What’s for dinner tonight? If you’re considering anything that comes from the freezer, you can thank Mary Engle Pennington. Pennington, “The Ice Lady,” was a pioneer in food preservation. As the population of the United States shifted from the countryside into the city in the early 20th century, people began turning to grocery stores for their entire food supplies. The lure of the Industrial Age left families without the relative ease and safety of food they once had in their backyard farms. But there were no standards for safe food handling or storage at the time, and as a result, many frozen or refrigerated foods were rightfully deemed unsafe. Among other issues, people complained their foods arrived to their grocer spoiled, dried out and even moldy. Hundreds died and thousands became sick every year after consuming contaminated foods — particularly eggs, milk, fish and poultry. Pennington was a key scientist in the passage of the landmark…