The Epic Of The Tv Dinner
After Clarence Birdseye perfected his process to freeze fresh foods, it didn’t take long to come up with the idea of freezing cooked dishes as well. By the early 1930s General Foods had a few prepared items, such as Irish stew, on the market. Far-sighted executives envisioned complete frozen dinners, packaged in one carton, with family-size servings of several items in separate containers. According to Fortune , the idea was thought to be “in advance of the housewife’s imagination,” and whether or not this was true, the Depression and Birds Eye’s early lack of profitability discouraged such schemes.
Individual frozen meals on a tray first appeared in 1945, when Maxson Food Systems, Inc., introduced its “Strato-Plates” for military and civilian airplane passengers. Eighteen different three-part meals were available, most of them following a basic meat-vegetable-potato pattern. Quality was said to be decent, but unfortunately for Maxson, the end of the war sharply cut military sales, and civilian air travel did not yet offer a very large market. In any case, the ovens that reheated the meals were big and heavy, used too much power, kept breaking down, and did not work fast enough. Maxson left the business shortly after its founder’s death in 1947, never having tried to sell frozen dinners directly to consumers.
For most of the next decade, food technicians struggled to make frozen dinners edible. They learned to cover meats with gravy, for example, to keep them from drying out. Since reheated gravy tends to curdle, new thickeners had to be developed. Another problem was synchronization. Heat penetrates meat more slowly than other foods, so precooked vegetables tended to get overdone. The solution was to merely scald them before freezing and complete their cooking in the oven. Fried, mashed, and boiled potatoes did not reheat well, so some early producers turned to puffs, croquettes, and scalloped potatoes. Others ignored the wallpaper-paste texture, judging—correctly—that their customers, still mostly airlines and the military, would not care.
Mass marketing of frozen dinners began in 1955, when C. A. Swanson & Sons, recently acquired by the Campbell Soup Company, began a splashy advertising campaign on behalf of its “TV Dinners.” The idea behind the name—which seems immortal in a generic sense, though Swanson dropped it in the early 1970s—was that the dinners could be eaten while watching television; it was even more fitting because the trays were shaped like a television screen, and preparation was simple enough that housewives could watch their favorite shows instead of cooking (combining the two had not been a problem with radio).
Frozen dinners were an instant hit. In 1955 Swanson and others sold approximately 70 million; by 1960 sales were up to 214 million; and today Americans buy some two billion frozen dinners and entrées per year. Early versions stuck to the meat-vegetable-potato paradigm, omitting dessert on the theory that housewives preferred to select their own and thus retain at least a small role in planning and preparing meals. Housewives eventually proved less devoted to the domestic ideal than company executives, and a tiny square of cherry cobbler or brownie became standard.
Sales of frozen meals continue to thrive, but the 1950s idea of what constitutes a dinner is increasingly outdated. In these health-conscious times dessert can be a liability; on the other hand, diners are less likely to eat carrots or peas just because their mothers once made them do so. The four-section aluminum tray went out in 1986; today’s microwavable plastic serving dish, sometimes decorated to look like china, may hold just an entrée and one side dish, or even an entrée by itself. In a modern supermarket, traditional frozen dinners, with their old-fashioned packaging and stodgy menus, are relegated to an obscure corner of the freezer case, crowded out by the flashier and more expensive Lean Cuisine and Budget Gourmet. In 1990 manufacturers introduced 651 new frozen entrées and only 55 new frozen dinners.
The TV Dinner allowed real-life families to gather around a television set and watch TV families gathered around a dinner table. In so doing, it challenged the idea of Mom-prepared dinners that had dominated America’s eating habits for centuries. Today the very idea of discrete meals and mealtimes has come into question, and the old-fashioned four-part frozen dinner is looking more and more antique—a victim of the very changes it helped set in motion.
