Frozen in Time by Mark Kurlansky

There's a lot of buzz among English teachers about finding YA nonfiction. Many struggling readers would prefer to read "something real" over fiction so we are all always on the hunt for good selections. Many lament that there isn't more good YA nonfiction out there. For my part, I really struggle with the concept. What fundamentally is different between a YA and regular nonfiction book intended for a broad audience? Vocabulary maybe, length? Marketing? Most teenagers are capable of reading at an adult level if they are interested in the topic.

Nevertheless, some publishers are starting to package some items as YA nonfiction.  Frozen In Time is one of these although there is nothing about the text that particularly suggests "teen" to me. Frozen In Time is a short (about 150 pages) biography of Clarence Birdseye who developed the process for quick freezing food that we still more or less use today.

Frozen food is so ubiquitous. It's strange to think that someone had to develop that, but apparently early frozen food was just terrible. It took so long to freeze the food that the ice crystals formed very large which broke the cell walls and made the food mushy when it thawed out. In the early days of frozen food, no one even had a freezer so the food would immediately thaw. To sell the frozen food, Birdseye had to figure out both how to freeze the food without destroying the texture and how to make home freezer's cost effective. It's a pretty thorny problem and interesting to think about.

Kurlansky does a good job of presenting Birdseye as an interesting eccentric. The chapters are reasonably short and there's good overviews of the science involved although I would have wished for a little more depth.