organization estimated that frozen food saved a family $1.12 per day, compensating a housewife’s time at the minimum wage. Presumably the savings were greater for families whose mothers deserved more than 75 cents an hour.
冷冻食品是标准化的典范；在印第安纳波利斯买的一包豌豆与在塔科马买的一包没有任何区别。然而，讽刺的是，标准化带来了多样性。消费者很快就可以选择许多不同方式制作的食品产品。到了1950年代中期，完整的餐食可以直接从冷冻室取出放入烤箱中加热。（见第55页的盒子）1955年，一个研究机构估计，冷冻食品每天为一个家庭节省了1.12美元，相当于家庭主妇以最低工资计算的时间。对于那些应该获得超过75美分每小时的母亲来说，节省可能更大。

The technological foundation of the frozen-food industry had been laid in the 1930s and 1940s, but commercial success lagged: in 1945 Americans still bought less than two pounds of frozen food apiece. The subsequent rapid expansion of the frozen-food industry was part of the consumer boom of the 1950s, during which more and more people bought new refrigerators and freezers. But no less important were cultural shifts. Work and domestic life were changing in the postwar era, altering conventional understanding of what constituted a proper meal and who had the responsibility for preparing it. After declining during the immediate postwar era, the number of women working outside their homes began to take off; commuting distances were lengthening, and families no longer necessarily took their meals together. Frozen foods were emblematic of life-style changes that encompassed far more than altered eating habits. They also quickly became a part of popular culture. In the 1953 film The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms , a prehistoric monster that had been frozen for millions of years is thawed and goes on a rampage through Wall Street, destroying every building in its path except the offices of Quick Frozen Foods , a trade magazine.
冷冻食品行业的技术基础在20世纪30年代和40年代奠定，但商业上的成功却滞后：1945年，美国人均购买的冷冻食品不到两磅。随后冷冻食品行业的迅速扩张是20世纪50年代消费繁荣的一部分，当时越来越多的人购买了新的冰箱和冷冻柜。但同样重要的是文化转变。战后时期的工作和家庭生活发生了变化，改变了对什么构成适当的餐食以及谁负责准备餐食的传统理解。在战后时期的初期，女性在家外工作的人数开始增加；通勤距离变长，家庭不再必须一起进餐。冷冻食品象征着远远超出改变饮食习惯的生活方式变化。它们也迅速成为流行文化的一部分。 在1953年的电影《来自两万英尺的野兽》中，一只被冻结了数百万年的史前怪兽被解冻后，在华尔街肆虐，摧毁了它经过的每一座建筑，唯独快速冷冻食品公司的办公室幸免于难。

The discovery and development of quick-freezing gave a nation of suburbanites servings of meat, fish, fruits, and vegetables that were often fresher and tastier than those available to rural folks. At the same time, however, changing consumer demands and the relentless search for novelty were resulting in some products that were the despair of nutritionist and gourmet alike. All too often retailers’ cabinets contained frozen foods with excessive fat, salt, or sugar, as well as products that sacrificed flavor and texture to the demands of efficiency and expediency. During the 1980s producers struggled to meet the contradictory demands of taste appeal, nutritional value, and convenience with varying degrees of success. For both good and ill, frozen foods are an integral part of a world built on volume production, standardized goods, the separation of workplace and residence, and complex and variable family structures. Much has changed since the cold Labrador days when piles of frozen fish provided inspiration for Clarence Birdseye.
速冻技术的发现和发展为城郊居民提供了比农村人更新鲜、更美味的肉类、鱼类、水果和蔬菜。然而，消费者需求的变化和对新奇事物的不懈追求也导致了一些产品，这些产品既令营养学家又令美食家感到绝望。太多时候，零售商的柜台上摆放着含有过多脂肪、盐或糖的冷冻食品，以及为了效率和迅捷而牺牲了口感和质地的产品。在20世纪80年代，生产商们努力满足口感吸引力、营养价值和便利性这些矛盾需求，但成功的程度各不相同。无论是好是坏，冷冻食品都是一个建立在大规模生产、标准化商品、工作场所与居住地分离以及复杂多变的家庭结构基础上的世界的不可或缺的一部分。自从寒冷的拉布拉多时代，冻鱼堆给了克拉伦斯·伯德赛灵灵感以来，许多事情已经发生了变化。