This is an I-Heart podcast.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I-Heart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry.

And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

So, when writing about Clarence Birdseye,

who is our topic today, for his full-length biography on him, author Mark Kirlanski wrote, quote,

Birdseye wrote numerous articles about himself and his ideas. But the subject himself is not always an infallible source either,

especially a man like Bird's Eye who had an image of himself that he wanted to promote.

A very American image of a lot of audacity, not much intellect, and a pioneer spirit.

The first and last of these were largely true.

The second, manifestly not.

But regardless of whether he fudged some details in his life story to make it more appealing,

Clarence Bird's Eye, who eventually went by Bob, and we'll mention that in the episode,

really changed the way that people thought about and prepared food in the 20th century.

There are, for the sake of clarity up top, two Clarence Birdseyes in this episode, Father

and Son, we will refer to the main focus, just as Clarence Birdseye or sometimes Bob Birdseye,

and his father, we will refer to as Clarence Senior.

Also, we have to give you a little heads up here because Birdseye was a very interesting and eccentric man,

and he's often touted as a naturalist and worked as one, but maybe not the image you have in your head when you hear that word today.

He was part of that era where being a naturalist, often included killing animals.

We're not lingering on any of that, but he did a lot of things that would be seen as deeply

problematic by today's standards, particularly regarding

...