‘A year of fish fingers’: how motherhood put me off frozen food

It’s 100 years since the American inventor Clarence Birdseye, with an investment of $7 for an electric fan, a few pails of brine and some blocks of ice, started developing his system of packing fresh food into cardboard boxes and freezing it at high speed, thus ushering in the frozen food era. If you go into your nearest branch of Iceland, you’ll see that the era is still in full swing.

In the colourful and far from morgue-like aisles, cheerful, sensible couples are filling their trolleys for the week, tempted by the dazzling food photography and the ‘tanginess’ of everything. This is wall-to-wall packaging seduction. ‘Oumph! Mexican spiced fajitas’, shouts the frozen ‘Oumph!’ brand. ‘Our Mac’n’Cheese with pigs in blankets’, purrs the more nostalgic frozen Cathedral City brand. The family-sized bags of breaded chicken include ‘hot and spicy’, ‘BBQ’, ‘salt and pepper’ and ‘sweet chilli’, and if your offspring don’t fancy any of the normal ‘nugget’-shapes, you can go for turkey dinosaurs or unicorns instead.