When food preservation using ice became commercialized, cold storage companies began to appear. Ice was farmed from lakes during the winter, and stored, surrounded by straw to insulate it, so that it could be used well into early summer. Ice houses and ice warehouses began to appear and sold blocks of ice for domestic and commercial use. Then in 1922, Clarence Birdseye founded the modern frozen food industry, by pioneering fast freezing (now called blast freezing), based on learning the benefits of low temperature freezing of fish practiced by the Inuit in Arctic regions.