How One Thing Can Change Everything
TV Dinners and the Transformation of How We Ate and Are
If you look at your calendar and looked up September 10th, you might notice a celebration of “Grandparents Day.” Or perhaps National Hug Your Hound Day. More importantly, it is also World Suicide Prevention Day. Often overlooked, however, is another monumental milestone in human civilization: National TV Dinner Day. For on September 10, 1953, the TV Dinner first hit stores and forever changed how we experienced the family dinner.
Looking back on everything, TV dinners might be the reason I’m not a vegetarian. Not that the TV dinners ever made me sick (to my knowledge) or weren’t enjoyable (minus the scalding apple pie and partially frozen mashed potatoes). In fact, my enjoyment of the TV dinner might have had nothing to do with their taste. It would be hard to argue that anything about how they tasted was memorable in a positive way. The idea of having a complete meal just for me was most compelling. Furthermore, I didn’t have to engage with my family while sitting around the table. I could be blissfully distracted by the people in the television box. They were more reliable after all, and to a large extent a better company. My shows never let me down (except for a few clunkers of episodes), and now I could break bread with them. Like a true friend.
The TV dinner was a product born at the advent of massive changes in American culture. The United States was largely untouched by World War II in terms of physical infrastructure and material damage to the continental United States (outside of Pearl Harbor and Dutch Harbor). Primed by increased industrial production and victory, the country was ready for cultural shifts of historical proportions. The 1950s was a time of increased prosperity for many and an expanding middle class. The GI Bill, union movements that increased pay (as well as limited work hours), and increased building in a post-war economy all made the home a more realistic option for millions.
Shortly after the opportunity to get a home, people had the chance to get a new technology called the television. While the family might hunker around the radio to listen to the Milton Berle Show, The Shadow Knows, You Bet Your Life, or Fibber McGee and Molly, that medium couldn’t compete with the images that were projected by cathode ray tubes. Ruining your eyes by sitting too close to it was a small price to pay for the magic that was presented to you.
Another set of fortuitous circumstances created the opportunity for the TV dinner to emerge. Frozen foods were nothing new in the 1950s. The ability to flash freeze food had been around for some time, invented by Clarence Birdseye in 1925. Interestingly, Birdseye was applying what he learned from the Canadian Inuit people who taught him how to flash-freeze fish. Birdseye took that technique to the next level by creating a double-belt flash-freezing process, through which “fleshy foods retained their original freshness, texture, and flavor.” Yum.
Even in 1947, entrepreneur Jack Fisher had the idea of distributing frozen meals as “Fridgi-Dinners” to bars and taverns so that customers could be fed without hiring cooks to do so. Also, as Aaron Randle of history.com notes:
Frozen dinners finally came to the direct consumer market in 1949 when brothers Albert and Meyer Bernstein founded Frozen Dinners Inc. under the One-Eyed Eskimo label and began selling the product exclusively in the Pittsburgh area. By 1950, the company had produced more than 400,000 dinners. By 1954, after forming the Quaker State Food Corporation and expanding distribution around the eastern U.S., it had sold more than 2 million pre-packaged frozen meals.
Destiny was slowly emerging for the TV Dinner. The right product at almost the right time and almost the right place. Ideas that don’t hit are not necessarily bad ideas, but perhaps ideas out of the proper context. Add the right ingredients, and innovation can take off.
Perhaps by an act of God in 1953, the company Swanson had a particular problem on their hands. They had surplus turkeys left after Thanksgiving, and no idea what to do with them. As one story goes,
[Marketer Gerry Thomas] proposed a metal tray perfectly sized to plate up a full evening meal and designed so it could comfortably sit atop a customer's lap while they watched TV: Something that was becoming an increasingly popular pastime during this era.
While there are various versions of who gets credit for the idea and name, the other hero in this story was Betty Cronin. She worked at Swanson as a bacteriologist and figured out how to reheat the meals so that everything cooked adequately, and people didn’t die eating them. Death can be, in many instances, a downward force on profits.
Swanson introduced the label TV Dinner, which you would have to say is one of the most genius things in marketing. Everyone has to eat! Now you can do what you have to do with what you want to do: watch TV. The combination of dinner and television was a winner. By the end of the 1950s, Americans were spending some half a billion dollars on these convenience foods each and every year.
The TV dinner changed how many Americans would come to spend family time. Rather than directly with one another, they now spent it with a intermediary. Questions of “How was your day?” or “What did you learn in school?” could be replaced by “Can you believe that?!” and “I wonder what is going to happen next!?”
In some ways, the TV dinner might be thought of as an instrument of women’s liberation. Much as Edward Bernays tried to sell cigarettes as “Freedom Torches” to get women to smoke more, we could have thought of TV dinners as “Emancipation Meals.”
Targeting harried women who worked outside the home—or just wanted a break from the daily grind of preparing family suppers—the meals were priced at 98 cents and bolstered with the guarantee of “dinner in 25 minutes.” (history.com)
We can think about the number of women (particularly white women) who entered the labor force during World War II’s industrial build up. Now that the war was over, there were many women who wanted to be back in the workplace. No longer could Mom spend hours preparing meals from scratch, only to have to spend more time cleaning the kitchen. With the advent of the TV dinner, Mom could pre-heat, cook, and serve something that appeared to be good for the family. As writer Ken Dowell noted, “About the best that could be said of them is that they allowed for the perception that you were getting a balanced meal.” It probably also assuaged some guilt that came with shirking her domestic duties.
Also, think about that beautiful increment of “25 minutes” for a moment. You could put it in the oven at the top of the hour when one show was starting, and it would be ready at the bottom of the hour just before another show began. It is as if God intended it that way. There is a magic in that number 25, similar to Pi or the Golden Rectangle. Sometimes math just works in a way that can’t be by accident, but rather by divine design.
It was not that the food was high quality. Any nutritional analysis of those meals would likely result in charges of child abuse. But if we as kids in the 1970s could survive constant second-hand smoke, riding in the back of a station wagon with no seat belt, and riding bikes on the street without helmets, we could survive a little trans-fat-laden partially hydrogenated oils. What didn’t kill us (and there was a lot that could have killed us), only mutated our DNA. We might as well be called Generation X-Men.
In terms of family dining, the microwave of course changed everything as well. I remember our first microwave. It was the size of a small safe, and about as heavy. I think we got it from Sears when Kenmore was a brand you could trust, or a brand at all for that matter. The instructions proclaimed that you could cook a turkey in it! (We never tried). The other thing it changed was removing the aluminum tray from the TV dinner. For me, that was part of the magic of the TV Dinner. That foil encasement that provided each item with its own space to be itself was a much better aesthetic than the black plastic that replaced it. However, aluminum and microwaves don’t play well together. Instead, we got plastic trays that never quite held the same wonder.
There is no doubt that the TV Dinner changed the family dinner and eating experience in ways both good and bad (okay, mostly bad). We know that certain kinds of food activate the release of dopamine in our brains, making us addicts in search of our next fix. Television can have the same effect of releasing those “feel good” chemicals. Put them together and you have an instant gratification machine that makes us want more.
TV Dinners hit all the elements of what makes for an experience. They were mundane, memorable, and metamorphic. They integrated into the rhythm of our daily lives through their low cost and convenience. They provided transformative elements to the routine experience of the family dinner. It made us talk to each other less, get more obese, watch more advertisements, and all the while feel more satisfied and happier. While perhaps they have lost some of their luster and magic (along with the aluminum), they have forever left their mark on our society and our lives.
Perhaps the band ZZ Top put our relationship with the magical meal best in their song TV Dinners:
TV dinners, there's nothin' else to eat
TV dinners, they really can't be beat
I like 'em frozen but you understand
I throw 'em in and wave 'em and I'm a brand-new man, oh yeahTV dinners, they're goin' to my head
TV dinners my skin is turnin' red
Twenty-year-old turkey in a thirty-year-old tin
I can't wait until tomorrow and thaw one out again, oh yeahTV dinners, I'm feelin' kinda rough
TV dinners, this one's kinda tough
I like the enchiladas and the teriyaki too
I even like the chicken if the sauce is not too blueAnd they're mine, all mine, oh yeah
And they sure are fine
Gotta have 'em, gimme somethin' now