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. 

From Brontë to Patchett

I just finished reading The Verts, Ann Patchett's latest children's book beautifully illustrated by Robin Preiss Glasser. The contrasting preferences for a birthday celebration between two siblings reminded me of the contrast between a set of cousins in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights

In Chapter 24 of Wuthering Heights, Catherine Linton recounts the contrast between Heathcliff's son summed up in their different ideal summer days:

'One time, however, we were near quarrelling. He said the pleasantest manner of spending a hot July day was lying from morning till evening on a bank of heath in the middle of the moors, with the bees humming dreamily about among the bloom, and the larks singing high up overhead, and the blue sky and bright sun shining steadily and cloudlessly. That was his most perfect idea of heaven's happiness: mine was rocking in a rustling green tree, with a west wind blowing, and bright white clouds flitting rapidly above; and not only larks, but throstles, and blackbirds, and linnets, and cuckoos pouring out music on every side, and the moors seen at a distance, broken into cool dusky dells; but close by great swells of long grass undulating in waves to the breeze; and woods and sounding water, and the whole world awake and wild with joy. He wanted all to lie in an ecstasy of peace; I wanted all to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee. I said his heaven would be only half alive; and he said mine would be drunk: I said I should fall asleep in his; and he said he could not breathe in mine, and began to grow very snappish. At last, we agreed to try both, as soon as the right weather came; and then we kissed each other and were friends.

These two statements, in particular, encapsulate the differences between introverts who need to 
 recharge in quiet surroundings and extroverts who feel inviograted by activity:

"He wanted all to lie in an ecstasy of peace; I wanted all to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee. I said his heaven would be only half alive; and he said mine would be drunk: I said I should fall asleep in his; and he said he could not breathe in mine."

In Pratchett's book, we have that difference depicted in Ivan's desire for solitude and quiet versus Estie's desire to throw a party with a lot of guests and noise. Thought Emily would not have used the terms attached to "vert," as a staunch introvert herself, she, certainly, would have recognized that aspect of human nature. 

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