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The frozen TV dinner is the result of decades of technological advancements and helped end outdated gender roles. Yeah, you read that right.
From frozen Thanksgiving dinners to scorching hot brownies, the TV dinner is the pinnacle of convenience food. But who came up with the idea of putting an entire frozen meal on a tray?
Food History is a new series from Mental Floss where we dive deep into the culinary stories that lead to the food on our plates. If you have an idea for a dish, cooking technique, or cuisine that you'd like us to explore in a future episode, tell us in the comments.
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Food History: TV Dinners | Mental Floss
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0:00
The first TV dinner may have been one of the smartest uses of Thanksgiving leftovers of all
0:04
time. According to former Swanson employee Jerry Thomas, the frozen food company had about 520,000
0:11
pounds of surplus turkey after the holiday in 1952. They stored the meat on refrigerated rail
0:16
cars while they desperately brainstormed ways to salvage it. The winning idea reportedly came from
0:21
Thomas. On a business trip, he noticed a fancy metal tray that airlines were just starting to use
0:26
to serve warm meals on flights. That's got him thinking, what if he brought the same technology to home kitchens
0:32
Two years later, Swanson's Thanksgiving dinner-in-a-box hit grocery stores. The meal consisted of turkey, gravy, buttered peas, sweet potatoes
0:40
and cornbread dressing in a segmented heat-proof tray. Hi, I'm Justin Dodd. Welcome to Food History
0:53
Jerry Thomas' account makes for a great story, but its legitimacy is debatable, to say the least
0:59
In the early 2000s, the Los Angeles Times reported that several insiders
1:02
including former Swanson employees and descendants of the company's founder, didn't agree with Thomas' version of events
1:09
Former employees said the company had eight stories of freezer space that could have held the turkeys
1:14
making refrigerated trains unnecessary. Thomas admitted that he may have misremembered some details
1:20
but he stood behind his basic narrative until his death in 2005. Turns out that the history of the
1:26
TV dinner isn't as simple as pressing a few buttons on the microwave. To get the story straight
1:31
let's jump back to the early 20th century. While inventions like cars and planes were changing how
1:35
people got around, high-tech appliances were transforming life inside the home. One of the
1:40
most important domestic innovations of this era was the refrigerator. Prior to the 1920s
1:46
these iceboxes were thought of as the cutting edge of home refrigeration
1:50
These wood cabinets were insulated, allowing them to keep large blocks of ice frozen for
1:54
long periods of time. The ice kept any food in the box chilled and preserved, which was revolutionary for households
2:01
Before iceboxes started becoming common in the mid-19th century, fresh foods had to be
2:06
pickled, cured, canned, or eaten before they went bad. There were earlier innovations in refrigeration, like the yakshals of ancient Persia, which
2:13
we covered in our episode on culinary inventions, but iceboxes were a game changer
2:18
That said, they weren't perfect. The ice blocks had to be replenished about once a
2:22
week and a drip dish that collected meltwater had to be emptied regularly. The refrigeration
2:27
industry really heated up—er, uh, cooled down—in the late 1920s. Companies like Frigidaire and Kelvinator note great nickname for my buddy Kelvin originally come out of the automobile industry and started working on home refrigeration In 1927 GE introduced its Monitor Top Fridge which combined a cool air compressor and a
2:48
cold box into one appliance. It wasn't the first such refrigerator GE even, passive-aggressively in my opinion, bragged
2:56
But with its simplicity of installation and quickly found popularity, you can think of
3:03
the monitor top fridge, occupying the same role in refrigeration that iPods did in the world of
3:08
MP3 players. Not the first, but a big deal nonetheless. Its success paved the way for
3:14
even more changes. In 1928, scientists from DuPont, General Motors, and Frigidaire worked together to
3:20
invent Freon, a trademark name for the refrigerants used to keep the units cool. Basically, your
3:25
standard refrigerator generates cold air by condensing a gas into a liquid, evaporating it
3:30
and repeat in the process. Older compressors used toxic gases like methyl chloride, which could
3:35
potentially leak and poison members of the household. Not cool. Well, I mean, yeah, technically
3:40
cool, but not, you know what I mean. Freon was the first refrigerant that was both non-toxic and
3:46
effective. It was also effective at depleting the Earth's ozone layer, incidentally, so the classic
3:50
formulation has since been replaced. 8% of American households owned a refrigerator at the start of
3:56
the 1930s. By 1944, that number rose to 85%. In the late 1940s, freezers were introduced to the
4:03
home, which allowed consumers to preserve their food even longer. The refrigeration revolution
4:08
did more than reduce food waste. Fridges and freezers were among several inventions often
4:13
credited with helping liberate women from the domestic sphere. Before the appliances went
4:17
mainstream, female heads of household had to devote many hours each week to either growing food
4:22
food, preserving it, or taking trips to the market to ensure their kitchens were well-stocked
4:27
All the time the fridge saved freed up women to pursue activities outside the home
4:32
According to a 2008 ysis, the number of employed married women jumped from 5% in 1900
4:38
to 51% in 1980. Numerous factors contributed to this cultural shift, but many experts cite new domestic
4:44
technology as a major catalyst. Swanson was one of many food companies that benefited from the refrigerated boom
4:51
In 1899, Swedish immigrant Carl Swanson got his start selling wholesale groceries in Omaha, Nebraska
4:57
The business transitioned to food processing in the 1920s, and Swanson became one of the
5:02
biggest names in the industry. Following Carl Swanson's death in 1949, his sons Gilbert C. and W. Clark took over the
5:09
business and they began experimenting with pre-made frozen dinners. Swanson's frozen chicken pot pie hit the freezer section in 1951, and it couldn't have
5:18
come at a better time The product took full advantage of the modern kitchen while meeting the customer growing desire to make a home meal without spending a ton of time and effort Three years later Swanson TV dinner took this concept to the next level
5:32
The idea to package frozen food in trays didn't come from Swanson, though
5:36
The first complete meal of this kind was produced by Maxson Food Systems, Inc. back in 1944
5:42
Like the TV dinner, Maxson's Stratoplates served different components of a meal in separate
5:46
compartments of the same heat-proof vessel. instead of people's homes, this product was consumed in airplanes. Maxson tried to commercialize
5:54
the product as sky plate cooked meat dinners, but they never took off. Pun could not be more
6:00
intended. It was just too expensive and too hard to manufacture. The challenge was taken over by
6:05
other manufacturers. Brothers Albert and Meyer Bernstein started selling frozen meals in aluminum
6:10
trays in 1949 to great success. They sold more than 2.5 million dinners in five years. So no
6:17
Swanson wasn't exactly a pioneer when it came to selling frozen foods in compartmented
6:21
trays, but the company did make a clever branding decision that set their product apart, adding
6:26
TV to the name. Around the same time that domestic appliances were freeing women from some of the responsibilities
6:31
of the kitchen, the television was compelling people to spend more time in their living rooms
6:37
Black and white TVs were adopted more quickly than any other device of the era
6:41
The number of sets in the U.S. grew 2,000-fold in just five years following World War II
6:46
By 1955, half of all homes in the country owned television. At this point, stations were only airing a few hours of new programming a day
6:54
and Americans made time to watch it. Unlike the quality content on the Mental Floss YouTube channel
7:01
these shows weren't available whenever the viewers were. Prime time was after school and work
7:07
aka the time traditionally spent in the kitchen and around the dining table. People still needed to eat, but their old schedule no longer fit into their new lifestyle
7:14
file. Enter Swanson's TV Dinner. The meal came in a special aluminum tray that could
7:19
go directly from the freezer, to the oven, to the table, to the trash. Like every other
7:25
part of the Swanson story, the details around its name are disputed. But Jerry Thomas claims
7:30
he chose the name because TVs were a hot household commodity, and he thought the dinners could
7:35
piggyback off the glow. It'd be like if a company today decided to market frozen TikTok burritos
7:40
and, oh god, now that I've said it, it's only a matter of time before it comes into being
7:45
I'm so sorry for what I've created. Whatever the origin of the name, TV dinners were a hit
7:50
In the product's first year, Swanson sold millions. Transforming the way Americans eat wasn't a piece of cake, though
7:56
or a piece of dangerously hot brownie. Cooking a starch meat sauce and vegetable together in the same tray posed numerous logistical challenges Betty Cronin was tasked with solving them She joined Swanson as a bacteriologist in 1953 and she was quickly promoted to Director of Product Development
8:13
She figured out the method for cooking multiple frozen components for the same length of time now known as synchronization
8:20
It involved cooking the various foods separately before freezing them and making sure the different portion sizes were just right
8:27
In addition to making the pre-cooked frozen food taste as good as possible, She also ensured it wouldn't make consumers sick
8:34
Like refrigerators, TV dinners were credited with reducing the time women spent in the kitchen
8:38
The food item was also similar in that it was generally more appreciated by women than men
8:44
In a 1999 interview, Jerry Thomas recalled receiving hate mail from men
8:48
who wanted their wives to make home-cooked meals like their mothers used to make
8:52
He told AP, Women got used to the idea of freedom that men always had
8:56
The idea that quick frozen dinners are inferior to fresh meals still persists today
9:02
Part of that comes from the myth that freezing food lowers its nutritional value
9:06
While it is true that food tends to be the most nutritious when it's at its freshest
9:10
there are still plenty of vitamins and minerals in your frozen meal. Veggies that were frozen right after they were harvested may be even more nutritious than produce
9:18
that's been sitting in your fridge for several days. Of course, pre-prepared frozen meals tend
9:22
to be higher in added fat, salt, and sugar than what you'd find at the farmer's market
9:27
So while the TV dinner may be the greatest convenience food of the last century
9:31
it didn't do much for the country's collective health. TV dinners underwent a few more innovations in the following decades. Desserts got their own tray
9:38
compartments in the 1960s, and in the 1980s, manufacturers introduced containers that were
9:43
safe from microwaves. You also won't see the name TV dinner on packages anymore. That's because the
9:49
the makers want consumers to eat the meal in any room at any time of day. Despite these changes
9:54
the concept of a full meal in one convenient partition tray hasn't changed that much in the
9:59
past 70 years. So next time you eat a Salisbury steak and a brownie that tastes a little like
10:04
green beans out of the same tray while watching The Bachelor, thank Jerry Thomas. Or maybe Gilbert
10:10
and Clark Swanson. According to Betty Cronin, Carl Swanson's sons were the ones who first had
10:15
the idea to sell a frozen meal in a tray. Today, the Library of Congress cites both Thomas and the
10:20
Swansons as inventors. No matter who we attribute the TV dinner to, we should remember that the
10:25
technology of the mid-20th century deserves a lot of the credit. And really, just wait five minutes
10:31
before biting into the brownie. It's not worth the pain. Our next episode is all about Jello salad
10:37
and yes, I am being forced to eat several varieties of nightmarish, jiggly, neon-colored
10:43
concoctions on camera
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