Clarence Birdseye’s nickname was Bugs. A naturalist and adventurer from Brooklyn, New York, he lived for a time among the Inuit at the very tip of Labrador, Canada, inside the Arctic Circle. There, the fishermen’s catches froze quickly in extreme sub-zero temperatures, yet maintained their taste and texture when thawed. Clarence concluded that speed was the answer to keeping frozen food fresh, so he went back home and invented a flash-freezing machine. Back then, commercially prepared foods took a long time to freeze. When thawed, the food’s flavor and texture were reduced to bland, mushy slurry.
The Frozen TV Dinner: It Came. It Thawed. It Conquered
Packaged frozen foods had been around since 1930, but the frozen dinners of 1953 were limited to meals for the U.S. military and in-flight meals provided to American Airlines. These complete frozen dinners were heated in onboard ovens and served by stewardesses (period-correct).
Swanson Foods overbought turkeys for Thanksgiving 1953
Did I say overbought? As the legend goes, Swanson found themselves with ten refrigerated railroad cars (reefers, in the trade) full of frozen turkey carcasses, a bit more than half a million pounds. To make matters worse, cold-air compressors of that era were powered by the motion of the car’s wheels. When the car’s wheels stopped rolling, the chilling system lost power.
There was a movie about a bomb on a city bus
Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves had to keep the bus moving at 50 mph or it would blow up. Swanson had an even bigger problem. They had to keep those ten refrigerated railcars rolling or their surplus turkeys would rot. Can you even imagine the smell of 520,000 pounds of putrid decomposing turkey? Executives ordered trains to haul their turkeys back and forth, to and fro on trips to nowhere, just don’t ever stop,
Panicky executives wrung their hands, gnawed their fingernails, and pondered their dilemma
One of many origin stories says a salesman named Gerry Thomas suggested they package the frozen turkey in partitioned aluminum trays that could be heated in the oven. Making the best of a bad situation, Swanson added stuffing, sweet potatoes, peas, and gravy to make a full meal. No cranberry sauce, though.
The Swanson family says it was Clarence’s sons who came up with the idea
But then again, they would, wouldn’t they? After all, it wouldn’t be the first or last time that someone jumped a claim and took credit for someone else’s idea. A closer look showed that was an impossibility because the lads were too young to have any involvement in the company business.
Nice forecasting, fellas
Still smarting from the abysmally poor planning that left them with 520,000 surplus birds after Thanksgiving, a fidgety Swanson hoped to sell 5,000 frozen turkey tv dinners the first year. They sold 10 million, stunning the frozen food industry.
Companies jumped on the frozen pre-portioned and pre-packaged dinner-in-a-tray bandwagon
William Maxson Food Systems of Long Island used Birdseye’s technology to create its flash-frozen Sky-Plates for the airlines.
Frozen Dinners, Inc, sold more than 400,000 frozen dinners in their first year, all to grocery stores and all bearing the One-Eyed Eskimo label (period-correct on both counts).
Super-salesman Jack Fisher placed pre-frozen meals in aluminum trays and called them “Fridgi-Dinners.” He pitched them exclusively to bar and tavern owners who wanted to sell food to their drinking customers but didn’t want the expense of adding a kitchen or hiring cooks.
Freezer Queen’s line of frozen dinners crashed and burned when the Buffalo, New York Health Department found live roaches swimming in the huge gravy tank. The warehouse was demolished and a 23-story apartment tower was planned for the site but never built.
Even with flash-freezing, a problem remained
How can Swanson create frozen dinners so that after heating, every item in every compartment looked and tasted good, with the right texture and consistency, every time? Swanson executives assigned the task to bacteriologist Betty Cronin. For nearly a year, Betty tried everything on her friends and neighbors, getting so sick of those damn tv dinners that she refused to have any in her home.
Just like that, television went viral in the 1950s
Fewer than one American household in ten had a tv in 1950. Ten years later, it was nine out of ten.
Pictures and sounds sent through the air into a wooden box full of wires and vacuum tubes were nothing short of miraculous
Televisions were still so new that once people turned them on, they didn’t want to turn them off. Right on time, along came the portable folding tv tray. No longer did people have to talk to each other at the dinner table. Now they didn’t have to talk at all, just peel back the tinfoil and dig in.
Swanson may have removed the words TV Dinner from their package in 1962, but that’s still what many people call it
It reached the status of being a term that describes all packaged frozen meals, regardless of who makes it. Just like Kleenex, Xerox, and FedEx, with its hide-in-plain-sight arrow serve as generic descriptions of facial tissues, printed pages, and overnight delivery.
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*The History Channel came up with this great tv dinner headline. And yes, that’s President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Just-Say-No Nancy eating tv dinners on folding tray tables in the White House.
What can I take a closer look at for you?
My name is David and I wrote this article, along with more than 500 others on this site alone. Ever since I was a kid with an insatiable curiosity and a knack for learning, I’ve observed, analyzed, and made sense of hundreds of different subjects and topics. Today, in addition to writing, I help organizations solve difficult problems requiring imaginative solutions. For more on this, drop by davidallanvan.com.
Bonus
National TV Dinner Day is September 10th. Just for fun, pick up dinners from your grocer’s freezer. To properly observe the event, avoid gourmet, artisanal, and curated tv dinners. Go for the original frozen turkey dinner, which is now microwaveable and needs no oven.
Takeaway
Arguing over which tv dinners are best is as pointless as arguing over Which of the Seven Dwarfs Is the Tallest. If there’s any real difference between frozen processed foods, it’s a minuscule one at best. Institutional frozen foods have a place in school cafeterias, military bases, and prisons because they’re cheap and require no preparation other than microwaving, not because they’re healthy, fresh, and flavorful.
