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March 6 is National Frozen Food Day

March 6, 2017/0 Comments/in March

Today is National Frozen Food Day, which honors the pioneering work of Clarence Birdseye. While living in Canada, he learned from the Inuit how to fish through a hole in the ice. He noticed that the day’s catch froze almost instantly, tasted fresh and didn’t turn to mush like conventional slow-frozen foods when thawed. Convinced he had discovered something revolutionary, he developed a freezing machine and patented it in 1927.

It took time for the world to catch up. Railroads used ice for its refrigeration “reefer” cars and wouldn’t accept responsibility for possible spoilage. Markets had no freezers to store to store the fish. Although home refrigerators were available, separate compartments with room for more than a few ice cube trays wouldn’t be introduced until 1940. Birdseye ran out of money, sold his company to Postum Cereals and took a job there.

With the financial resources of Post, Birdseye began the painstaking process of convincing the public what a boon frozen food could be to busy mothers and families. In March 1930, he placed display freezers into several stores in Springfield, MA, stocking them with 27 different foods from haddock to spinach.

Fifty-four years later, Senate Joint Resolution 193 requested that Ronald Reagan, 40th president of the United States of America, officially designate March 6th as Frozen Food Day. Proclamation 5157 reads, in part:

…The international frozen food industry started in the United States. Frozen vegetables, fruit, meat, and fish were first packaged and offered to consumers in 1930, contributing greatly to the convenience of life and freeing consumers permanently from the cycle of limited seasonal availability of many foods.
Between 1935 and 1940, frozen foods became available to the public on a large scale. During World War II, ration point values posted in stores and carried in newspapers focused public attention on frozen food. Frozen food became a part of the space age when Apollo XII astronauts took frozen meals on board. Seventy-two frozen food items were stored on the Skylab for a five hundred-day supply of meals for the crew…
Now, Therefore, I, Ronald Reagan, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim March 6, 1984, as Frozen Food Day, and I call upon the American people to observe such day with appropriate ceremonies and activities.
In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this sixth day of March, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eighty-four, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and eighth.
Ronald Reagan

TV dinner in the White House

Happy National Frozen Food Day!

March 2 is Read Across America Day

March 2, 2017/0 Comments/in March

Read Across America Day was proposed in 1997 by the National Education Association (NEA) and adopted the following year. March 2nd was chosen to celebrate the birthday, in 1904, of Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, one of the most beloved children’s book authors in history.

Geisel worked as a cartoonist and ad man for Standard Oil while he was establishing himself as an author and illustrator. His first children’s book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, was reportedly rejected 27 times before it was published in 1937.

During World War II, he collaborated with Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng and others on an animated film series called Private SNAFU. He also scripted propaganda films including Your Job in Germany, directed by Frank Capra.

A 1954 Life magazine article by John Hersey, author of Hiroshima, suggested Dr. Seuss could create a fun-to-read educational book using the limited vocabulary required for new readers. Fun with Dick and Jane, a primary school book at that time, was so boring that it seemed to actively discourage literacy, as anyone who had to read it (or teach it) can attest.

It took him until 1957 to finish The Cat in the Hat, using only 236 different words. It was an instant hit and continues to be a classic children’s book. In 1960, he topped himself with Green Eggs and Ham which features only 50 unique words:

a, am, and, anywhere, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, mouse, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would, you

Geisel wrote and illustrated 44 children’s books and wrote many more featuring other people’s artwork before his death in 1991. Publisher’s Weekly’s most recent global sales figures, from 2000, count 25 Dr. Seuss titles among the top 189 (selling 750,000 hardcovers or more) All-Time Bestselling Children’s Books.

While searching for Seuss/Geisel quotes, we noticed something odd. Many of them just don’t seem like things he would say. As it turns out, he didn’t. It’s nearly impossible to know, in this age of cut-and-paste cannibalism, who is responsible for misinformation. Who cares?

Professor Philip Nel cares. We stumbled upon his invaluable post, “Oh, the Quotations You’ll Forge!” on the subject of ersatz Seuss sayings. Nel has taught graduate courses on the work of Dr. Seuss. His blog, Nine Kinds of Pie, has a wealth of information, including a 1952 essay published in the New York Times Book Review in which Geisel skewered racist humor and explained his assertion that adults are “obsolete children.”

Dr. Seuss had a flair for tall tales and embellishment, dedicating one book to a non-existent daughter but we think he would approve of our proposal: Don’t Believe Everything You Read Across America (Especially on the Internet) Day.

UNLESS someone like you
cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It’s not.
—The Lorax

Have a happy Read Across America Day!

February 28 is National Public Sleeping Day

February 28, 2017/1 Comment/in February

Today is National Public Sleeping Day, not to be confused with Festival of Sleep Day on January 3rd.

Cats are known for taking short naps and waking quickly to flee a predator or pounce on prey. Those who have cats can attest to the fact that cats sleep a lot, an average of 15 hours per day, according to petMD. They are most active at night so, when the bipedal world is getting up, they’re settling in for a snooze.

We can approximate a catnap with the “power nap.” According to sleep expert Sara C. Mednick, Ph.D., author of Take a Nap! Change Your Life, “You can get incredible benefits from 15 to 20 minutes of napping. You reset the system and get a burst of alertness and increased motor performance. That’s what most people really need to stave off sleepiness and get an energy boost.”

Longer naps have benefits, too, but don’t lend themselves to public situations. For instance, you might miss your stop on the train or bus, sleep through getting fired for sleeping at work or come to on a park bench having unwittingly donated your watch, wallet and shoes while you slumbered.

Sleep architecture researchers define the power nap as stage 2 sleep. Most of us are familiar with Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep; this very short sleep cycle is classified as Non-Rapid Eye Movement (NREM). According to a National Institutes of Health (NIH) study:

An individual in stage 2 sleep requires more intense stimuli than in stage 1 to awaken. Brain activity on an EEG shows relatively low-voltage, mixed-frequency activity characterized by the presence of sleep spindles and K-complexes. It is hypothesized that sleep spindles are important for memory consolidation.

K-complexes appear to prevent interruption of sleep due to touch, sound and other stimuli judged by the sleeping brain to present no threat. They also aid in information processing, help to synchronize NREM activity in the thalamus and promote a slow-wave sleep state. (More science here.)

While the effects of caffeine are researched, debated and studied some more—the NIH lists 72 open clinical trials involving caffeine—everyone agrees that a little shut-eye will do you a lot of good. Keep in mind that our circadian biological clock rhythms tend to make us most sleepy between 1 pm to 3 pm.

Naps longer than 30 minutes can paradoxically make you feel groggy. This effect is called “sleep inertia” and happens when you awaken quickly from deep sleep. Psychological and motor skills are impaired for minutes or longer, especially if you’ve had insufficient sleep the night before.

Dark surroundings will help you fall asleep more quickly and get more out of your downtime. If there’s nowhere at work to turn off the lights and close the door or it’s too cold, hot, rainy or snowy to go outside and lounge with a TPS report over your face, check out the Ostrich Pillow.

There’s no better way to let your cubicle mates know they should come back later, get everyone to come look at you, post a photo companywide, worldwide, to the International Space Station, start a therapy fund…or all of the above!

A nap can’t replace a good night’s sleep, but it can sharpen your senses and keep you going until quitting time. Unless you’re a cat. Then it’s always quitting time.

Happy National Public Sleeping Day!

February 23 is International Dog Biscuit Appreciation Day

February 23, 2017/0 Comments/in February

Today is International Dog Biscuit Appreciation Day, also known as National Dog Biscuit Day.

The modern biscuit our dogs know and love owes its existence to Ohio electrician James Spratt. It gets its international pedigree because he got the idea while on a trip to London around 1860, where he reportedly saw sailors who’d just docked throwing leftover hardtack overboard to stray dogs on the pier, who gobbled it up.

Hardtack derives from British sailors’ slang term for food, tack. Cheap and long-lasting, made from flour, water and salt, it was eaten when fresh food was unavailable, especially on extended 0cean voyages and military campaigns. It was called by other names as well: pilot bread, ship’s bread, sea biscuits, molar breakers and worm castles, due to frequent infestations which necessitated dropping a piece into hot coffee, then skimming off the insects which floated to the top.

Spratt was already a successful American businessman who had patented a type of lightning rod. While in London to sell them, he seized upon the opportunity to create and dominate a lucrative market that would target wealthy owners of sporting dogs. He formulated his dog biscuits with fresher ingredients than sailors and soldiers enjoyed: meat, vegetables and wheat.

He opened a factory there and began an unprecedented advertising campaign, using large colored billboard displays which depicted a Native American buffalo hunt, implying it was the source of the meat in “Spratt’s Patent Meat-Fibrine.” The true origin remained a closely guarded secret; after selling the company, Spratt retained the sole contract to supply meat for the dog biscuits until his death in 1880.

In 1876, he supplied free food to exhibitors at the Centennial International Exposition in Philadelphia, PA, the second World’s Fair held in the United States. The same year, he filed U.S. Patent #3864 for Spratt’s “Meat-Fibrine Dog Cakes or Biscuits…a square interspersed with punctures, with a St. Andrew’s Cross between the words ‘Spratt’s Patent,’ impressed in the center of the square.”

Spratt’s dominated the market until the early 1900’s when a biscuit made of waste milk from slaughterhouses and fashioned into the shape of a bone rose to prominence. It eventually became known as Milk-Bone and captured the imagination of dog owners everywhere. In 1931, the National Biscuit Company, now known as Nabisco, bought the formula.

In recent years, as health problems caused by obesity have become more prevalent due to a rich diet, dog treat and food formulas have evolved and more nutritious options are available. There’s no doubt that dog biscuits have come a long way and deserve a little recognition. So give your pooch a big hug and have a happy International Dog Biscuit Appreciation Day!

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Happy National Frozen Food Day!