As recently as a century ago, if you wanted to eat fresh vegetables, you were out of luck if they were out of season. Before the global village and high-speed transportation, you had to eat as much of your favorite veggies in the spring and summer as you could, hoping that would hold you over until the next year. Otherwise, the best you could do was preserve your veggies in canning jars, by drying, packing them in salt, or by pickling. Sadly, very few people were buying freezer food labels at that point, since no one had freezers. While people needed the occasional food label, frozen varieties were right out.
Then, in 1913 or thereabouts, an ice fisherman made a momentous discovery. He probably wasn’t the first to do so, but he was the first to realize he had a gold mine on his hands, and that he could create an entire industry if he just could find a mechanical way to mimic what nature already did. You see, when he was sitting out on a frozen lake in -40 °F weather, the fish he pulled out of the water and threw out onto the ice froze instantly. You can see the need for freezer meal labels coming, can’t you? Later, when he thawed and cooked those flash-frozen fish, he realized they tasted as fresh as if he’d taken them straight to his kitchen. Cue music for how to label frozen food.
But as in all sagas, where they deliberately delay the solution to heighten the tension, he wasn’t quite there yet. The door leading to labels for freezer containers was ajar, but technology hadn’t caught up to the need for freezer adhesive labels yet.
Thank goodness for us, in the early 1920s that fisherman, one Clarence Birdseye, invented not just the frozen foods industry, but also the frozen food labels industry. The way had been cleared for other unsung heroes to figure out the details of self-adhesive freezer labels. So oddly enough, we owe our livelihoods here at Etiquette Systems to a member of that special breed of madmen who liked to keep warm by chopping holes through ice three feet thick, on days when even snowmen were smart enough to stay indoors, just so they could jiggle funny-looking little lures in freezing water using fishing poles made for midgets, and then haul very hungry fish out into air so cold they froze solid in mid-flop.
You just never know where genius will come from. It’s a good thing Clarence didn’t work in Hawaii and take up beachcombing as a hobby, or maybe no one would ever have a need to buy freezer labels. At least until the next ice fisherman noticed how good his flash-frozen fish tasted.
Today, you can buy your printable freezer meal labels from many sources, but be careful whose you choose. Do you really want some cheap fly-by-night freezer food labels made by some third party that fall off in the freezer, leaving your favorite frozen vegetables unlabeled? Do you really want to play freezer roulette? Of course not. You want your sticker freezer labels and refrigerator labels to come from a company that knows how to label frozen food and can provide you with write on freezer labels you can count on for years.
You can buy freezer food labels from someone else, or you can buy them from Etiquette Systems. We think the choice is obvious, so hit us up for a quote.
