November 24, 2022 • 53 mins
Hey, it's us, your pals Ben, Noel and Max from Ridiculous History. We figured the holidays can be stressful for everyone, and we're pretty sure you've heard the history of Thanksgiving countless times. So instead of telling you that story, we decided to celebrate by exploring the weird history of TV dinners and microwave meals -- none of which would exist if the food company Swanson hadn't accidentally found itself with 260 tons of leftover turkeys after Thanksgiving in 1953. So tune in; we hope it gives you a chuckle.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. If you are hearing this
the day it comes out here in these United States,
then happy Thanksgiving to you, super producer Max, to you
knowl and I guess to me it's weird to say
happy Thanksgiving to yourself. Gobble gobble, Max, Gobble gobble gobble,
(00:53):
who likes uh you guys, you guys turkey? Boys like
turkeys turkey. I have a complicated relationship with turkeys. They're
one of the few birds that I don't get on with,
one of the few animals so I don't get on with.
As a matter of fact, we talked about it both
on Stuff they want, you know, and Ridiculous History. There
can be they're aggressive, it's true, but also like, I
(01:13):
don't know, has anyone ever really attempted to have a
domesticated pet turkey a little leash perhaps with a little
collar on it. You know it's been done, you know,
someone's statistically likely, but seemingly a bad form. But yet somehow, Okay,
that's a slaughter. These these big beefy boys and populate
(01:35):
our Thanksgiving tables with them. Remember the whole of course,
you remember it still goes on, the whole pardoning of
the turkey thing. That's an interesting tradition, don't you think.
Are you guys ricking Morty fans? Yes? Yeah, Have you
guys seen the episode of Rick and Morty where Rick
turns himself into our Turkey so they can get a
pardon from the prest have Yeah, I've seen every episode. Yeah,
(01:55):
it's it's worth it, especially if you're a Rick and
Morty fan. That's the episode to revisit today. In fact,
we're we're friends with Dan Harmon. We've been on his
show Harmon Town, and he's come over to our show. Stuff.
They don't want you to know. That was a roller
coaster of a conversation and it went in unexpected places.
In that spirit, this episode, which is a holiday episode,
(02:17):
is not going to talk about some of the things
you might expect from a Thanksgiving episode of a history show.
We're not going to talk about, you know, turkey partning
too much because we we all know that story. You've
probably heard the history of Thanksgiving, either the real version
or the sanitized version countless times growing up in the States.
(02:39):
Instead we decided to look at this through the angle
of one of our favorite things in all of history. Food. Uh.
This is something that is close to you, regardless of
what you eat, where you live, or even if you
if you've never eaten turkey for some reason, this still
affects you. No, we're talking about TV dinners probablarly known
(03:03):
as microwave meals. Right, Yeah, I love that TV dinner.
I guess any dinner contectively to be consumed in front
of the TV. The idea here being it is self contained,
comes with its own you know, throwaway receptacle. Um. So
you know, you know, all you have to do is uh,
supply a fork, perhaps the knife if you if you
(03:24):
need to, and then you know, rinse and repeat and
enjoy your stories. Yeah. You don't really need any extra stuff,
don't need any condiments. I mean, you know, I personally
like to up a TV dinner a little bit, uh
add a little bit of extra spice, perhaps a little
Worcester sauce. I don't know who knows, but whatever it
might be. Um. But some people, this is literally the
thing they fear the most is having to overthink cooking
(03:47):
or meal prep. You know, so leave it to the professionals,
and oh, we know all TV dinners aren't created equal,
but it really did come down to kind of an
interesting backstory. These frozen, pre cooked, pre proportioned you know,
m R. Ease of consumer culture essentially meals ready to eat. Uh.
You know, a military thing, Benn. And you've collected some
(04:09):
of these in the past, haven't you. Yeah, yeah, I
have again. Uh for for the size of my pantry,
I have way too much food because I'm still an
eagle scout and feel like I have to be cartoonishly
prepared for things. So I have m R. Ease from France,
Russia and the US. I also, you know, I don't
(04:30):
have as many microwave meals as usual because I really
like to cook. I know what you do too, knowld.
And this is where our research associate for today, Max Williams,
decided to start off with a hot take by saying
cooking is dumb, sir, I take exception, though I respect
your right to disagree. That is the perspective of the
(04:54):
poor cook Smith. I would argue, no game, no game
in the kitchen. I mean sorry, I got a busy
life on like y'all, so I don't really have time
to cook. I'm out here being fancy, so you know
what I listen, you're I'm sorry, you're being fancy with
your microwave meals this hungry man. Yeah, you know, you
(05:18):
know the uh my personal favorite is you know, the
dinosaurs chicken nuggets. They're a bang for sure. They taste
better when they're shaped like things, and you can have
a little adventures with them. Put them in your mashed potatoes,
make a little volcano mountain. No. I like to do
a I like to do a recreation of the great
extinction of the dinosaurs, you know, by dipping some stuff,
and then I like to sort of throw them in
(05:38):
the air and then catch them with my mouth. I'm
an adult, I can vote, you know what I mean?
Something should have done. No. Part of the beauty of
being an adult as you can do whatever the hell
you want. You can play with your food on the regular. Uh.
And and we and we we take advantage of our
adult status in these ridiculous ways pretty regularly. But the
(05:58):
backstory that I was and aware of is that like
a lot of interesting advancements in technology and let's not
live freezing and uh in refrigeration is technology even in
its earliest days. It is a form of technology even
without electrical components. Oftentimes innovations come from mistakes UH that
(06:19):
then leads to solutions. Then you realize the mistake, or
when you use the thing wrong or you know, in malfunction,
it actually created a new and desired effect, such as
the case with the Swanson's UH Food Corporation. Yeah, this
is good. This is a beautiful point, and I'm glad
we're making it early on. The microwave itself is the
(06:42):
result of a mistake and accidental discovery. Percy Spencer was
a guy working for Raytheon back in the day, in
the nineteen forties, I think, and he realized a radar
set he was working on had melted a good bar,
a Mr. Good Bar candy bar he had in his pocket.
(07:03):
That mistake, that love of Mr Goodbar is what led
to the microwave. And years back I used to write
a show for how Stuff Works called Stuff of Genius,
kids show about inventors, and that's how I learned that
Clarence Bird's Eye was the pioneer for the freezing methods
you're talking about, Noll. If you look at it, the
(07:26):
groundwork for TV dinners. Really starts back in n when
Bird's Eye figures out this method for freezing fish. And
he learned this from Native people from First Nations folks
in Canada who had been preserving food due to the
hostile environment for thousands of years. And we know that
(07:48):
people have been eating frozen meat before in the United States,
but it wasn't really popular because it didn't taste that great.
You could definitely tell something had been frozen. They had
weird textures, they didn't taste as nice. Birds. I changed
that with flash freezing technology, yeah, you know, and none
(08:09):
of that freezer burn or weird kind of pockets of
inconsistent freezing. You know, it's all about the timing, right,
It's a bit flash freezing freezes everything the same temperature,
same time, all in one kind of like you know,
Caveman style ice block, right, and then therefore when it
when it defrosts or microwaves, everything theoretically reheats at the
(08:30):
same temperature. And as you know, sometimes there are microwave
meals that have instructions about stirring and then continuing to
microwave and all of that, and that's usually just to
encourage that even heating but this was absolutely revolutionary because
now these things were palatable, and it prevented some of
these issues that came along with slow freezing things like
(08:53):
meat and poultry, which would actually cause them to lose
their flavor and the texture would be weird too. Right, Yeah, exactly.
And there's a lot to Bird's Eye story. I think
we we we should spend some time on a bird's
eyel that might be a recognizable brand to a lot
of our fellow ridiculous historians today still around those pretty
the boiling bag corn and you know, whatever it might be.
(09:16):
Lots of frozen vegetables still come from the Bird's Eye Company. Yep, yep.
And Bird's Eye turns out as a Brooklyn cat. And
he's born in Brooklyn, uh And he was always interested
in the natural sciences. He went to Amherst College in
nineteen o six, where for two years he studied biology
until he ran out of money unfortunately, so he went
(09:38):
to the labor market. He works for the U. S
Department of Agriculture, and he travels around. He's in New Mexico,
he's in Arizona. In nineteen twelve, he makes it up
to Canada. He takes on a new profession. He becomes
a fur trader, and he does this, you know, on
and off for about let's say five years. And while
(09:58):
he's going around Labrador in Canada, he says, oh, look,
people freeze food in the winter because they can't get
fresh food during that season, So how do they fix it?
And when he sees what they've been doing, when he
sees what they've learned again over thousands of years, he says, huh,
maybe I can take these ancient techniques and apply them
(10:21):
to the modern day. So he gets back to the
States and he starts experimenting. This leads to him founding
General Seafoods Company in nineteen four and uh, I think
it's not too long after. It's when he starts selling
this stuff. And this is what makes the Bird's Eye
(10:42):
family fortune. His most successful thing is like big innovation
was that rapid freezing knoll where they take packaged food,
they have to refrigerated metal plates and they flash freeze it.
He didn't make the first frozen food sold in stores,
but his is so efficient and kept things so flavorful
(11:04):
that it clearly dominated the market, like right after it
came out. So is that proprietary technology ben like, at
this point, is this the only game in town, do
you think? Or is this something that is that can
then be kind of repurposed by other companies. That's a
good question. So he does get patents for this stuff.
But eventually in also in he sells his patents for
(11:29):
twenty two million dollars to Goldman Sacks in the and
the post them serial company. They are not a name
you would hear these days. It's not a story the
Jedi will tell you. But this eventually led to the
formation of General Foods. Do you say, post them serial company?
Pos t U M post them so? But didn't did
(11:52):
they shorten that to post? Eventually they did. It became
post consumer brands. That's what it is now, things like
gold and Crisp or Raisin Brand. They really, they really,
they really lean into the post logo on the boxes
of some of these Raisin Brand in particular, and the
just absolutely absurdly titled Grape Nuts which contains neither grape
(12:16):
nor nor nuts. Also, uh, I might make some enemies here, folks,
but since we're in a safe space and we're all friends,
I'll just say it. I don't like Raisin brand. You know,
when they're like two scoops. It's just like an extra
scoop of poop for me was too much already. Raisins
are failed grapes. Their grapes they dropped out, you know
(12:36):
what I mean. I agree they gave up on life. Man. Yeah,
my girlfriend really loves Raisin brand, But I am with
you that as a trash cereal, as is grape nuts
and shredded wheat. These are all legacy cereals, and I'm
sure there's a place for them and many people's pants.
Multimeal senior home centers, you know, that's the main market.
But do you remember O G shredded wheat? You guys,
(12:58):
it was just like it was huge giant blocks of
shreds of wheat, and then you know, many wheats became
more of the thing. But I think you could still
buy the ones that have four giant freaking bricks of
wheat shreds. Yeah, Max, what's on your mind? So? Um,
we're talking about all this like old school grows cereal
and like that's like all my daddy's he's obsessed with
(13:19):
this kind of stuff. And like I remember when the
pandemic was first taken off, there was I guess a
shortage of grape nuts, which I wouldn't have known. I
don't think y'all would have known. But we like a
group thread and my dad's like, yeah, it's really hard,
Like they're trying to charge me like thirty six dollars
for a box of grape nuts on Amazon, and it's like,
why don't you just not eat grape nuts? Like what
what would I do without grape nuts? It's like, eat
(13:41):
anything else save thirty six dollars a box is what
you would do? Uh. It actually says though on the
page on Post despite its name, grape nuts do not
contain grapes nor nuts. Legends state that the c W
Post believed glucose so what he referred to as grape
sugar formed during the baking process. Well, you can't win
(14:03):
them all. Uh. This this, and also let us know
what your favorite at least favorite cereals are. We probably
should do an episode on cereal in the future. But
but we're getting to the Thanksgiving part because this is
the story. Microwave dinners are the story of a series
of weird accidents and discoveries and mistakes. Just for the record,
(14:27):
this this this bird's eye stuff. These are not microwave dinners.
These are frozen you know, frozen foods, right, preserve frozen corn,
frozen vegetables, frozen meats, but not all put together into one,
one deal. Yeah, yeah, not yet. But we have to
know about that technology to understand what led to TV
dinners today. As we see, war drives a lot of
(14:51):
human innovation in addition to making so much tragedy and atrocity.
World War two accelerated medical technology. World War two accelerated
packaging technology, supply chain logistics, and it accelerated the popularity
of frozen food. People started acquiring the bird's eye process.
(15:14):
Folks like Maxim Food Systems Inc. In they used this
flash freezing technology to create frozen, prepackaged dinners. But they
were just for civilian air carriers and the military. They
had a cool name too. I like this name, strato
plates or sky plates. It's the meals of the future
(15:37):
of the air. You know, they should have called mashed
potatoes cloud potatoes, Like I can think of all these
different names. I love it. No, it's really smart. Good branding.
Unnecessary kind of because it's not really public facing. Certain
things a little bit wasted, but yeah, this is this
is essentially frozen m R E S. M R e's
by the way, you know, not to be the dead
(15:58):
horse here, but they are dry. They are not They
don't need to be heated, isn't that right? Pen Or
like they're they're freeze dried in some sense, or they
don't need to be they're like preserved in kind of
like an air tight packaging. But they're not frozen. Yeah,
they're vacuum sealed. They're not frozen, and they're supposed to
have a they they have a wide temperature tolerance. It
will impact how long they last. But if you have
(16:20):
them stored in a in a cool, dry place, they
can keep for a long time. For anybody who has,
let me put this diplomatically, been in a situation where
you ate m R e's for a while, you may
know the most popular urban legend about them, which is
that they can give you constipation. No comment either way,
(16:41):
but would love to hear your war stories about it. No,
you are correct. One thing you will need that n
m R A doesn't include is water. So a lot
of the drink packets are going to be powdered and
you add water to them, but you don't have to
heat this stuff to eat it, which can be key
if you're in a um an active situation, right probably
(17:03):
you know, we like a hot meal. There are certain meals.
I'm no stranger to eating cold leftovers, you know, usually
a little bit drunk in the middle of the night.
Not gonna lie, but they definitely have a different They
hit different than when they're warm e s. Humans tend
to like certain things that we expect to be hot
to be hot, unless we're talking cold pizza. Day after
(17:25):
pizza is really good and it's due to the chemical
reactions between the bread, the cheese and the tomato. God,
we're fun at parties. But so we've got the strato plates,
we've got the sky plates. And the interesting thing is
these playing This is almost like a marketing ploy by
the Maxim Company in a weird way because along with these,
(17:46):
you know, these meals, maxis and is also installing their
line of Whirlwind electric ovens, which is a precursor to
convection ovens. W. L. Maxon, you know, was was the
founder of this company, and this is sort of a
structor genius on his part to get these things to
get in with kind of the military, right this Unfortunately,
his plan to expand the strato plates idea to a larger,
(18:11):
more consumer facing audience died along with the man, but
it opened the door for others to jump into this
kind of burgeoning new, uh new food space. And we
remember Maxim's efforts because he did. He did place an
important brick in the pavement toward towards your grocery store today.
(18:34):
So there's this other guy named Jack Fisher, and he
also wants to get in the frozen food business, and
like Maxim before him, he wants to aim for a
specific demographic, a specific slice of customerhood. Customer two. We're
just making up words. It's fine, it's American English. Uh.
(18:55):
He has these things that are frozen meals. They're in
aluminum trays and he calls them frigie dinners like frigid
air dash dinner. And he said, look, I'm not gonna
sell these necessarily in grocery stores. I got a business
to business model, and my business sells exclusively to bars,
basically bars that not just every bar, bars that want
(19:20):
to feed hungry customers so they keep consuming booze, but
also bars that don't want to spend the scratch to
hire a cook or build a kitchen. So he's that's
what he's doing. You could call them lazy bars. Maybe
they just didn't have the real estate behind the bar
to have a kitchen. So he's selling these things, and
(19:41):
uh he meets with some success, but Frozen Dinners are
still not something you see in the average US household
because history is still waiting for one big, great mistake.
And this great mistake, folks, is all about Thanksgiving, and
it's all about turkeys. Turkey. Yuh talk to talk a
(20:05):
little turk. It's worth it. Let's get turky, gobble it up.
So yeah, this the Albert and Meyer Bernstein. Um, we're
two brothers who founded the Frozen Dinners Incorporated under a
label that I love because it is it's kind of
does didn't age well that I do. I do get
(20:25):
an image with the one eyed Eskimo. I imagine he
is winking in some just to some degree, probably sort
of like a big blocky logo cartoonish looking fellow. But yeah,
we we we uh, we can't really culturally co opt
things like that for the purposes of slinging our microwave
meals for the better, I would add. They began selling
(20:47):
a product in Pittsburgh. It's very regional in nineteen selling
these frozen dinners. By around nineteen fifty the company had
produced more than four hundred thousands of these meals, and
that is when they formed the Quaker State Food Corporation
and started to look into creating an expanded distribution network
(21:08):
around the east eastern part of the United States. By
then had it sold more than two million prepackaged frozen meals.
Has really taken off around that time. A company that
we reference to the top of the show, uh, a
Nebraska based company called ce A Swanson and Sons, which
(21:28):
is a you know, very popular food brand already known
for its frozen chicken and turkey uh and also chicken
pot pies. UM. They decided and were kind of the
impetus for taking this concept national because at this point
you have some kind of like little you know, factions,
little regional factions. They're really have their own territories. But
(21:52):
it was because again as a reference at the top
of the show, of a mistake, a very particularly bad
lead time mistake happening around the Thanksgiving holidays in nineteen
fifty three. Yeah, yeah, and a little bit of context
gobble gobble. Indeed, Max and a little bit of context here.
So the frozen food industry, as we've outlined, is already
(22:16):
really taking off, and part of that is due to
the demand of labor. In World War Two, a lot
of uh, you know, there was still very much a
glass ceiling for women right in the workforce, and when
more men were taken off to war, more women became
started working, right, and this limited the amount of time
(22:40):
they could spend preparing meals as they would have done
in decades prior. So after World War Two closes, there's
this post World War two economic boom. You know, for
some people, it's like the Golden years, right, two point
five kids, you could buy a car, everybody's buying a house.
Everybody has money, no one has time, right, at least
(23:00):
that's the rose colored, sanitized version of history. And so
Swanson is doing something a lot of food companies and
manufacturers in general have to do in the modern day.
They're gambling a little. They're taking their past sales estimates
and they're doing the math and they're saying, Okay, we're
gonna buy this many you know, of this many widgets
(23:23):
or this many gallons or tons of something. Right, And
in nine the Swanson's, they make them wrong move at
the casino of food manufacturing sales of turkeys for Thanksgiving,
our stupid low and all of a sudden, Swanson, which
(23:45):
is a powerful company, as you said, they find themselves
with no less than five hundred and twenty thousand pounds
on leftover turkey. Yeah, if you've ever dealt with leftover
turkey at a family Thanksgiving, you can amend imagine the
problem this could sink their company. This is a lot
of turkey, and you know, people might have turkey fatigue,
(24:07):
they might not want to all of a sudden buy
a bird, even if it's on a discount. Well, isn't
that funny? I mean, turkey really is kind of a
seasonal bird in terms of like you know, typically a
year round chicken is more popular, but turkey, I don't know,
because of marketing or history or tradition or whatever, typically
is something that you really buy and stock up on
(24:28):
around the holidays. So they miscalculated, like you said, grossly
and ended up with thousand pounds of frozen product that
will not last forever obviously, and also as a narrowing
window of interest, right in terms of like when this
bird is appropriate to serve. You know, I think turkey
(24:50):
is good. I like turkey stuff. I'll get like a
turkey pop pie or jerk turkey. You know, there's definitely
places here in Atlanta where you can get like really
good turkey meat loaf around, turkey in on the spaghetti.
I like the turkey leg at the Renaissance. That's awesome. Also,
I mean, you know, I think a lot of times
when people are anti turkey, it's because they haven't had
(25:13):
it properly cooked. It is a bird that can dry out,
and that's you know, that's the bane of many a
Thanksgiving gathering. But also health people who are into the
health food world love turkey, right, turkey bacon if you
don't eat pork, that kind of stuff. Turkey's often used
as alternatives. I had a turkey Philly one time, which
(25:34):
was really good. I still think about it. I had
a dream about it. That's how you know it's good.
Dream sandwiches. I love that. Take me there. But you know, again,
like this, this requires some innovation, right, so the company
essentially had to like think fast and and and basically
invent something that they could sell successfully to the American
(25:56):
public that would be year round seasonal, not a holiday themed,
and that would also keep they had they had an
expensive ticking clock too. This is like a gosh, this
(26:16):
is almost like a Mr. Show situation or a Christopher
Guest film. So they dropped the ball on or they
dropped the bird, I should say, on over buying turkey,
and they didn't want it to thaw and go bad.
So what they did instead was they got ten refrigerated
railway cars, kind of like the stuff you would see
(26:38):
on on on the rails today. And they knew the
refrigeration for these cars only worked when the train was moving,
so they shuttled trains back and forth, This is a
true story, from Nebraska to the East coast, just boom
to the East Coast, boom to Nebraska, just in a
desperate bid to an expensive bid to keep the stuff frozen.
(27:00):
All the executives were sitting there in the boardroom going on,
come on, come on, uh, let's not forget too that had, dude,
that couldn't have been an inexpensive property. Yeah, man, serious
ticking cloth. Uh. And then like again, sort of like
with the Scotch tape situation, you had kind of a
(27:20):
junior salesperson or like you know junior. Yeah, salesman, a
guy named Jerry Thomas who remembered seeing these like aluminum
trays in distribution warehouses that he visited in Pittsburgh. These
were the same kinds of trays that you see stacked
in those kind of racks like on airplanes for you know,
in all the old days of sort of like PanAm
(27:43):
early airline food kind of situations. And he just kind of,
you know, planted this seed with the Swanson execs and
what if we you know, package this all together with
like like a meal, you know, with complete with with
stuffing and peas and uh sweet potatoes and all that stuff. Yeah, yeah,
(28:03):
they did, and they did something smart. So remember we
talked about turkey fatigue. That's what I like to call it.
It's a real problem. You know, they knew it would
be the wrong move to try to say, hey, wasn't
the last Thanksgiving where you got stressed out with your family?
Wasn't that awesome? Don't you want to relive that? They
knew that was a dumb idea, So they tapped into
the zeitgeist of another invention sweeping the nation. Television. Uh
(28:29):
that same year they sold more than twenty five million
instances of this product by not calling it Whoops too
much Turkey. Instead, they called it TV dinners. For ninety
cents a package, you could get this thing that was like, now,
it was part of your TV viewing experience. Hey, honey,
(28:49):
you don't have to slave away in the kitchen. Sit
down with us and let's see what's on the quiz
broadcast or whatever. It's it's a it's a futurist concept, right,
which which was so is microwaves, and now we think
a microwave is sort of like a last resort. You know,
any microwave dinners are fine, but like they're you know,
not nearly as good as like a home cooked meal
or even like reheating leftovers on the stove or something about.
(29:10):
I mean, you know, it's come a long way. But
I would also say, Penn, you could probably credit this
with with single handedly creating the TV tray industry. Oh,
it definitely goes to that level. Now, there have been
people who were eating on trays by a radio or
something beforehand, but this but no, but something. Yeah, I
think you're onto something. And this origin story about our
(29:32):
guy Thomas is sometimes debated and sometimes people will say
you you should give a lot more credit to Thomas's bosses.
The company itself credits Gilbert and Clark Swanson with dreaming
up that iconic three part plate and the TV name.
(29:52):
And you know, you'll hear stories that swants that Gilbert
Swans in particular was inspired by an airline food tray
while flying to just Banker. But there's this other thing,
you know, there's so many things. There's an urban legend now, right.
There's the also the idea that Gilbert thought of the
name TV dinner because he had people over for a
party and everybody's watching the TV. But folks were balancing
(30:17):
the trays on their laps or balancing plates of food.
So you know, take it as you make. Someone at
Swanson came up with it. I tend to be a
fan of the underdog and the common man, so I'm
gonna go team Thomas on this. It just seems a
little convenient for the official Swanson company to say, oh,
are fearless leaders came up with it. But if that's
(30:38):
the truth, that's the truth. Thumbs down from the company
line company line line. H But but even just the
circumstances surrounding it or bonkers you know, the idea of
like the ticking clock, like you know, as as as
dull as the invention of TV dinners might sound as
the subject for like a biopic, I could see this
part being kind of tense. Yeah, I mean this is
(31:03):
like again, this is another great opportunity for Ridiculous History
Studios and the extended Ridiculous History Universe. We would make
an awesome, awesome feature on this, and we can say
that with certitude because we know there's more to the story.
So these are TV dinners, but as student listeners, you'll
(31:23):
notice the timeline of this stuff and the timeline of
the microwave they don't line up. The TV dinner makes
it into the American household. Before the microwave, what what
you needed to do was pop this in an oven
and wait twenty five minutes, which doesn't maybe sounds super
convenient for a lot of people these days. Right, you
(31:44):
can still see this as a preparation instruction on chicken
pot pies. Right, you can put it in the microwave
for what eight to twelve minutes or something or better
in the oven. It's always a thing like with a
crust like that that is essentially uncooked pastry. You know
what I mean. You want in the in the microwave,
(32:04):
it's gonna be soggy and not as good, or you
can put it in the oven for you know, thirty
something minutes, and a lot of people, no judgment. A
lot of people want to save the time and they
just settle for something that tastes a little less crispy.
I think it was this Smithsonian article that you found,
Max that had one of my favorite facts from Kovie
(32:26):
by a Colo who we've mentioned on the show before.
A brief history of the TV Dinner Covid points out
that some people were writing angry letters to Swanson because
TV Dinners got so popular. They were saying, Hey, Swanson brothers,
you know I can't even get a home cooked meals
(32:46):
in my house anymore. It's always always TV dinners. I'm
sick of the turkey or something like that. We're paraphrasing
by saying some people and not just saying men, right,
angry angry angry dudes. Maybe some proto in cells in
the basement. And no, we didn't mention that the the
(33:08):
packaging of these things was designed to look like many
television's A little tuning knobs uh so, I think that.
I think it's cool. Yeah. So they hit grocery stores
right September nine fifty three, huge success. By that same
time next year they have sold ten million units. The
(33:29):
year after that, they've sold twenty five million, and people
loved it. They also expanded, right, it wasn't always just Turkey.
After they saved themselves from the Great Turkey Crisis, they
they started going into Salisbury steak, pot roast things like that.
(33:50):
You know, I ate Salisbury steak as a kid, both
homemade and and TV dinners, and I remember really liking
it was quite young until I had my first actual steak,
and you know, it was like a meat of the
gods straw, the fool Situationally, I felt so built. Yeah,
(34:11):
Salisbury steak is kind of like it pales in comparison
to just the texture and the flavor of of of
a real piece of steak. But it's more like meat
low f Really, it's really kind of more of a
meat product. It's a pound of beef patty, Yeah, like
a mcribb or like hamburger in Japan. Muh so. But
the sauce is good, way, people like sauces. Sauces great.
(34:34):
Other companies, you know, similar to what happened when Bird's Eye,
Like we were saying other companies like Staffers and then Banquet,
Oh we forgot about Banquet. They got into the game.
This became a huge business for food manufacturers. It was
a synergistic effect too. It's like TV wanted to promote
this too, right, because of the association with their medium.
(34:58):
He started getting all these celebrity eat tie ins essentially,
and you know it being shielled on I Love Lucy
and gun Smoke and all that stuff in the same
way that now we have, you know, all these TV
and movie tie ins with like cereals and silly products
like that. Yeah. Yeah, And you know, you make an
excellent point there because think about it. If you're manufacturing TV,
(35:20):
so you're making programs for television, then you want people watching, right,
So now if you can sort of infiltrate their traditional
meal time and say, hey, instead of sitting around at
the kitchen table eating and talking about your day, tuning
into guns Smoke or I Love Lucy or what have you,
(35:41):
and eat TV dinners while you do it. This became
a symbiotic relationship between the two industries and a quite
successful one, because no one really could have predicted this.
Television was a massive hit and very quickly it didn't
take long to catch on. I want to shout out,
by the way, Filo Farnsworth another stuff. A genius guy,
(36:03):
Filo Farnsworth invinced the concept of television when he's like
fourteen as a farm boy. He's plowing across a field
line by line and he thinks, huh, what if I
could send images this way line bio line the way
that I'm plowing this field. That sounds crazy, but it's
true and it lets you know how far the mind
(36:23):
can wander. Would you have to do work like that?
So shout out to Filo. Okay, I yield my tipe. No,
it's fine, now, it's very very fascinating, and it's it's
it really really is that kind of outside of the
box thinking that that creates the most bizarre and incredible
innovations of humanity? Really, so I have a question for you,
(36:44):
uh and and new Bet in New Max, what credit
is due to the brainstorming under lane that happens upon
a genius idea and then the company takes it and
runs with it. You know, no, not you can leave
maybe morally, Let's say, like, is is he owed a
(37:05):
stake in the company? You know, is you know? I
mean that's I really am asking seriously, I'm not being
cynical about it. Like he you know, he claims this
guy he was given a thousand dollars in nineteen fifties bucks,
which would be probably more like a hundred thousand dollars
right today, roughly, I'm guessing. And a promotion, a relatively
(37:25):
vague promotion. But it's like, you know, it was it
was brainstorming time the guy opened his mouth. He had
an idea and then it was executed by the company
and they had the product to do it. Like, are
they stealing this guy's idea? Well? Is it parallel? Thinking?
Would somebody else have come up with it? Anyway? Like
what is a truly unique idea and what is owed
(37:46):
to the person that like spits it out into existence? Well,
I have some thoughts on that. First off, in any
large organization, Unfortunately, what tends to happen is if it's
a good idea, all of a sudden, everybody had some
sort of contribution, whether or not that's the case. And
it's an unfortunate reality of how self centered people can be.
(38:10):
Now as far as whether this is a unique innovation,
I think it's fair to point out that while while
our boy Mr Thomas may not have been the only
person to think of this thing, he was Swanson was
one of the few organizations that had five hundred and
twenty thousand pounds of turkey to bring to bear. Right,
(38:30):
So it's no longer just a conversation some you know,
we've got a lot of a lot of folks working
in the tech industry or consulting or engineers who are
fellow ridiculous historians. And often companies require you to sign
some sort of agreement that says anything made with company
equipment or on company time belongs to the company. So
(38:53):
you can run into stuff like that ethically, however, it's
just my opinion. Ethically, I am a huge believer in
giving people credit where it's due for what they have done.
I think it's incredibly important, increditively important. Oh so we're
gonna miss but uh, but it is a good question. No,
(39:14):
it is a good question. Well, let's just I I
think I'm with you on all of those points. I
just think, you know, in the heat of the moment,
it is interesting where you know, like someone doesn't have
the bargaining power, let's say, from their position, to ensure
that their idea pays them dividends for like the rest
of their life, you know, yeah, yeah, I mean, and
(39:36):
then I know, like so people who have pet peeves.
Everybody has a few pet peeves. People who have a
lot tend to be pretty chill about them. People who
have only a few tend to get a little zealous
about them. And uh, I know I'm preaching to acquire
here for a lot of us tuning in. But one
of my pet peeves, for instance, is hearing an idea
(39:58):
concept that I made hold back to me as though
it was not my idea in the first place. And
that is something you know, that's something that people encounter
in the corporate world all the time. So shout out
to everybody, I think on behalf of the showing say
the shout out to everybody who feels like you have
been in a situation where you come up with a
banger idea and all of a sudden your bosses say, hey,
(40:21):
I've got an idea. Oh it's like that high on
potent news sketch exact, you know, I mean, like it's
all about who said a lot. And this also happens
not to get on a soapbox here, but with sexism,
like with with with women, for example, maybe who have
an idea but they don't say it forcefully enough, or
it's or they're just not a man. And therefore when
(40:42):
a man repeats it, you know, or the boss, and
it makes it their own, then it gets the attention
that it maybe didn't get when somebody who maybe is
viewed in a company culture as less than um put
it out there. So yeah, but with this, oh, here's
a way we can segue back. So Filo Farnsworth weird story.
(41:04):
Speaking of credit, Filo Farnsworth only makes one appearance on
television and the entirety of his life. And he's on
this show where you have to guess why someone is
famous or what what makes them a notable figure. And
he was on this show called I've Got a Secret,
and they tried to guess his secret, and you know,
(41:27):
he answers these questions from this panel, and his secret
was I invented electric television. No one could guess it,
and so he won the game and his prize was
eighty dollars and a carton of Winston Cigarettes. Good job, Filo.
But uh, but that that happens in fifty seven, and
(41:50):
television sweeps the world before then. In nineteen fifty less
than ten percent of people had television sets, but by
five more than sixty four percent of US households had TVs,
by more than eighty seven percent. That's that's a rise
(42:11):
so precipitous that it outdoes the cellular phone. It's nearly
a hundred percent adoption, which is probably close to that today.
I mean, you know, I mean there's definitely you know,
obviously there can be a backlash against that, and there
are stuff course cord cutters, but even now, the TV
manufacturers have figured out how to you know, integrate TVs
into cable less homes, like with smart TVs and apps
(42:33):
and all of that stuff. So I would argue that
number probably is very close to the same today, if
not a little bit higher. Oh yeah, it's it's probably
a higher. I mean, you know, we're cord cutter generation
over here, so a lot of people, you might not
a lot of people are getting rid of cable. But
you probably do have a TV in your home for
games you like to play, or you have a connected
(42:54):
to a computer, right, or you could say you don't
need a television because your computer monotcher does all the
things you want a TV to do. Still still very
much the same thing. Swanson is, you know, not in
a vacuum. Here, Swanson has their finger on the pulse.
They saved themselves from the Great Turkey Crisis. They knew
a good thing when they saw it. So what do
(43:15):
they start making TV commercials? Commercials for TV dinners on TV?
How exhibit is that? So? So they kind of pimp
their TV dinner ride and they also get pressed from
celebrities like you alluded to earlier in old nineteen sixty
two talking to New Yorker, Barbara Streichs said says the
best fried chicken I know comes with a TV dinner
(43:38):
and that you couldn't write better copy than that, you
know what I mean? And she apparently told this of
her own volition to the New Yorker in nineteen sixty two.
Because at this point, this is probably this is innovative.
So it's almost chic to be like leaning into the
TV dinner craze at this point, as opposed to it
becoming kind of ghosh a bit later, right, It wasn't
(44:01):
looked at as uh, food for people who hated cooking,
or food for people who are somehow less successful. Right,
it was looked at as the food of the busy,
the early adopters, right, the movers and the shakers. And
now if we fast forward, we see that this stuff
(44:23):
just expanded, right, it diversified their through their microwave desserts
a plenty. In the sixties, Swanson starts making TV breakfast
TV lunch kind of things. Campbell's gets in the game,
of course in nine three. By this point they're Swanson's
parent company, and they introduce Hungry Man, which are you know,
(44:46):
larger meals aimed towards surprise hungry dudes. And then, you know,
in the seventies, we get it starts to kind of
go off the rails a little bit with like sort
of tastemaker kind of poorly placed taste maker attempts. Let's
just say by this one since take on Polynesian style dinner,
(45:06):
which is like completely not anything that would even resemble
food you might get in Polynesia. And critics take note
because now this really is kind of encroaching on you know,
fine foods and on like, you know, the idea of
fine dining. So you have a lot of like kind
of New York Times New Yorker types who are turning
(45:28):
their nose up at the thing now and now it
is kind of becoming more ghost and a little more like,
you know, the the the meal of of the tasteless consumer. Yeah,
because there's always a backlash in the world of arts
and culture. And this is something I used to talk
about at length with our old pal and felt ridiculous
(45:49):
historian Casey Pegram. There's this recursive logic, right, if something
gets too popular too quickly, there's going to be someone
who comes out as a contrarian, right, and they say,
this is uh, you know, the emperor has no clothes.
So of course, people like New York Times food critic
(46:09):
back in nineteen seventy seven would say TV dinners, you know,
they're basically too popular. They have there for people who
have no taste. And this cultural critique begins, this national conversation.
One newspaper out of Shrewsbury, New Jersey says, well, hey,
maybe it's maybe it's more about the value in the convenience.
(46:30):
Sure it's not a Michelin restaurant necessarily, but in what
other way, can I get a single serving of turkey,
a portion of dressing, and the potatoes, vegetable and dessert
for less than dollar for something like sixty nine cents.
That's a good point. Also, people who are on diets
liked it from what we read, Yeah, exactly. And then
you start getting things like lean cuisine and again I
(46:51):
don't know the exact history of that, but as an example,
or weight Watchers, because it is uh even today like
a lot of the really expensive subscription meal plan you know,
weight loss kind of like solutions are frozen dinners that
that you know, get shipped to you like in these
kind of refrigerated boxes or whatever. Um. So that makes sense,
(47:14):
the whole built in portion control just don't go for
the hungry man style. But it is actually only just
now through all of this that the biggest innovation of
all kind of comes nineteen eighties six when the Campbell's
Soup company invents the microwave safe tray. So up to
(47:34):
this point we've been you know, twenty minutes in the oven.
Now this is cutting down prep time for these things
to just you know, twelve minutes thirt less than that,
even depending on the size and the and the type
of of of dish. Yeah, this is where the TV
dinner becomes the microwave meal, and people are already nostalgic
(47:55):
for the TV dinner. There was one columnist who said
progress is one of full but I was still miss
those steaming creekly aluminum TV trees. Uh and uh. Now,
if you have been around for the past couple of years,
you know that there was a global pandemic, one that
(48:16):
continues today despite the news moving on to different stories.
It turns out that the COVID nineteen pandemic was huge
for frozen meals. People who didn't want to cook and
who would usually go to a restaurant or something found
that their favorite restaurants were closed to one degree or another.
So people were by nearly fifty more frozen meals in
(48:41):
April as compared to and Uh. Then you saw kind
of fancier stores like Williams Sonoma stock fancy gourmet TV dinners,
So we didn't even talk about that part. Now, micro
wave mules and TV dinners have also moved into the
world of like gourmet Upper Echelont and Whole Foods, Trader
(49:03):
Joe's type stuff. You can get it organic, you can
get a vegan, gluten free all sorts of neat cuisines
from around the world that taste pretty close in some
cases to the actual traditionally cooked versions. It's it's pretty neat. Also,
I didn't I I think I saw this of one
(49:25):
Atlanta restaurant over the past few years. They were offering
frozen versions of their restaurants or restaurant offerings for carry out. Yeah,
did you try any of those? No? But I mean
I have noticed more of that lately with like T
G I Fridays, you know, potato loaded potato skins and
(49:45):
PF Chang's, you know, but whatever, like orange chicken. But
usually I mean, if the if the chain restaurant dishes
even that good to begin with, the microwave version is
probably gonna pale in comparison. Yeah. Yeah, And in this
case we're talking to about, uh, maybe restaurants that aren't
chain restaurants. But I've figured out how to you know,
(50:07):
from some family meal. Yeah, that's cool, that's cool. Yeah, No,
I think that's neat. There's certainly, especially certain restaurants or
bakeries say that make like a really beloved lasagna or
like a really like like a family meal thing, and
you can get that frozen ready to freeze. That's great.
Casseroles such for soul food and now frozen meals are
(50:33):
here to stay. Uh. They're not all unhealthy. That's a
bit of a stereotype. They're not all super fancy, obviously,
but almost everybody has tried one and enjoyed it. They
are all kinds of options, and we owe it all.
(50:53):
We really do owe it all in part to Jerry
Thomas and his solution to a massive mistake by the
good folks over at Swanson. So thanks, what do you
say we that's started. That's our company line here. Thanks
to you, Jerry. Yeah, and all the Jerry's of the
world that don't get credit for their ideas. Yeah, go
(51:15):
eat some frozen turkey Swanson. So so I didn't even
talk about what that Swanson money did for right wing
punditry than you can google it yourself, though, google it yourself.
Well we yeah, we'll take you to the edge of
that rabbit hole or that turkey turkey roost, turkey hangout.
(51:39):
And I was thinking, since it's a holiday and we
might guys, we might be accompanying someone right now as
they're getting away from their family, or as they're like
washing dishes, or as they're cooking, and they just say, oh,
don't talk to me. I'm listening to something very important.
If you need a note from to your family from us,
let us know we got your back, and here are
(52:01):
some things to give you a laugh, some terrible jokes. Well,
what do you call a group of featherless turkeys? M
I don't know, Ben, what do you call a group
of featherless turkeys? I'm so glad you asked a cluster pluck? Uh? Okay, okay,
just one more, just one more, just one more here?
(52:22):
Why did the turkey cross the road to prove he
wasn't a chicken? Yeah? Classic classic format there, classic format.
So well you can also say because it was the
chickens day off. Yeah that's good. No, that's good. Any
judges will accept both. Yeah, this was a lot of fun.
We went long, but we again, we wanted to give
(52:42):
you some time. Uh if you if you need a
little escape for these holidays. I hope this finds you
well and in good health, good spirits. Thank you so
much as always for tuning in. We wish you the
happiest of thanksgivings to those who celebrate uh. And if
you don't, well, we just made some American customs sound
(53:04):
even weirder and I think you're okay with that. Yeah. Always,
that's what we do here in Pardiculous Sister Uh. We'll
see you next time, folks. For more podcasts for my
Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. If you are hearing this
the day it comes out here in these United States,
then happy Thanksgiving to you, super producer Max, to you
knowl and I guess to me it's weird to say
happy Thanksgiving to yourself. Gobble gobble, Max, Gobble gobble gobble,
(00:53):
who likes uh you guys, you guys turkey? Boys like
turkeys turkey. I have a complicated relationship with turkeys. They're
one of the few birds that I don't get on with,
one of the few animals so I don't get on with.
As a matter of fact, we talked about it both
on Stuff they want, you know, and Ridiculous History. There
can be they're aggressive, it's true, but also like, I
(01:13):
don't know, has anyone ever really attempted to have a
domesticated pet turkey a little leash perhaps with a little
collar on it. You know it's been done, you know,
someone's statistically likely, but seemingly a bad form. But yet somehow, Okay,
that's a slaughter. These these big beefy boys and populate
(01:35):
our Thanksgiving tables with them. Remember the whole of course,
you remember it still goes on, the whole pardoning of
the turkey thing. That's an interesting tradition, don't you think.
Are you guys ricking Morty fans? Yes? Yeah, Have you
guys seen the episode of Rick and Morty where Rick
turns himself into our Turkey so they can get a
pardon from the prest have Yeah, I've seen every episode. Yeah,
(01:55):
it's it's worth it, especially if you're a Rick and
Morty fan. That's the episode to revisit today. In fact,
we're we're friends with Dan Harmon. We've been on his
show Harmon Town, and he's come over to our show. Stuff.
They don't want you to know. That was a roller
coaster of a conversation and it went in unexpected places.
In that spirit, this episode, which is a holiday episode,
(02:17):
is not going to talk about some of the things
you might expect from a Thanksgiving episode of a history show.
We're not going to talk about, you know, turkey partning
too much because we we all know that story. You've
probably heard the history of Thanksgiving, either the real version
or the sanitized version countless times growing up in the States.
(02:39):
Instead we decided to look at this through the angle
of one of our favorite things in all of history. Food. Uh.
This is something that is close to you, regardless of
what you eat, where you live, or even if you
if you've never eaten turkey for some reason, this still
affects you. No, we're talking about TV dinners probablarly known
(03:03):
as microwave meals. Right, Yeah, I love that TV dinner.
I guess any dinner contectively to be consumed in front
of the TV. The idea here being it is self contained,
comes with its own you know, throwaway receptacle. Um. So
you know, you know, all you have to do is uh,
supply a fork, perhaps the knife if you if you
(03:24):
need to, and then you know, rinse and repeat and
enjoy your stories. Yeah. You don't really need any extra stuff,
don't need any condiments. I mean, you know, I personally
like to up a TV dinner a little bit, uh
add a little bit of extra spice, perhaps a little
Worcester sauce. I don't know who knows, but whatever it
might be. Um. But some people, this is literally the
thing they fear the most is having to overthink cooking
(03:47):
or meal prep. You know, so leave it to the professionals,
and oh, we know all TV dinners aren't created equal,
but it really did come down to kind of an
interesting backstory. These frozen, pre cooked, pre proportioned you know,
m R. Ease of consumer culture essentially meals ready to eat. Uh.
You know, a military thing, Benn. And you've collected some
(04:09):
of these in the past, haven't you. Yeah, yeah, I
have again. Uh for for the size of my pantry,
I have way too much food because I'm still an
eagle scout and feel like I have to be cartoonishly
prepared for things. So I have m R. Ease from France,
Russia and the US. I also, you know, I don't
(04:30):
have as many microwave meals as usual because I really
like to cook. I know what you do too, knowld.
And this is where our research associate for today, Max Williams,
decided to start off with a hot take by saying
cooking is dumb, sir, I take exception, though I respect
your right to disagree. That is the perspective of the
(04:54):
poor cook Smith. I would argue, no game, no game
in the kitchen. I mean sorry, I got a busy
life on like y'all, so I don't really have time
to cook. I'm out here being fancy, so you know
what I listen, you're I'm sorry, you're being fancy with
your microwave meals this hungry man. Yeah, you know, you
(05:18):
know the uh my personal favorite is you know, the
dinosaurs chicken nuggets. They're a bang for sure. They taste
better when they're shaped like things, and you can have
a little adventures with them. Put them in your mashed potatoes,
make a little volcano mountain. No. I like to do
a I like to do a recreation of the great
extinction of the dinosaurs, you know, by dipping some stuff,
and then I like to sort of throw them in
(05:38):
the air and then catch them with my mouth. I'm
an adult, I can vote, you know what I mean?
Something should have done. No. Part of the beauty of
being an adult as you can do whatever the hell
you want. You can play with your food on the regular. Uh.
And and we and we we take advantage of our
adult status in these ridiculous ways pretty regularly. But the
(05:58):
backstory that I was and aware of is that like
a lot of interesting advancements in technology and let's not
live freezing and uh in refrigeration is technology even in
its earliest days. It is a form of technology even
without electrical components. Oftentimes innovations come from mistakes UH that
(06:19):
then leads to solutions. Then you realize the mistake, or
when you use the thing wrong or you know, in malfunction,
it actually created a new and desired effect, such as
the case with the Swanson's UH Food Corporation. Yeah, this
is good. This is a beautiful point, and I'm glad
we're making it early on. The microwave itself is the
(06:42):
result of a mistake and accidental discovery. Percy Spencer was
a guy working for Raytheon back in the day, in
the nineteen forties, I think, and he realized a radar
set he was working on had melted a good bar,
a Mr. Good Bar candy bar he had in his pocket.
(07:03):
That mistake, that love of Mr Goodbar is what led
to the microwave. And years back I used to write
a show for how Stuff Works called Stuff of Genius,
kids show about inventors, and that's how I learned that
Clarence Bird's Eye was the pioneer for the freezing methods
you're talking about, Noll. If you look at it, the
(07:26):
groundwork for TV dinners. Really starts back in n when
Bird's Eye figures out this method for freezing fish. And
he learned this from Native people from First Nations folks
in Canada who had been preserving food due to the
hostile environment for thousands of years. And we know that
(07:48):
people have been eating frozen meat before in the United States,
but it wasn't really popular because it didn't taste that great.
You could definitely tell something had been frozen. They had
weird textures, they didn't taste as nice. Birds. I changed
that with flash freezing technology, yeah, you know, and none
(08:09):
of that freezer burn or weird kind of pockets of
inconsistent freezing. You know, it's all about the timing, right,
It's a bit flash freezing freezes everything the same temperature,
same time, all in one kind of like you know,
Caveman style ice block, right, and then therefore when it
when it defrosts or microwaves, everything theoretically reheats at the
(08:30):
same temperature. And as you know, sometimes there are microwave
meals that have instructions about stirring and then continuing to
microwave and all of that, and that's usually just to
encourage that even heating but this was absolutely revolutionary because
now these things were palatable, and it prevented some of
these issues that came along with slow freezing things like
(08:53):
meat and poultry, which would actually cause them to lose
their flavor and the texture would be weird too. Right, Yeah, exactly.
And there's a lot to Bird's Eye story. I think
we we we should spend some time on a bird's
eyel that might be a recognizable brand to a lot
of our fellow ridiculous historians today still around those pretty
the boiling bag corn and you know, whatever it might be.
(09:16):
Lots of frozen vegetables still come from the Bird's Eye Company. Yep, yep.
And Bird's Eye turns out as a Brooklyn cat. And
he's born in Brooklyn, uh And he was always interested
in the natural sciences. He went to Amherst College in
nineteen o six, where for two years he studied biology
until he ran out of money unfortunately, so he went
(09:38):
to the labor market. He works for the U. S
Department of Agriculture, and he travels around. He's in New Mexico,
he's in Arizona. In nineteen twelve, he makes it up
to Canada. He takes on a new profession. He becomes
a fur trader, and he does this, you know, on
and off for about let's say five years. And while
(09:58):
he's going around Labrador in Canada, he says, oh, look,
people freeze food in the winter because they can't get
fresh food during that season, So how do they fix it?
And when he sees what they've been doing, when he
sees what they've learned again over thousands of years, he says, huh,
maybe I can take these ancient techniques and apply them
(10:21):
to the modern day. So he gets back to the
States and he starts experimenting. This leads to him founding
General Seafoods Company in nineteen four and uh, I think
it's not too long after. It's when he starts selling
this stuff. And this is what makes the Bird's Eye
(10:42):
family fortune. His most successful thing is like big innovation
was that rapid freezing knoll where they take packaged food,
they have to refrigerated metal plates and they flash freeze it.
He didn't make the first frozen food sold in stores,
but his is so efficient and kept things so flavorful
(11:04):
that it clearly dominated the market, like right after it
came out. So is that proprietary technology ben like, at
this point, is this the only game in town, do
you think? Or is this something that is that can
then be kind of repurposed by other companies. That's a
good question. So he does get patents for this stuff.
But eventually in also in he sells his patents for
(11:29):
twenty two million dollars to Goldman Sacks in the and
the post them serial company. They are not a name
you would hear these days. It's not a story the
Jedi will tell you. But this eventually led to the
formation of General Foods. Do you say, post them serial company?
Pos t U M post them so? But didn't did
(11:52):
they shorten that to post? Eventually they did. It became
post consumer brands. That's what it is now, things like
gold and Crisp or Raisin Brand. They really, they really,
they really lean into the post logo on the boxes
of some of these Raisin Brand in particular, and the
just absolutely absurdly titled Grape Nuts which contains neither grape
(12:16):
nor nor nuts. Also, uh, I might make some enemies here, folks,
but since we're in a safe space and we're all friends,
I'll just say it. I don't like Raisin brand. You know,
when they're like two scoops. It's just like an extra
scoop of poop for me was too much already. Raisins
are failed grapes. Their grapes they dropped out, you know
(12:36):
what I mean. I agree they gave up on life. Man. Yeah,
my girlfriend really loves Raisin brand, But I am with
you that as a trash cereal, as is grape nuts
and shredded wheat. These are all legacy cereals, and I'm
sure there's a place for them and many people's pants.
Multimeal senior home centers, you know, that's the main market.
But do you remember O G shredded wheat? You guys,
(12:58):
it was just like it was huge giant blocks of
shreds of wheat, and then you know, many wheats became
more of the thing. But I think you could still
buy the ones that have four giant freaking bricks of
wheat shreds. Yeah, Max, what's on your mind? So? Um,
we're talking about all this like old school grows cereal
and like that's like all my daddy's he's obsessed with
(13:19):
this kind of stuff. And like I remember when the
pandemic was first taken off, there was I guess a
shortage of grape nuts, which I wouldn't have known. I
don't think y'all would have known. But we like a
group thread and my dad's like, yeah, it's really hard,
Like they're trying to charge me like thirty six dollars
for a box of grape nuts on Amazon, and it's like,
why don't you just not eat grape nuts? Like what
what would I do without grape nuts? It's like, eat
(13:41):
anything else save thirty six dollars a box is what
you would do? Uh. It actually says though on the
page on Post despite its name, grape nuts do not
contain grapes nor nuts. Legends state that the c W
Post believed glucose so what he referred to as grape
sugar formed during the baking process. Well, you can't win
(14:03):
them all. Uh. This this, and also let us know
what your favorite at least favorite cereals are. We probably
should do an episode on cereal in the future. But
but we're getting to the Thanksgiving part because this is
the story. Microwave dinners are the story of a series
of weird accidents and discoveries and mistakes. Just for the record,
(14:27):
this this this bird's eye stuff. These are not microwave dinners.
These are frozen you know, frozen foods, right, preserve frozen corn,
frozen vegetables, frozen meats, but not all put together into one,
one deal. Yeah, yeah, not yet. But we have to
know about that technology to understand what led to TV
dinners today. As we see, war drives a lot of
(14:51):
human innovation in addition to making so much tragedy and atrocity.
World War two accelerated medical technology. World War two accelerated
packaging technology, supply chain logistics, and it accelerated the popularity
of frozen food. People started acquiring the bird's eye process.
(15:14):
Folks like Maxim Food Systems Inc. In they used this
flash freezing technology to create frozen, prepackaged dinners. But they
were just for civilian air carriers and the military. They
had a cool name too. I like this name, strato
plates or sky plates. It's the meals of the future
(15:37):
of the air. You know, they should have called mashed
potatoes cloud potatoes, Like I can think of all these
different names. I love it. No, it's really smart. Good branding.
Unnecessary kind of because it's not really public facing. Certain
things a little bit wasted, but yeah, this is this
is essentially frozen m R E S. M R e's
by the way, you know, not to be the dead
(15:58):
horse here, but they are dry. They are not They
don't need to be heated, isn't that right? Pen Or
like they're they're freeze dried in some sense, or they
don't need to be they're like preserved in kind of
like an air tight packaging. But they're not frozen. Yeah,
they're vacuum sealed. They're not frozen, and they're supposed to
have a they they have a wide temperature tolerance. It
will impact how long they last. But if you have
(16:20):
them stored in a in a cool, dry place, they
can keep for a long time. For anybody who has,
let me put this diplomatically, been in a situation where
you ate m R e's for a while, you may
know the most popular urban legend about them, which is
that they can give you constipation. No comment either way,
(16:41):
but would love to hear your war stories about it. No,
you are correct. One thing you will need that n
m R A doesn't include is water. So a lot
of the drink packets are going to be powdered and
you add water to them, but you don't have to
heat this stuff to eat it, which can be key
if you're in a um an active situation, right probably
(17:03):
you know, we like a hot meal. There are certain meals.
I'm no stranger to eating cold leftovers, you know, usually
a little bit drunk in the middle of the night.
Not gonna lie, but they definitely have a different They
hit different than when they're warm e s. Humans tend
to like certain things that we expect to be hot
to be hot, unless we're talking cold pizza. Day after
(17:25):
pizza is really good and it's due to the chemical
reactions between the bread, the cheese and the tomato. God,
we're fun at parties. But so we've got the strato plates,
we've got the sky plates. And the interesting thing is
these playing This is almost like a marketing ploy by
the Maxim Company in a weird way because along with these,
(17:46):
you know, these meals, maxis and is also installing their
line of Whirlwind electric ovens, which is a precursor to
convection ovens. W. L. Maxon, you know, was was the
founder of this company, and this is sort of a
structor genius on his part to get these things to
get in with kind of the military, right this Unfortunately,
his plan to expand the strato plates idea to a larger,
(18:11):
more consumer facing audience died along with the man, but
it opened the door for others to jump into this
kind of burgeoning new, uh new food space. And we
remember Maxim's efforts because he did. He did place an
important brick in the pavement toward towards your grocery store today.
(18:34):
So there's this other guy named Jack Fisher, and he
also wants to get in the frozen food business, and
like Maxim before him, he wants to aim for a
specific demographic, a specific slice of customerhood. Customer two. We're
just making up words. It's fine, it's American English. Uh.
(18:55):
He has these things that are frozen meals. They're in
aluminum trays and he calls them frigie dinners like frigid
air dash dinner. And he said, look, I'm not gonna
sell these necessarily in grocery stores. I got a business
to business model, and my business sells exclusively to bars,
basically bars that not just every bar, bars that want
(19:20):
to feed hungry customers so they keep consuming booze, but
also bars that don't want to spend the scratch to
hire a cook or build a kitchen. So he's that's
what he's doing. You could call them lazy bars. Maybe
they just didn't have the real estate behind the bar
to have a kitchen. So he's selling these things, and
(19:41):
uh he meets with some success, but Frozen Dinners are
still not something you see in the average US household
because history is still waiting for one big, great mistake.
And this great mistake, folks, is all about Thanksgiving, and
it's all about turkeys. Turkey. Yuh talk to talk a
(20:05):
little turk. It's worth it. Let's get turky, gobble it up.
So yeah, this the Albert and Meyer Bernstein. Um, we're
two brothers who founded the Frozen Dinners Incorporated under a
label that I love because it is it's kind of
does didn't age well that I do. I do get
(20:25):
an image with the one eyed Eskimo. I imagine he
is winking in some just to some degree, probably sort
of like a big blocky logo cartoonish looking fellow. But yeah,
we we we uh, we can't really culturally co opt
things like that for the purposes of slinging our microwave
meals for the better, I would add. They began selling
(20:47):
a product in Pittsburgh. It's very regional in nineteen selling
these frozen dinners. By around nineteen fifty the company had
produced more than four hundred thousands of these meals, and
that is when they formed the Quaker State Food Corporation
and started to look into creating an expanded distribution network
(21:08):
around the east eastern part of the United States. By
then had it sold more than two million prepackaged frozen meals.
Has really taken off around that time. A company that
we reference to the top of the show, uh, a
Nebraska based company called ce A Swanson and Sons, which
(21:28):
is a you know, very popular food brand already known
for its frozen chicken and turkey uh and also chicken
pot pies. UM. They decided and were kind of the
impetus for taking this concept national because at this point
you have some kind of like little you know, factions,
little regional factions. They're really have their own territories. But
(21:52):
it was because again as a reference at the top
of the show, of a mistake, a very particularly bad
lead time mistake happening around the Thanksgiving holidays in nineteen
fifty three. Yeah, yeah, and a little bit of context
gobble gobble. Indeed, Max and a little bit of context here.
So the frozen food industry, as we've outlined, is already
(22:16):
really taking off, and part of that is due to
the demand of labor. In World War Two, a lot
of uh, you know, there was still very much a
glass ceiling for women right in the workforce, and when
more men were taken off to war, more women became
started working, right, and this limited the amount of time
(22:40):
they could spend preparing meals as they would have done
in decades prior. So after World War Two closes, there's
this post World War two economic boom. You know, for
some people, it's like the Golden years, right, two point
five kids, you could buy a car, everybody's buying a house.
Everybody has money, no one has time, right, at least
(23:00):
that's the rose colored, sanitized version of history. And so
Swanson is doing something a lot of food companies and
manufacturers in general have to do in the modern day.
They're gambling a little. They're taking their past sales estimates
and they're doing the math and they're saying, Okay, we're
gonna buy this many you know, of this many widgets
(23:23):
or this many gallons or tons of something. Right, And
in nine the Swanson's, they make them wrong move at
the casino of food manufacturing sales of turkeys for Thanksgiving,
our stupid low and all of a sudden, Swanson, which
(23:45):
is a powerful company, as you said, they find themselves
with no less than five hundred and twenty thousand pounds
on leftover turkey. Yeah, if you've ever dealt with leftover
turkey at a family Thanksgiving, you can amend imagine the
problem this could sink their company. This is a lot
of turkey, and you know, people might have turkey fatigue,
(24:07):
they might not want to all of a sudden buy
a bird, even if it's on a discount. Well, isn't
that funny? I mean, turkey really is kind of a
seasonal bird in terms of like you know, typically a
year round chicken is more popular, but turkey, I don't know,
because of marketing or history or tradition or whatever, typically
is something that you really buy and stock up on
(24:28):
around the holidays. So they miscalculated, like you said, grossly
and ended up with thousand pounds of frozen product that
will not last forever obviously, and also as a narrowing
window of interest, right in terms of like when this
bird is appropriate to serve. You know, I think turkey
(24:50):
is good. I like turkey stuff. I'll get like a
turkey pop pie or jerk turkey. You know, there's definitely
places here in Atlanta where you can get like really
good turkey meat loaf around, turkey in on the spaghetti.
I like the turkey leg at the Renaissance. That's awesome. Also,
I mean, you know, I think a lot of times
when people are anti turkey, it's because they haven't had
(25:13):
it properly cooked. It is a bird that can dry out,
and that's you know, that's the bane of many a
Thanksgiving gathering. But also health people who are into the
health food world love turkey, right, turkey bacon if you
don't eat pork, that kind of stuff. Turkey's often used
as alternatives. I had a turkey Philly one time, which
(25:34):
was really good. I still think about it. I had
a dream about it. That's how you know it's good.
Dream sandwiches. I love that. Take me there. But you know, again,
like this, this requires some innovation, right, so the company
essentially had to like think fast and and and basically
invent something that they could sell successfully to the American
(25:56):
public that would be year round seasonal, not a holiday themed,
and that would also keep they had they had an
expensive ticking clock too. This is like a gosh, this
(26:16):
is almost like a Mr. Show situation or a Christopher
Guest film. So they dropped the ball on or they
dropped the bird, I should say, on over buying turkey,
and they didn't want it to thaw and go bad.
So what they did instead was they got ten refrigerated
railway cars, kind of like the stuff you would see
(26:38):
on on on the rails today. And they knew the
refrigeration for these cars only worked when the train was moving,
so they shuttled trains back and forth, This is a
true story, from Nebraska to the East coast, just boom
to the East Coast, boom to Nebraska, just in a
desperate bid to an expensive bid to keep the stuff frozen.
(27:00):
All the executives were sitting there in the boardroom going on,
come on, come on, uh, let's not forget too that had, dude,
that couldn't have been an inexpensive property. Yeah, man, serious
ticking cloth. Uh. And then like again, sort of like
with the Scotch tape situation, you had kind of a
(27:20):
junior salesperson or like you know junior. Yeah, salesman, a
guy named Jerry Thomas who remembered seeing these like aluminum
trays in distribution warehouses that he visited in Pittsburgh. These
were the same kinds of trays that you see stacked
in those kind of racks like on airplanes for you know,
in all the old days of sort of like PanAm
(27:43):
early airline food kind of situations. And he just kind of,
you know, planted this seed with the Swanson execs and
what if we you know, package this all together with
like like a meal, you know, with complete with with
stuffing and peas and uh sweet potatoes and all that stuff. Yeah, yeah,
(28:03):
they did, and they did something smart. So remember we
talked about turkey fatigue. That's what I like to call it.
It's a real problem. You know, they knew it would
be the wrong move to try to say, hey, wasn't
the last Thanksgiving where you got stressed out with your family?
Wasn't that awesome? Don't you want to relive that? They
knew that was a dumb idea, So they tapped into
the zeitgeist of another invention sweeping the nation. Television. Uh
(28:29):
that same year they sold more than twenty five million
instances of this product by not calling it Whoops too
much Turkey. Instead, they called it TV dinners. For ninety
cents a package, you could get this thing that was like, now,
it was part of your TV viewing experience. Hey, honey,
(28:49):
you don't have to slave away in the kitchen. Sit
down with us and let's see what's on the quiz
broadcast or whatever. It's it's a it's a futurist concept, right,
which which was so is microwaves, and now we think
a microwave is sort of like a last resort. You know,
any microwave dinners are fine, but like they're you know,
not nearly as good as like a home cooked meal
or even like reheating leftovers on the stove or something about.
(29:10):
I mean, you know, it's come a long way. But
I would also say, Penn, you could probably credit this
with with single handedly creating the TV tray industry. Oh,
it definitely goes to that level. Now, there have been
people who were eating on trays by a radio or
something beforehand, but this but no, but something. Yeah, I
think you're onto something. And this origin story about our
(29:32):
guy Thomas is sometimes debated and sometimes people will say
you you should give a lot more credit to Thomas's bosses.
The company itself credits Gilbert and Clark Swanson with dreaming
up that iconic three part plate and the TV name.
(29:52):
And you know, you'll hear stories that swants that Gilbert
Swans in particular was inspired by an airline food tray
while flying to just Banker. But there's this other thing,
you know, there's so many things. There's an urban legend now, right.
There's the also the idea that Gilbert thought of the
name TV dinner because he had people over for a
party and everybody's watching the TV. But folks were balancing
(30:17):
the trays on their laps or balancing plates of food.
So you know, take it as you make. Someone at
Swanson came up with it. I tend to be a
fan of the underdog and the common man, so I'm
gonna go team Thomas on this. It just seems a
little convenient for the official Swanson company to say, oh,
are fearless leaders came up with it. But if that's
(30:38):
the truth, that's the truth. Thumbs down from the company
line company line line. H But but even just the
circumstances surrounding it or bonkers you know, the idea of
like the ticking clock, like you know, as as as
dull as the invention of TV dinners might sound as
the subject for like a biopic, I could see this
part being kind of tense. Yeah, I mean this is
(31:03):
like again, this is another great opportunity for Ridiculous History
Studios and the extended Ridiculous History Universe. We would make
an awesome, awesome feature on this, and we can say
that with certitude because we know there's more to the story.
So these are TV dinners, but as student listeners, you'll
(31:23):
notice the timeline of this stuff and the timeline of
the microwave they don't line up. The TV dinner makes
it into the American household. Before the microwave, what what
you needed to do was pop this in an oven
and wait twenty five minutes, which doesn't maybe sounds super
convenient for a lot of people these days. Right, you
(31:44):
can still see this as a preparation instruction on chicken
pot pies. Right, you can put it in the microwave
for what eight to twelve minutes or something or better
in the oven. It's always a thing like with a
crust like that that is essentially uncooked pastry. You know
what I mean. You want in the in the microwave,
(32:04):
it's gonna be soggy and not as good, or you
can put it in the oven for you know, thirty
something minutes, and a lot of people, no judgment. A
lot of people want to save the time and they
just settle for something that tastes a little less crispy.
I think it was this Smithsonian article that you found,
Max that had one of my favorite facts from Kovie
(32:26):
by a Colo who we've mentioned on the show before.
A brief history of the TV Dinner Covid points out
that some people were writing angry letters to Swanson because
TV Dinners got so popular. They were saying, Hey, Swanson brothers,
you know I can't even get a home cooked meals
(32:46):
in my house anymore. It's always always TV dinners. I'm
sick of the turkey or something like that. We're paraphrasing
by saying some people and not just saying men, right,
angry angry angry dudes. Maybe some proto in cells in
the basement. And no, we didn't mention that the the
(33:08):
packaging of these things was designed to look like many
television's A little tuning knobs uh so, I think that.
I think it's cool. Yeah. So they hit grocery stores
right September nine fifty three, huge success. By that same
time next year they have sold ten million units. The
(33:29):
year after that, they've sold twenty five million, and people
loved it. They also expanded, right, it wasn't always just Turkey.
After they saved themselves from the Great Turkey Crisis, they
they started going into Salisbury steak, pot roast things like that.
(33:50):
You know, I ate Salisbury steak as a kid, both
homemade and and TV dinners, and I remember really liking
it was quite young until I had my first actual steak,
and you know, it was like a meat of the
gods straw, the fool Situationally, I felt so built. Yeah,
(34:11):
Salisbury steak is kind of like it pales in comparison
to just the texture and the flavor of of of
a real piece of steak. But it's more like meat
low f Really, it's really kind of more of a
meat product. It's a pound of beef patty, Yeah, like
a mcribb or like hamburger in Japan. Muh so. But
the sauce is good, way, people like sauces. Sauces great.
(34:34):
Other companies, you know, similar to what happened when Bird's Eye,
Like we were saying other companies like Staffers and then Banquet,
Oh we forgot about Banquet. They got into the game.
This became a huge business for food manufacturers. It was
a synergistic effect too. It's like TV wanted to promote
this too, right, because of the association with their medium.
(34:58):
He started getting all these celebrity eat tie ins essentially,
and you know it being shielled on I Love Lucy
and gun Smoke and all that stuff in the same
way that now we have, you know, all these TV
and movie tie ins with like cereals and silly products
like that. Yeah. Yeah, And you know, you make an
excellent point there because think about it. If you're manufacturing TV,
(35:20):
so you're making programs for television, then you want people watching, right,
So now if you can sort of infiltrate their traditional
meal time and say, hey, instead of sitting around at
the kitchen table eating and talking about your day, tuning
into guns Smoke or I Love Lucy or what have you,
(35:41):
and eat TV dinners while you do it. This became
a symbiotic relationship between the two industries and a quite
successful one, because no one really could have predicted this.
Television was a massive hit and very quickly it didn't
take long to catch on. I want to shout out,
by the way, Filo Farnsworth another stuff. A genius guy,
(36:03):
Filo Farnsworth invinced the concept of television when he's like
fourteen as a farm boy. He's plowing across a field
line by line and he thinks, huh, what if I
could send images this way line bio line the way
that I'm plowing this field. That sounds crazy, but it's
true and it lets you know how far the mind
(36:23):
can wander. Would you have to do work like that?
So shout out to Filo. Okay, I yield my tipe. No,
it's fine, now, it's very very fascinating, and it's it's
it really really is that kind of outside of the
box thinking that that creates the most bizarre and incredible
innovations of humanity? Really, so I have a question for you,
(36:44):
uh and and new Bet in New Max, what credit
is due to the brainstorming under lane that happens upon
a genius idea and then the company takes it and
runs with it. You know, no, not you can leave
maybe morally, Let's say, like, is is he owed a
(37:05):
stake in the company? You know, is you know? I
mean that's I really am asking seriously, I'm not being
cynical about it. Like he you know, he claims this
guy he was given a thousand dollars in nineteen fifties bucks,
which would be probably more like a hundred thousand dollars
right today, roughly, I'm guessing. And a promotion, a relatively
(37:25):
vague promotion. But it's like, you know, it was it
was brainstorming time the guy opened his mouth. He had
an idea and then it was executed by the company
and they had the product to do it. Like, are
they stealing this guy's idea? Well? Is it parallel? Thinking?
Would somebody else have come up with it? Anyway? Like
what is a truly unique idea and what is owed
(37:46):
to the person that like spits it out into existence? Well,
I have some thoughts on that. First off, in any
large organization, Unfortunately, what tends to happen is if it's
a good idea, all of a sudden, everybody had some
sort of contribution, whether or not that's the case. And
it's an unfortunate reality of how self centered people can be.
(38:10):
Now as far as whether this is a unique innovation,
I think it's fair to point out that while while
our boy Mr Thomas may not have been the only
person to think of this thing, he was Swanson was
one of the few organizations that had five hundred and
twenty thousand pounds of turkey to bring to bear. Right,
(38:30):
So it's no longer just a conversation some you know,
we've got a lot of a lot of folks working
in the tech industry or consulting or engineers who are
fellow ridiculous historians. And often companies require you to sign
some sort of agreement that says anything made with company
equipment or on company time belongs to the company. So
(38:53):
you can run into stuff like that ethically, however, it's
just my opinion. Ethically, I am a huge believer in
giving people credit where it's due for what they have done.
I think it's incredibly important, increditively important. Oh so we're
gonna miss but uh, but it is a good question. No,
(39:14):
it is a good question. Well, let's just I I
think I'm with you on all of those points. I
just think, you know, in the heat of the moment,
it is interesting where you know, like someone doesn't have
the bargaining power, let's say, from their position, to ensure
that their idea pays them dividends for like the rest
of their life, you know, yeah, yeah, I mean, and
(39:36):
then I know, like so people who have pet peeves.
Everybody has a few pet peeves. People who have a
lot tend to be pretty chill about them. People who
have only a few tend to get a little zealous
about them. And uh, I know I'm preaching to acquire
here for a lot of us tuning in. But one
of my pet peeves, for instance, is hearing an idea
(39:58):
concept that I made hold back to me as though
it was not my idea in the first place. And
that is something you know, that's something that people encounter
in the corporate world all the time. So shout out
to everybody, I think on behalf of the showing say
the shout out to everybody who feels like you have
been in a situation where you come up with a
banger idea and all of a sudden your bosses say, hey,
(40:21):
I've got an idea. Oh it's like that high on
potent news sketch exact, you know, I mean, like it's
all about who said a lot. And this also happens
not to get on a soapbox here, but with sexism,
like with with with women, for example, maybe who have
an idea but they don't say it forcefully enough, or
it's or they're just not a man. And therefore when
(40:42):
a man repeats it, you know, or the boss, and
it makes it their own, then it gets the attention
that it maybe didn't get when somebody who maybe is
viewed in a company culture as less than um put
it out there. So yeah, but with this, oh, here's
a way we can segue back. So Filo Farnsworth weird story.
(41:04):
Speaking of credit, Filo Farnsworth only makes one appearance on
television and the entirety of his life. And he's on
this show where you have to guess why someone is
famous or what what makes them a notable figure. And
he was on this show called I've Got a Secret,
and they tried to guess his secret, and you know,
(41:27):
he answers these questions from this panel, and his secret
was I invented electric television. No one could guess it,
and so he won the game and his prize was
eighty dollars and a carton of Winston Cigarettes. Good job, Filo.
But uh, but that that happens in fifty seven, and
(41:50):
television sweeps the world before then. In nineteen fifty less
than ten percent of people had television sets, but by
five more than sixty four percent of US households had TVs,
by more than eighty seven percent. That's that's a rise
(42:11):
so precipitous that it outdoes the cellular phone. It's nearly
a hundred percent adoption, which is probably close to that today.
I mean, you know, I mean there's definitely you know,
obviously there can be a backlash against that, and there
are stuff course cord cutters, but even now, the TV
manufacturers have figured out how to you know, integrate TVs
into cable less homes, like with smart TVs and apps
(42:33):
and all of that stuff. So I would argue that
number probably is very close to the same today, if
not a little bit higher. Oh yeah, it's it's probably
a higher. I mean, you know, we're cord cutter generation
over here, so a lot of people, you might not
a lot of people are getting rid of cable. But
you probably do have a TV in your home for
games you like to play, or you have a connected
(42:54):
to a computer, right, or you could say you don't
need a television because your computer monotcher does all the
things you want a TV to do. Still still very
much the same thing. Swanson is, you know, not in
a vacuum. Here, Swanson has their finger on the pulse.
They saved themselves from the Great Turkey Crisis. They knew
a good thing when they saw it. So what do
(43:15):
they start making TV commercials? Commercials for TV dinners on TV?
How exhibit is that? So? So they kind of pimp
their TV dinner ride and they also get pressed from
celebrities like you alluded to earlier in old nineteen sixty
two talking to New Yorker, Barbara Streichs said says the
best fried chicken I know comes with a TV dinner
(43:38):
and that you couldn't write better copy than that, you
know what I mean? And she apparently told this of
her own volition to the New Yorker in nineteen sixty two.
Because at this point, this is probably this is innovative.
So it's almost chic to be like leaning into the
TV dinner craze at this point, as opposed to it
becoming kind of ghosh a bit later, right, It wasn't
(44:01):
looked at as uh, food for people who hated cooking,
or food for people who are somehow less successful. Right,
it was looked at as the food of the busy,
the early adopters, right, the movers and the shakers. And
now if we fast forward, we see that this stuff
(44:23):
just expanded, right, it diversified their through their microwave desserts
a plenty. In the sixties, Swanson starts making TV breakfast
TV lunch kind of things. Campbell's gets in the game,
of course in nine three. By this point they're Swanson's
parent company, and they introduce Hungry Man, which are you know,
(44:46):
larger meals aimed towards surprise hungry dudes. And then, you know,
in the seventies, we get it starts to kind of
go off the rails a little bit with like sort
of tastemaker kind of poorly placed taste maker attempts. Let's
just say by this one since take on Polynesian style dinner,
(45:06):
which is like completely not anything that would even resemble
food you might get in Polynesia. And critics take note
because now this really is kind of encroaching on you know,
fine foods and on like, you know, the idea of
fine dining. So you have a lot of like kind
of New York Times New Yorker types who are turning
(45:28):
their nose up at the thing now and now it
is kind of becoming more ghost and a little more like,
you know, the the the meal of of the tasteless consumer. Yeah,
because there's always a backlash in the world of arts
and culture. And this is something I used to talk
about at length with our old pal and felt ridiculous
(45:49):
historian Casey Pegram. There's this recursive logic, right, if something
gets too popular too quickly, there's going to be someone
who comes out as a contrarian, right, and they say,
this is uh, you know, the emperor has no clothes.
So of course, people like New York Times food critic
(46:09):
back in nineteen seventy seven would say TV dinners, you know,
they're basically too popular. They have there for people who
have no taste. And this cultural critique begins, this national conversation.
One newspaper out of Shrewsbury, New Jersey says, well, hey,
maybe it's maybe it's more about the value in the convenience.
(46:30):
Sure it's not a Michelin restaurant necessarily, but in what
other way, can I get a single serving of turkey,
a portion of dressing, and the potatoes, vegetable and dessert
for less than dollar for something like sixty nine cents.
That's a good point. Also, people who are on diets
liked it from what we read, Yeah, exactly. And then
you start getting things like lean cuisine and again I
(46:51):
don't know the exact history of that, but as an example,
or weight Watchers, because it is uh even today like
a lot of the really expensive subscription meal plan you know,
weight loss kind of like solutions are frozen dinners that
that you know, get shipped to you like in these
kind of refrigerated boxes or whatever. Um. So that makes sense,
(47:14):
the whole built in portion control just don't go for
the hungry man style. But it is actually only just
now through all of this that the biggest innovation of
all kind of comes nineteen eighties six when the Campbell's
Soup company invents the microwave safe tray. So up to
(47:34):
this point we've been you know, twenty minutes in the oven.
Now this is cutting down prep time for these things
to just you know, twelve minutes thirt less than that,
even depending on the size and the and the type
of of of dish. Yeah, this is where the TV
dinner becomes the microwave meal, and people are already nostalgic
(47:55):
for the TV dinner. There was one columnist who said
progress is one of full but I was still miss
those steaming creekly aluminum TV trees. Uh and uh. Now,
if you have been around for the past couple of years,
you know that there was a global pandemic, one that
(48:16):
continues today despite the news moving on to different stories.
It turns out that the COVID nineteen pandemic was huge
for frozen meals. People who didn't want to cook and
who would usually go to a restaurant or something found
that their favorite restaurants were closed to one degree or another.
So people were by nearly fifty more frozen meals in
(48:41):
April as compared to and Uh. Then you saw kind
of fancier stores like Williams Sonoma stock fancy gourmet TV dinners,
So we didn't even talk about that part. Now, micro
wave mules and TV dinners have also moved into the
world of like gourmet Upper Echelont and Whole Foods, Trader
(49:03):
Joe's type stuff. You can get it organic, you can
get a vegan, gluten free all sorts of neat cuisines
from around the world that taste pretty close in some
cases to the actual traditionally cooked versions. It's it's pretty neat. Also,
I didn't I I think I saw this of one
(49:25):
Atlanta restaurant over the past few years. They were offering
frozen versions of their restaurants or restaurant offerings for carry out. Yeah,
did you try any of those? No? But I mean
I have noticed more of that lately with like T
G I Fridays, you know, potato loaded potato skins and
(49:45):
PF Chang's, you know, but whatever, like orange chicken. But
usually I mean, if the if the chain restaurant dishes
even that good to begin with, the microwave version is
probably gonna pale in comparison. Yeah. Yeah, And in this
case we're talking to about, uh, maybe restaurants that aren't
chain restaurants. But I've figured out how to you know,
(50:07):
from some family meal. Yeah, that's cool, that's cool. Yeah, No,
I think that's neat. There's certainly, especially certain restaurants or
bakeries say that make like a really beloved lasagna or
like a really like like a family meal thing, and
you can get that frozen ready to freeze. That's great.
Casseroles such for soul food and now frozen meals are
(50:33):
here to stay. Uh. They're not all unhealthy. That's a
bit of a stereotype. They're not all super fancy, obviously,
but almost everybody has tried one and enjoyed it. They
are all kinds of options, and we owe it all.
(50:53):
We really do owe it all in part to Jerry
Thomas and his solution to a massive mistake by the
good folks over at Swanson. So thanks, what do you
say we that's started. That's our company line here. Thanks
to you, Jerry. Yeah, and all the Jerry's of the
world that don't get credit for their ideas. Yeah, go
(51:15):
eat some frozen turkey Swanson. So so I didn't even
talk about what that Swanson money did for right wing
punditry than you can google it yourself, though, google it yourself.
Well we yeah, we'll take you to the edge of
that rabbit hole or that turkey turkey roost, turkey hangout.
(51:39):
And I was thinking, since it's a holiday and we
might guys, we might be accompanying someone right now as
they're getting away from their family, or as they're like
washing dishes, or as they're cooking, and they just say, oh,
don't talk to me. I'm listening to something very important.
If you need a note from to your family from us,
let us know we got your back, and here are
(52:01):
some things to give you a laugh, some terrible jokes. Well,
what do you call a group of featherless turkeys? M
I don't know, Ben, what do you call a group
of featherless turkeys? I'm so glad you asked a cluster pluck? Uh? Okay, okay,
just one more, just one more, just one more here?
(52:22):
Why did the turkey cross the road to prove he
wasn't a chicken? Yeah? Classic classic format there, classic format.
So well you can also say because it was the
chickens day off. Yeah that's good. No, that's good. Any
judges will accept both. Yeah, this was a lot of fun.
We went long, but we again, we wanted to give
(52:42):
you some time. Uh if you if you need a
little escape for these holidays. I hope this finds you
well and in good health, good spirits. Thank you so
much as always for tuning in. We wish you the
happiest of thanksgivings to those who celebrate uh. And if
you don't, well, we just made some American customs sound
(53:04):
even weirder and I think you're okay with that. Yeah. Always,
that's what we do here in Pardiculous Sister Uh. We'll
see you next time, folks. For more podcasts for my
Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
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