Fresh vs. Frozen Food

It is a natural tendency to believe fresh fruits and veggies are better for us, and taste better. However, unless you live in an area with local farms, your produce probably came from a place that is far away. From the moment that spinach was picked, it has been slowly decaying and losing its nutrients during the long journey to the grocery shelf. In addition, it was tossed into a refrigerated storage room for a while, then spread out in the produce section for a while hoping to get selected, then left in your fridge at home after you bought it.

What that all leads to is when it comes to nutrition, frozen produce will probably always be better than fresh. It is flash frozen immediately after it is picked, so it loses fewer nutrients between being harvested and landing on your plate. The same is true for some canned foods. For instance, canned tomatoes are higher in the cancer-fighting antioxidant lycopene than their non frozen counterpart, due to how they are preserved.

There is a caveat, the convenience and cost of frozen or canned foods makes them attractive options, particularly when fresh foods are out of season in your area. However, make sure you carefully read nutrition labels before purchasing frozen or canned foods. Some of these foods have high levels of added sodium or preservatives, which can make them less healthy options.

Frozen or canned food often allows you to buy higher-quality produce that was picked in-season and kept at that level of freshness. Even Popeye preferred canned spinach.

Five More Frozen Food Facts

Carl Paul Gottfried Linde, an engineer, scientist, and professor at the Technical University of Munich helped pioneer industrial cooling, through what is commonly known as the Hampson-Linde cycle, and used his findings to plan an ice and refrigeration machine back in the nineteenth century. Linde’s desire to build such machines was furthered in 1892, when the Guinness Brewery requested that Linde create a carbon dioxide liquefaction plant for them.

The first “complete” frozen meal was not the 'TV dinner', it was airplane food. In 1945, Maxson Food Systems, Inc. starting making its 'Strato-Plates', meals that were created specifically for consumption on airplanes. Each frozen meal included a meat, vegetable, and potato, and was meant to be reheated for in-air eating.

Swanson’s, which is widely hailed as the true creator of TV dinners, coined the name and was the most well-known maker of compartmentalized meals in the 1950s.

Conagra Foods introduced its Healthy Choice line of frozen food in 1989, after the corporation was inspired to pursue healthy frozen picks after its chairman, Charles Harper, suffered a heart attack due to his bad eating habits.

There has long been a debate over which company first introduced the frozen pizza to the grocery store market, with both Totino’s and Tombstone vying for the title. However, the Celentano brothers, who owned their own Italian specialty store in New Jersey, are believed to have marketed the first frozen pizza in 1957.

Five Frozen Food Facts

Frozen foods do not require any added preservatives to keep them safe and consumable, because microbes cannot grow on food that is at a temperature less than 0°F. The microbes do not die at that temperature, but they stop multiplying and can come back as food is unfrozen.

Despite some old wives’ tales, freezing food does not remove any nutrients.

Freezer burn is just the result of air hitting frozen food and allowing the ice to sublimate; other color changes can be blamed on long freezing times or poor packaging. It might look gross, but if your frozen food has maintained a proper temperature, it is fine to eat.

Freezing food typically keeps items edible indefinitely, although taste and quality may diminish over time. Some items that stay tasty even after long freezes include uncooked game, poultry, and meat, which are still good after up to a year in the freezer.

Even though freezing food was used as a storage technique in cold weather climates for many years, it is believed it was first applied to industrial food sales sometime in the 1800s, when a Russian company froze a small quantity of duck and geese and shipped them to London. By 1899, the Baerselman Bros. company adapted frozen storage for their own Russia-to-England food shipping business, though they initially only operated during cold weather months. Birdseye fact here LINK.

What's in a Name, Birdseye

The namesake of Birds Eye Frozen Foods was the company’s founder, Clarence Birdseye, who introduced the concept of flash freezing to the world. He developed his technique after seeing food freezing in action in the Arctic, and noting how much better frozen fish tasted if it had been frozen immediately after been caught. He helped pioneer flash freezing as a frozen food standard and helped develop in-store freezer cases and refrigerated boxcars that allowed his frozen foods to travel in comfort.


Birdseye’s food was the first frozen food sold commercially in the United States. On March 6, 1930, Birds Eye frozen foods were put on sale at Davidson’s Market in Springfield, Massachusetts, the first product of its kind.