Mary MacArthur

Mary MacArthur (January 20, 1904 – April 26, 1959) was a Canadian scientist who performed research on the principles of the successful dehydration and freezing of fresh foods. She performed this research while employed by the federal government of Canada's Department of Agriculture at the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa, Ontario. In 1952 she was the first woman to be named as Fellow of the Agricultural Institute of Canada (FAIC) for her contributions to Canadian agriculture.

Biography

Mary MacArthur was born in Glasgow, Scotland. She came to Canada as a child and her family settled in Pugwash, Nova Scotia. She became interested in botany at an early age. after attending a botany course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts the prior year. She then earned an M.A. at Radcliffe College (affiliated with Harvard University) in 1934 and received her PhD from Harvard in 1937. She is credited with identifying that vegetables needed blanching to inactivate enzymes before dehydration. She worked jointly with scientists at Kentville, Nova Scotia, who provided her with the dehydrated vegetables for further analysis in Ottawa, Ontario.