The Surprising Origin of TV Dinners: Too Many Thanksgiving Turkeys

Necessity is the mother of invention.

 It's been years since I've cooked a whole turkey. Back in the day when I felt obligated to because stores were practically giving them away this time of year, I always looked for the smallest one I could find because I did not want to have turkey leftovers haunting me for days afterwards.

It was just this kind of problem at scale -- think hundreds of tons rather than a mere couple of pounds of excess turkeys --  that led to a new solution in food sales and dinner prep: the frozen TV dinner that was born in 1953.

As per the account that Owen Edwards wrote the Smithsonian Magazine twenty years ago, Swanson's overestimating how many frozen turkeys would be purchased for Thanksgiving that year led to the company finding itself in possession of 10 refrigerated railroad cars stuffed with those bird. That amounted to 260 tons of poultry that needed to be uploaded on a public that had already felt it had done its duty as far as formal carving and feasting. 

Some innovative thinking turned one man's unwanted turkey into a tantalizing offering packaged for convenience. Taking a page from the meals packaged for airlines, Gerry Thomas, a salesman at Swanson, had the birds cooked, carved, and distributed to the accompaniment of  gravy, peas, and sweet potatoes,  among 5,000 aluminum trays.

 An army of women carried out the distribution for these pre-packaged portions that promised other women they could simply pop a tray into the oven (this was before microwaves were a household item) to heat up a meal that would be ready in minutes. The cost was 98 cents.

While that sounds incredibly cheap to us, you have to bear in mind that with the rate of inflation, 98 cents in 1953 had the purchasing power of over $11 in 2024.  Perhaps the steep price is what made them not altogether confident that this TV dinners would sell well. But they did. In fact, in 1954, sales of the turkey dinners hit 10 million, turning the apparent fiasco of 260 tons of excess turkey into a profitable line of business. 

As this was back in the middle of the last century and not in our current one in which every variation on software is hailed as a paradigm-shifting game-changer, Thomas did not declare Swanson frozen dinners to be the future of food. To convey that the convenience of just pulling a box out of the freezer and popping a tray into the oven as revolutionary, he aligned it with the most futuristic technology found in homes at the time -- television. 

Given the popularity of the turkey meal, Swanson expanded its offerings into beef, chicken, etc. The rest, as they say, is history. It was not what we consider fine cuisine these days, but remember that this was also the decade that featured jello in everything from salads to sides to desserts. 

Prices rise, but not evenly.

I've notice the rise in prices of groceries and gas in the last several years. But I'm not old enough to know exactly how they compare to decades ago. I got curious about it after seeing a supermarket scene in a movie from the very early 60s. Eggs were advertised at 49 cents. Granted that's cheaper than what they sell for today, but not so much cheaper as one may expect. Eggs are generally priced anywhere between $1.50 and $1.99 a dozen, and I even managed to pick up some on sale for 99 cents this past year -- something that was far more common a few years ago.

It seemed to me, that given the rate of inflation, 49 cents would have been not so cheap back then. I looked up some price on http://www.1960sflashback.com/1960/economy.asp. Perhaps the 49 cents was some kind of special because, according to that, the price in the 60s would have been 57 cents, higher than the cost of a gallon of milk, which it puts at 49 cents. Currently, in my area, milk gallon prices range from $3.49-$4.99, with an average of about $4, depending on the store, the brand, and whatever other factors come into play.  That would mean that while milk prices have risen about 10x, the cost of eggs have only risen 3 to 4 times their cost then. Oh, and the cost of gallon of gas was 31 cents, so that has actually gone up more than 10x. Interesting, though, that the postage stamp then was only 4 cents, which would have made it cheaper than a local call in a payphone. A new home is said to cost $16,500.

If you jump ahead a decade to http://www.1970sflashback.com/1970/economy.asp, you find  moderate increases in prices. The stamp now costs 6 cents, still less than call.  The gallon of gas is 36 cents. The dozen eggs are up to 62 cents. But the gallon of milk has more than doubled in price to $1.15.  The median household income is given as $8,734 (no comparable figure appeared for 1960). A house would have proved to be a good investment (as you can't hold milk for 10 years) because the new home price is $26,600.

By the time you get to 1980, home prices would have tripled over the decade to$76,499, though the median income would have only about doubled to $17,710. Other prices are as follows:

Cost of a first-class stamp:  $0.15  Cost of a gallon of regular gas:  $1.25  Cost of a dozen eggs:  $0.91  Cost of a gallon of Milk:  $2.16

The cost of a home would have doubled again by 1990 to  149,800. Other indexes include:

Median Household Income:  $29,943.00  Cost of a first-class stamp:  $0.25  Cost of a gallon of regular gas:  $1.16  Cost of a dozen eggs:  $1.00  Cost of a gallon of Milk:  $2.78

For the rate of inflation applied to British products and prices, see http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-1633409/Historic-inflation-calculator-value-money-changed-1900.html Eggs are a lot more expensive over the Atlantic than they are over here.