They claim it’s the mission. That our admirable goal of conserving the fish,
wildlife, and plants of the globe (“for the continuing benefit of the American
people”) accounts for the almost-maniacal devotion to duty that motivates most
Fish and Wildlife Service employees. But, as most of us know, it’s really about the food. Well before training center smorgasbords, decades before regional office
clambakes and central office holiday spreads, food played a central role in the
life of the Fish and Wildlife Service. It has something to do with being an agency populated by hunters and anglers
who shoot, spear, trap, fish, net, seine, or otherwise “reduce to possession”
the fowl of the air and the fins of the sea. We simply recognize the importance
of conservation of animals and plants to people…and that part of the value in
their preservation consists of, well, eating them. Long before deliberations over climate change and strategic habitat
planning, the Service was engaged in a much more perplexing question: “What are
we going to have for dinner tonight?” For nearly twodecades, the answer came
from four ladies-in-white,cooking in an obscure kitchen in suburban “With holiday parties now in full swing, this year’s hostess will find
something different for her holiday guests when she serves such intriguing hors
d’oeuvres and canapés as spiced shrimp, smoked salmon rolls and crab salad in
puff shells,” one 1947 holiday advisory recommended, dishing up recipes for
tunaa la king and “angels on horseback” (bacon-and-oyster concoctions, skewered
on festive toothpicks). “Whatever your nationality, for pre-holiday religious fast days and those
post-season “tired of turkey days,” there will be an abundance of various
species of fish and shellfish with which the homemaker may add variety and
substantial value to the table,” added another agency missive. That most in this profusion of chirpy household homilies were penned by
agency biologist Rachel Carson is a fact glossed over by most conservation
historians. (It wasn’t all prize-winning pesticide exposes and lyrical undersea
rhapsodies that typified Few now recall that, in its day, the Service was one of the most enterprising
chefs in the Government — the Julia Child of the Federal bureaucracy. Operating
out of test kitchens at the “It may seem alien to a Government agency with such virile responsibilities
as the management of fur seal herds and the destruction of predatory animals,
but the Fish and Wildlife Service works up recipes for the housewife,” a 1948
agency feature trumpeted. Its kitchen-counseling activities are part of a plan
to make Beginning in World War II, our fisheries division had a mission to market
the oceans. By logical extension, the fish cookbooks are a post-World War
II outgrowth of the ‘Fish are a Fighting Food’ era, as men and women returned
to the home front,” notes Service historian Dr. Mark Madison. “During the
war, efforts began to make shark, sea lion, and other exotic marine species
palatable to a protein-starved citizenry. And perhaps recognizing that
people still weren’t increasing their seafood consumption, efforts were made to
foster fish-eating in schools, hospitals, and prisons, where the denizens don’t
get to choose their food. Perhaps our most enduring contribution to American cuisine, however, was
made years before, by an obscure trapper of wolves and collector of ticks who
roamed the backwoods of the American West on studies for the Biological Survey,
predecessor to today’s Fish and Wildlife Service. In 1910, collecting specimens in It was while in the frigid north that the man became intrigued by how duck
and caribou meat retained its taste and texture when quick-frozen out-of-doors.
Cabbages, he noticed, could be preserved in barrels of seawater, later to be
chipped from the ice and enjoyed in mid-winter. Those cabbages, according to
the account, became “the foundation of a great industry.” For the novice biologist neither invented the freezing process, nor was the
first person to freeze food commercially. “My contribution was to take Eskimo
knowledge and the scientists’ theories and adapt them to quantity production,”
he confessed. “I do not consider myself to be a remarkable person....But I am
intensely curious about the things which I see around me, and this curiosity,
combined with a willingness to assume risks, has been responsible for such
success and satisfaction as I have achieved in life.” The Service employee’s name was Clarence Birdseye.His handiwork can still be
found in any frozen food locker in every grocery store in This is sixth in a series of short features
that David Klinger has written about little-known aspects of the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service. It originally appeared in Fish and
Wildlife Service News. Related Links: Historic USFWS Release, "Film and Recipe Booklet, in Color, Feature Canned Salmon"
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