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It’s 1953, a week after Thanksgiving. Panic has set in at the Swanson Food Company. This is no small matter, because two hundred and sixty tons of leftover, unsold holiday turkeys are tightly packed in ten refrigerated railroad cars. The cheers of the festival are gone as the groaning engine struggles to pull the massive burden of the stiff, cold foul.
And as if that wasn’t dismay enough, more misery unfolds when Swanson learns that the cooling in the cars only works when the train is moving. What to do? There is little choice but to ride the train non-stop back and forth from Swanson headquarters in Nebraska to the distant east coast.
The little hair they have left is torn out by panicked executives, who watch their gigantic investment drip into a puddle of melted turkey juice.
But let’s pause in our story to go back eleven years to when the clever Clarence Birdseye invented a machine to freeze fish. It revolutionized food storage. Its first customers were the airlines when they started serving its passengers its frozen meals in 1945. With insane creativity, the airlines cleverly named their aerospace dinners with appropriate aerospace jargon: “Strato-Plates”.
Soon plans were underway to sell the same meals to retail supermarkets. However, this exciting idea was thwarted when the company founder suddenly died. Overnight the idea went as cold as he did. The idea languished for another eight years. Then came the toil of the laborious, trapped train of tempting turkey treats.
Without blinking an eyelid, a Swanson salesman, Gerry Thomas, came up with his brilliant idea of creating a meal of turkey, cornbread filling, sweet potatoes, and various holiday items. He explained that it would be wrapped in baking-proof aluminum trays that could be pushed into the oven. The trays would also serve as dinner plates that would be thrown away when finished. The idea was monumental. Housewives would soon love America to enjoy a non-working Thanksgiving dinner every day of the year!
The new convenience was a commercial triumph. In 1954, the first year of production, Swanson sold ten million meals to Americans. They threw caution to the wind and boldly called it “TV dinner”.
Shrewdly as it all came out, Swanson realized that millions of American women had entered the world of work. The same women were no longer home in time to cook elaborate dinners for their families. Like a heavenly blessing, Swanson stepped in with the solution. It’s no surprise to learn that there was an angry outcry from husbands complaining about the loss of their homemade meals, as well as (and I’m just guessing here) that apron sales had plummeted.
For many released housewives, dinner suddenly became a breeze. All they had to do was put the frozen meals in the oven and 25 minutes later their families were eating a delicious full course meal. And it wasn’t all; A mind-boggling bonus for your buck was not only having a Thanksgiving-style meal, but also – as the wording on the packaging suggested – indulging in the new national pastime: watching TV!
In 1950, only 9 percent of American households had a television. In 1955 that number rose to 64 percent. Five years later it was an unbelievable 87 percent! Swanson didn’t make a blow, capitalizing on the TV trend with ads showing sleek, modern women serving freshly baked meals to their glowing families. It didn’t matter that the food wasn’t exactly gourmet, it was the novelty, don’t you see?
Besides, where else can you get a piece of turkey, a piece of mashed potatoes ala sauce, a vegetable and a dessert for only 69 cents?
Then, to Swanson’s delight, dieters got on board; People who were relieved that their food portions were all measured out for them. Dinner, reinvented, was just too simple to be true.
Something was still missing. You see, most people were used to having dinner in their kitchen. From there it was uncomfortable to see the TV in the living room as a massive wall blocked the view. So the families began to carry their aluminum trays into the living room. Before they knew it, the dining table was out of date.
There was one problem, however. The flexible metal plates were red hot when they came out of the oven and too painful to sit on their knees. In addition, there was an effort to balance the pliable cans on the same knees as they cut their turkey slices. Sauce stains appeared on living room carpets across America. There had to be a better way.
Enter the unworthy TV compartment. Who doesn’t remember the rush of consumers rushing into stores to buy their own sets? In no time at all, there was no home without the small, foldable, rocking, wobbly metal tables.
Who cared how precariously they had to thread their long legs under the mini-tables and stay that way without moving a muscle so as not to catapult all the food across the room? Who cared if they had to sit with their knees taped together, which men had never done before? Who cared that those same cramped legs had to be rolled so carefully over and over so they could walk across the room to switch TV channels and adjust the volume between the three network options? Finally, and most importantly, who cares that the designs on the trays were decidedly cheesy when interior decorating women in the US suddenly ignored the conflict in their living room decor?
Everything that was dismissed as modern families now prepared dinner in the blink of an eye and ate it (with great care) at their own little individual tables in front of their snowy living room televisions. It was spacey, don’t you see? Cool American cats had reached the top of hip gastronomy.
Fast forward to now. Due to Covid-19 and the closure of many restaurants, frozen meals have become popular again. Efficiency-conscious Americans grab them in stacks. In one year alone, we spent almost 50 percent more on frozen ready meals. Granted, we’ve gone way beyond the TV dinner origins as many of the newest dishes are now high-end gourmet starters. It is predicted that increasing consumption will continue well beyond the pandemic.
I personally do not see myself following this trend. No matter how chic the current frozen dinners are, to me they still spread sliced questionable turkey nostalgia, served on wobbling tin TV trays.
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