The first TV dinner may have been one of the smartest uses of Thanksgiving leftovers
of all time. According to former Swanson employee Gerry Thomas, the frozen food
company had about 520,000 pounds of surplus turkey after the holiday in 1952. They stored
the meat on refrigerated rail cars while they desperately brainstormed ways to salvage it.
The winning idea reportedly came from Thomas. On a business trip, he noticed a fancy metal
tray that airlines were just starting to use to serve warm meals on flights. This
got him thinking—what if he brought the same technology to home kitchens? Two years later,
Swanson’s Thanksgiving-dinner-in-a-box hit grocery stores. The meal consisted of turkey,
gravy, buttered peas, sweet potatoes, and cornbread dressing in a segmented, heat-proof tray.
Hi, I’m Justin Dodd. Welcome to Food History. Gerry Thomas’s account makes for a great story,
but its legitimacy is debatable, to say the least. In the early 2000s, The Los Angeles Times
reported that several insiders, including former Swanson employees and descendants of the company’s
founder, didn’t agree with Thomas’s version of events. Former employees said the company had
eight stories of freezer space that could have held the turkeys, making refrigerated trains
unnecessary. Thomas admitted that he may have misremembered some details, but he stood behind
his basic narrative until his death in 2005. It turns out the history of the TV dinner isn’t as
simple as pressing a few buttons on a microwave. To get the story straight, let’s jump back to the
early 20th century. While inventions like cars and planes were changing how people got around,
high-tech appliances were transforming life inside the home. One of the most important domestic
innovations of this era was the refrigerator. Prior to the 1920s, ice boxes were thought of as
the cutting-edge of home refrigeration. These wood cabinets were insulated, allowing them to keep
large blocks of ice frozen for long periods of time. The ice kept any food in the box chilled and
preserved, which was revolutionary for households. Before ice boxes started becoming common in the
mid-19th century, fresh foods had to be pickled, cured, canned, or eaten before they went bad.
There were earlier innovations in refrigeration, like the yakhchāls of ancient Persia,
which we covered in our episode on culinary inventions—but iceboxes were a game-changer.
That said, they weren't perfect. The ice blocks had to be replenished about once a week,
and a drip dish that collected melt water had to be emptied
regularly. The refrigeration industry really heated up—or, um, cooled down—in the late 1920s.
Companies like Frigidaire and Kelvinator (sidenote: great nickname for my buddy Kelvin)
had 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 cold
box into one appliance. It wasn’t the first such refrigerator; GE even (passive-aggressively,
in my opinion) bragged, “We did not … go into production until the research had been
finished.” But with its simplicity of installation and quickly-found popularity,
you can think of the monitor-top fridge occupying the same role in refrigeration that iPods did in
the world of mp3 players: not the first in, but a big deal, nonetheless. Its success paved the way
for even more changes. In 1928, scientists from DuPont, General Motors, and Frigidaire worked
together to invent Freon, a trademarked name for the refrigerants used to keep the units cool.
Basically, your standard refrigerator generates cold air by condensing a gas into a liquid,
evaporating it, and repeating the process. Older compressors used toxic gases like methyl chloride,
which could potentially leak and poison members of the household. Not cool. Well,
OK, technically, cool, but not—you know what I mean.
Freon was the first refrigerant that was both nontoxic and effective.
(It was also effective at depleting the earth’s ozone layer, incidentally, so the
classic formulation has since been replaced.) Eight percent of American households owned a
refrigerator at the start of the 1930s. By 1944, that number rose to 85 percent.
In the late 1940s, freezers were introduced to the home, which allowed consumers
to preserve their food even longer. The refrigeration revolution did more
than reduce food waste. Fridges and freezers were among several inventions often credited
with helping liberate women from the domestic sphere. Before the appliances went mainstream,
female heads of household had to devote many hours each week to either growing food,
preserving it, or taking trips to the market to ensure their kitchens were well-stocked.
All the time the fridge saved freed up women to pursue activities outside the home. According
to a 2008 analysis, the number of employed married women jumped from five percent in 1900
to 51 percent in 1980. Numerous factors contributed to this cultural shift,
but many experts cite new domestic technology as a major catalyst.
Swanson was one of many food companies that benefited from the refrigeration boom.
In 1899, Swedish immigrant Carl Swanson got his start selling wholesale groceries in Omaha,
Nebraska. The business transitioned to food processing in the 1920s, and Swanson became one of
the biggest names in the industry. Following Carl Swanson’s death in 1949, his sons Gilbert C. and
W. Clarke took over the 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 come at a better time. The product took full advantage of the modern kitchen
while meeting the customer’s growing desire to make a home cooked meal without spending a ton
of time and effort. Three years later, Swanson’s TV dinner took this concept to the next level.
The idea to package frozen food in trays didn't come from Swanson, though. The first complete
meal of this kind was produced by Maxson Food Systems, Inc. back in 1944. Like the TV dinner,
Maxson's Strato-Plates served different components of a meal in separate compartments of the same
heat-proof vessel. But instead of people's homes, this product was consumed in airplanes. Maxson
tried to commercialize the product as “‘Sky-Plate’ cooked meat dinners,” but they never took off (pun
could not be more intended). It was just too expensive and too hard to manufacture.
The challenge was taken over by other manufacturers. Brothers Albert and Meyer Bernstein
started selling frozen meals in aluminum trays in 1949, to great success: They sold more than
2.5 million dinners in five years. So no, Swanson wasn’t exactly a pioneer when it came to selling
frozen food in compartmented trays, but the company did make a clever branding decision that
set their product apart: adding TV to the name. Around the same time that domestic appliances were
freeing women from some of the responsibilities of the kitchen, the television was compelling
people to spend more time in their living rooms. Black-and-white TVs were adopted more quickly
than any other device of the era. The number of sets in the U.S. grew 2000-fold in just
five years following World War II. By 1955, half of all homes in the country owned a television.
At this point, stations were only airing a few hours of new programming a day, and Americans
made time to watch it. Unlike the quality content on the Mental Floss YouTube channel,
these shows weren’t available whenever the viewers were. Primetime was after school
and work—a.k.a. 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.
Enter Swanson’s TV dinner. The meal came in a special aluminum tray that could go directly
from the freezer to the oven to the table to the trash. Like every other part of the Swanson story,
the details around its name are disputed, but Gerry Thomas claims he chose the name because TVs
were a hot household commodity, and he thought the dinners could piggy-back off the glow.
It’d be like if a company today decided to market frozen TikTok burritos,
and oh god, now that I’ve said it it’s only a matter of time before it comes into being.
I'm so sorry for what I've created.
Whatever the origin of the name, TV dinners were a hit: In the product’s
first year, Swanson sold millions. Transforming the way Americans eat
wasn’t a piece of cake, though—or a piece of frighteningly 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.
She figured out the method for cooking multiple frozen components for the same length of time
now known as synchronization. It involved cooking the various foods separately before freezing them
and making sure the different portion sizes were just right. In addition to making the precooked
frozen food taste as good as possible, she also ensured it wouldn’t make consumers sick.
Like refrigerators, TV dinners were credited with reducing the time women spent in the kitchen.
The food item was also similar in that it was generally more appreciated by women
than men. In a 1999 interview, Gerry Thomas recalled receiving hate mail from men who wanted
their wives to make homecooked meals like their mothers used to make. He told AP, “Women got used
to the idea of freedom that men always had.” The idea that quick frozen dinners are
inferior to fresh meals still persists today. Part of that comes from the myth that freezing
food lowers its nutritional value. While it is true that food tends to be most nutritious when
it's at its freshest, 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 that's been sitting in your fridge for several days. Of course, pre-prepared frozen
meals tend to be higher in added fat, salt, and sugar than what you'd find at the farmer's market.
So while the TV dinner may be the greatest convenience food of the last century, 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 compartments in the 1960s,
and in the 1980s, manufacturers introduced containers that were safe for microwaves.
You also won’t see the name “TV dinner” on packages any more. That’s because the makers
want consumers to eat the meal in any room at any time of day. Despite these changes, the concept
of a full meal in one convenient, partitioned tray hasn’t changed much in the past 70 years.
So next time you eat a Salisbury steak and a brownie that tastes a little like green
beans out of the same tray while watching The Bachelor, thank Gerry Thomas. Or maybe
Gilbert and Clarke Swanson. According to Betty Cronin, Carl Swanson’s sons were the ones who
first had the idea to sell a frozen meal in a tray. Today, the Library of Congress cites
both Thomas and the Swansons as inventors. No matter who we attribute the TV dinner to,
we should remember that the technology of the mid-20th century deserves a lot of the credit.
And, really, wait five minutes before biting into that brownie. It’s not worth the pain.
Our next episode is all about jello salad. And yes, I am being forced to eat
several varieties of nightmarish, jiggly, neon-colored concoctions on camera. It’s
gonna be… great. Make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss it, thanks for watching.