Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - TV Dinners

Episode Date: December 6, 2021

Alex Schmidt is joined by bestselling author Jason Pargin (‘John Dies At The End’ series, ‘Zoey Ashe’ series) for a look at why TV dinners are secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.

Hey folks, it's Alex, like always, and I'm excited to announce the first ever live episode of this podcast. First ever live Secretly Incredibly Fascinating. The live episode is going to stream online for everybody's convenience, and it's going to have an amazing guest lineup of Katie Golden, Adam Todd Brown, and Andrew T. All at once, all three of them. The show is Saturday, December 18th, 2 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time. I'm also going to work out a recorded version for you to see it after. And here's the thing. If you become a patron of this show, you get in for free. There's no ticket

purchasing you need to work out. All patrons are already all set to enjoy this live episode of the show, the first one ever. And being a patron is also the only way to see it. I'm not selling outside tickets or nothing. You have to back the show, otherwise you miss this completely. So if you're not yet a patron of the podcast, I hope you'll consider doing that. Patronage is the only reason this show can exist at all. You also get a huge basket of benefits and bonus shows and other stuff if you do become a patron. And now also that is the way to see live SifPod with Katie Golden, Adam Todd Brown, Andrew T,

and myself on Saturday, December 18th. It's going to be amazing. It's going to also be something you can catch later if you're busy that day. Either way, please consider becoming a patron. And hey, see you at the live show. TV dinners known for being fast, famous for being trays. Nobody thinks much about them. So let's have some fun. Let's find out why TV dinners are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there folks, welcome to a whole new podcast episode. A podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone.

I am joined by Jason Pargin, my former colleague, my old pal, one of my favorite authors, just period. I highly recommend Jason's latest novel. It is entitled Zoe Punches the Future in the Dick. Jason also has many novels, and perhaps you are shopping for a winter holiday. Perhaps you're up to that. Perhaps you're doing that. Get someone a great book by a great author, right? Get one of Jason's books. It's a fun, enjoyable, no-screen time kind of way to give a nice gift and have a good time. Also, I've gathered all of our zip codes and used internet resources like native-land.ca to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples, acknowledge Jason recorded this on the traditional land of the Shawnee, Eastern Cherokee, and Sa'at'atsayaha peoples, and acknowledge that

in all of our locations, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode. And today's episode is about TV dinners. TV dinners is one of the three patron-chosen topics for this month. There are three of them every month. If you go to sifpod.fun, you can get in there and, you know, be part of steering this show and deciding what it's about. Thank you to Dusty's Rad Title for that great suggestion of a topic. TV dinners are perfect for this show, and you're about to hear why. So please sit back or stand in front of your

conventional oven, happily watching as your dinner gets ready in a mere 30 minutes. Either way, here's this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with Jason Pargin. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then. Jason, so glad you're back, so glad you're here. And I always start by asking us the relationship to the topic or opinion of it. How do you feel about TV dinners? I'm fascinated by this modern idea of always needing to be consuming media while doing literally anything else? Because that's a distinctly modern thing, obviously.

You couldn't, in the olden days, read a book while also trying to rustle horses or whatever the old-timey jobs were. As far as I know, TV dinners were the first product that was advertised as, hey, this is something you can do to distract yourself while you're eating. Even though for most of human history, eating was enough of a task on its own. Whereas today, I'm multitasking pretty much all of the time. While I'm recording this podcast, I have Twitter open on my monitor in the background, even though this should command all of my attention. We have been trained that no, you always, there's always another stream of your brain that consumes media. I actually think that's a pretty huge change in

society. And TV dinners, both that invention and the way they chose to brand it and promote it was one of those real pivotal moments in that. Now I'm imagining you tweeting your exact words as you say them throughout the show. Like just every single thing is also being posted. That'd be great. With none of my side, too. Very confusing. No one knows what's going on.

confusing. No one knows what's going on. And one, I just love the idea that like these days, I think every TV show is written with the knowledge that the viewers are sitting on their sofa looking at their phones while watching your show. Whereas in my youth, I was, I'm old enough that, you know, the idea that TV will rot your brain was still a thing in the eighties. You know, TV came around in the mid 1950s, became totally prevalent in all households by the end of the 50s, almost 50s into the 60s. So the idea of like, oh, you don't need this box, like, you know, saying stuff to you all the time in your house. This is surely you could go read a book or do something more useful with your time. Whereas now the TV is the boring, tedious thing. and we need some other distraction to get us through watching the TV.

portion every episode they're like and the technical challenge everybody does the same thing and the judges have to leave and there's a time limit like they they always relay that out you know maybe because we're all going to be watching something else as we do it yeah and yeah they're not wrong about that assumption in my mind i it's there are many times i will look up from my phone and say who who, who's that? That's dead that everybody's upset about in the show. Is that, was that the character I'm supposed to know? Because I of course had, had only been devoting about 20% of my attention, uh, to it. This is why you get into arguments about like with the release of Dune and the filmmaker, they're really wanting it to be only in theaters. Like, I don't blame them that's got to be

a weird feeling to make a movie on that scale and know that a lot of people are going to be watching it on a phone while on the bus or it's going to be on in the background while they're on their phone texting their friends or doing whatever watching another show like it's for a filmmaker where you you have all this attention to detail and to costuming and all of these infinite little tiny things and realize that more than half of your audience is just absent-mindedly leaving it on as background noise that's that's fascinating to me yeah it's like every appliance is background hum even the ones that are designed to entertain you it's amazing Like it might as

well be a radiator or something like, Oh, this billion dollar foundation show on Apple, man, can it just quiet down for a second? I'm trying to look at apps on my phone, please. And yeah, and I, I don't know about you, but I figure a lot of listeners, uh, I don't know if they eat TV dinners all the time, but in the run up to this, I realized that because our household, it's just being my partner. And so sometimes just the two of us will watch a show, you know, on some kind of laptop or something while we're eating dinner. do not buy TV dinners as in like a boxed tray of a set amount of things, but we make a lot of dinners and then eat them while watching TV. Like that's very common for us, even though we're not doing the specific product that's the topic of the show. Yeah. They're all TV dinners now. There's no point in calling them that anymore because it's just any meal can be eaten in front of the tv yeah

and i think and i think i associate a traditional tv dinner with like high sodium and maybe bad taste and you know you know like it's it's got baggage in my head even though until we like put this research together i had not checked lately what the nutritional stuff is for a TV dinner. It could be amazing now. Yeah. We'll get into all that. Because the one thing that I cannot emphasize enough when we get into the subject is how bad all TV dinners were. I ate many of these as a child.

They were still popular back then. I know they've fallen out of favor now to where like eating a TV dinner in a sitcom is like something that a very sad bachelor does as a symbol of how sad they are. But when I was a kid in the 80s, this was still a common thing. And they were even as a child when my tastes were awful, even then as like this is this is like food they serve in a prison or something. It also it reminds me of airline food which was such a punch line and i think the last time i was served actual airline food because it was it was for a podcast in london and so it was across the ocean so we got actual airline food and i immediately got serious food poisoning like i spent the next couple days throwing up so i i think tray food like that

has a bad vibe in my head at the moment. Yeah. And that's not like an irrational phobia. That's your body trying to tell you something. But yeah, but I think we can get into the set of stuff we prepped here because on every episode, our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week, that's in a segment called... His data is sweaty. Maths cheap. Stats are heavy. There's facts on his pod already. Line graph spaghetti. math's cheap stats are heavy there's facts on his pod already line graph spaghetti and uh that uh that name was submitted by johnny davis thank you johnny there's a new name for the segment every week please make him as silly and wacky and bad as possible submit to sif pod on

twitter or to sif pod at gmail.com disappointed that they did not that was supposed to be clear if they had actually taken the effort to do the entire thing front to back. When I make my biopic about my early days, we'll do the whole thing. That'll be the single. You can ignore it while looking at your phone. But yeah, we got a set of numbers here. And first number is 9%. 9%. Less than 10.

number is 9%. 9%, less than 10. And that is how many U.S. households had a television set in the year 1950. So middle of the 20th century, 9% of households had a TV. And then next number right away is five years later in 1955, that percentage was up to 64%. So in those five years, first half of the 1950s, we went from 9% of American households had a TV all the way to 64%. It's just a seismic shift in how being in a house works in America. And it's my understanding that that's the first technology that has had that kind of adoption curve that fast. Like if you look at anything prior to that, we talked on another podcast about the penetration of air conditioning, refrigerators, things like that.

I think they took much longer than five years to go from niche product used by rich jerks to most people have it. And here, you know, if just five years in that era to, like these days we expect, you know, you can immediately get a brand new cell phone into everybody's household in a year, you know, that the upgrades are just immediately on the market. But the idea of doing that in 1950s with something that at the time was very advanced and it, when it came on the market, very expensive, And when it came on the market, very expensive. It was a real shift.

We used to take a lot longer to adopt technology. But the idea of television was so compelling to people. And the fear of missing out or the FOMO element, I'm sure of everybody who didn't have one, was so pervasive that they got these out very quickly. And, yeah, that's a change that happened all at once. The follow-up number is that by 1960, so 10 years later, it was all the way up to 87%. So in those 10 years, it went from 9% to 87%, which that's like almost pushing past it being for a particular socioeconomic class. You know, like the poorest people can't

afford it. But basically, everyone said a chunk of our 1950s budget is going toward not just a TV, but probably kind of a bad TV. Like the tech was not awesome yet. And people were still like, I have to have this in the middle of my home. Got to get it. Because like you say, have to have this in the middle of my home. Got to get it. Because like you say, we, now that we have smartphones going, we do kind of have like that expectation that a new electronic gadget will go out in a wave to the whole country. But, but before this, it was, you know, just radios and things did not have that kind of pickup. Yeah. And if you look at, there's actually a graph you can find on the internet where it's a line graph in various colors of all the technologies that have come out over time. And it ends with like the internet and how quickly that got into

homes during the nineties and the two thousands. TV is one of the first vertical lines you saw, whereas, you know, like telephones, radio, things like that took much, much longer. But in terms of the way it reshaped the household and household habits, I think it was probably the most profound to come along because the idea of like part of the issue with TV dinners and what they will get into, like that rearranged the American living room. You go and look at my living room, every, the chair, sofa, everything is facing the television. Like it's just assumed if you're in there, you're watching TV. Whereas if you go to 19, I don't know, 40, 1935, I assume a living room is arranged so that the furniture,

like it's all facing each other. Like it's a conversation area where it's like, you can, you can converse in my living room if you want, but we're all looking at the TV. We're not looking at each other. Yeah. There's a, I live near the Brooklyn museum now, and they had an exhibit of like design in the early 20th century. And so they had some setups of people's rooms that they lived in. And it, my, my closest touchstone, I guess is from TV, but Downton Abbey, like it's a, it's a very fancy room with a couple of chairs that point at each other and some side tables to put your drinks on. Like like that was there. There was no gizmo for everybody to look at.

You just had to look at each other and maybe dogs. That was it. Yeah. And I'm wondering if a modern family, if you said, OK, we're going to move you into this home, we're going to leave your smartphones behind. And also this home doesn't have a TV and that setup of the living room, like that's, that's the setup as there's just a bunch of chairs all facing each other. And if you have not brought a newspaper or a book or something to read, you're just, you're just sitting there staring at each other. It would have to be almost unnerving because that's not, uh, like, like like for me that would be a mentally taxing

thing to do there's a an image that went out a few years ago that was like a patent on a new type of airline seating and it involved all the passengers like sitting knee to knee facing each other um because it maximized space and just looking at it like gave me a panic attack the idea of sitting on it on an eight hour flight and you're just staring at the stranger the whole time. Uh, and the idea of course would be the airline would charge you much, much more to not have to sit like that. Oh, you don't want to sit in staring class. Oh, well the regular economy class, That'll be quite a bit more. Yeah. You're drilling your gaze into a stranger.

And I don't want to get too, we're not on this here podcast. We're not old fashioned. We're not saying that technology is bad and things were back, were better back in the olden days. Anybody that's heard me on literally any other show knows, I believe the past was awful. And I know that a lot of what you're doing on that smartphone is connecting to other people. You're texting friends who live across the country or in another country altogether. And that's a miracle. It's just that

it's hard to appreciate that it was a profound change. Whether or not the change is good or bad, you can argue about that on your own. But it was a profound change in the way people live their lives. And as far as something that is maybe more objectionable, we have a next number here. And this came up way back on the microwave ovens episode, but it directly fits this and it's worth bringing in. The number is $514.63. That's U.S. dollar cost, $ 514 dollars 63 cents that's the cost of the world's most expensive tv dinner which was rolled out in 2013 by a british microwave dinner company called charlie bigum and they called it swish pie we'll have a picture for people it's a dinner of salmon scallops something called turbot, which is probably fancy, and then oysters, lobster tails, and it's all poached in Dom Perignon,

along with truffles, caviar, and a garnish of edible 24-karat gold. I can't find it anywhere for sale now. It seems like a stunt to make the most expensive TV dinners so you can sell more regular ones. But that was an attempt. It was over $500 worth of dinner. Yeah. And was probably also very bad. I know you've discussed microwave ovens, because this was to be microwaved, wasn't it? Yeah, this is designed to be microwaved. That's why we talked about it there. And it was the most expensive microwave food I could find of any kind.

Yeah. And in that episode, I'm sure you covered it. But the fact that microwaves, those were legitimately a bad invention. They do a horrible job of heating food. Even today, they've never improved. You've already done the episode. That's an invention I can't believe caught on. And I guess it's one of those things where it's a sign of we will save time at the expense of literally everything else. That's how much we in America, we, we value time so much that we will, we will eat food that has been turned into rubber that is still frozen in the middle. If it saves us literally 20 minutes of having to wait for the meal to finish cooking in the oven. Yeah. Right. We'll just trade it for,

I have a couple more minutes now. We'll add the ninth lane to that highway because it's a little faster, even though it makes it more of a hell thing to experience. Yeah. And what are we doing with that time we saved? Nothing. It's just this superstition we have that everything has to be done quickly. It's like I just, last weekend I had to go, I was driving around because I had to kill time while my wife was at an appointment. And I got behind a very slow driver and became extremely frustrated that this person was driving slowly, even though I was only trying to kill an hour. Like I was literally trying to kill time.

I was trying to think of some place or some errand I could run that would get me back, you know, that would use up that time. It didn't matter. I'm an American and therefore the pressure of doing everything fast is always on. Even if the only thing I'm going to do is go at home and then zombie scroll through my phone for two straight hours. It doesn't matter. I'm in a hurry to get at home and do that. The next number is about regular frozen dinners. It's 17.4%. And 17.4% is the increase in frozen food sales in 2020, according to an industry group. They figure that's pandemic-driven partly. But they say that in November of 2020, frozen food sales were 17.4% higher than they were the previous November. November 2019, no pandemic going on. They also say grocery sales were only up 9.3%. So frozen food was specifically the choice people were seeming to turn to, to get through this pandemic situation.

Plus, you have a freezer at home, you can stick it in there and eat it when you get to it. They also say that in just that first chunk of the pandemic from March to April of 2020, frozen food sales went up 70%, 7-0. So they didn't continue to see that humongous increase, but they kept tracking it and they figure frozen food is just a bigger thing as long as we were and are dealing with the continuing pandemic keeping us home, having us make more frozen food. And this is a whole separate rabbit hole you can go down if you want to Google for a subject, which is trends that happened because of the pandemic, but partially stayed permanent. You know, and now there's some of them that are obvious, like people working from home and then once they realize the job could be done from home, they just kept doing it like they originally were at home for pandemic reasons.

And then they just made the job permanent work from home. Yeah. But things like the increase in frozen food sales, it's one of a hundred or a thousand little changes in the markets or in our behavior that I don't know that people fully understand yet. I personally think it's two factors. One, because of the hoarding that happened early on and the shortages that happened early on in the pandemic, I think the habit of people wanting to keep a bunch of stuff on hand, like just in case, so keeping a bunch, because frozen food will keep for years, so that where maybe they normally wouldn't keep a bunch of boxes of ready-made meals in the freezer,

now they do, and so they just continually buy them in case the day comes when they see empty shelves again. But part of it is people that used to get maybe Instacart or takeout every day, as some bachelors I know do, found out that there's actually some really good frozen meals if you know how to prepare them like if you don't microwave them like frozen food technology like all other technology has gotten way way way better in the last few decades yeah like those those tv dinners of my youth where everything in there tasted the same except for the brownie which even barely tasted like a brownie but everything everything else just tasted like warm salt, like the mashed potatoes and the turkey. It all just tasted like various textures of the same food and the same awful gravy. Now you can get

legitimately like some kind of a fancy crab cake or whatever that if you're willing to pay a little bit more, if you follow the cooking instructions on it, it's actually very good. Their ability to freeze stuff without destroying it has only gotten better with time. So I think some people have just simply realized, no, there's some good, there's some actually good frozen food out there. Why am I, was I spending twice as much to get it from a restaurant? And there's also, there've been a bunch of restaurants that just started selling frozen meals that you can buy from them and then stash in your freezer until you want to eat it because you can't eat inside the restaurant and feel safe. And that also just seems to be a good system. I think it's outside of this number we have here. So it's maybe even

the numbers under-reporting how much frozen food people are eating now. But yeah, we could have just been doing that the whole time. And with the pandemic, we realized, oh, that's an option. We can do that. Our kitchens in the United States are really well put together. Often, there's usually a lot of gadgets and gear you have available to you. And so you can use your freezer and your oven, which would blow the mind of someone 100 years ago to enjoy it. Yeah. Or if you have now, if you have an air fryer, there's certain frozen foods that

when you put in there, it tastes like it came from a restaurant. All these gadgets actually do, they actually do what they claim, believe it or not. but uh next number here next number is 2008 and in the year 2008 that's that's approximately the turning point when tv dinners got less popular for the first time ever in 2014 roberto feldman of quartz.com reported that the nestle corporation was considering selling off the Lean Cuisine brand of frozen dinners, which apparently they own. And they were possibly considering selling all their TV dinner stuff because they found that from 2008 to 2014, they'd seen consistently flat or declining sales. But the most interesting thing tucked into that, to me, is that the article said that the decline from 2008 to 2014 was basically the first decline in the history of TV dinners.

And the article says that the entire category had experienced, quote, nearly 60 years of sustained growth, end quote. quote. So we'll talk about the invention of these in a sec, but I find it amazing that from jump, these things have basically always gotten more popular for more than half a century and until pretty recently. People like them. Yeah. And then this is yet another rabbit hole you can go down. But after the financial crisis in 2008, 2009, you saw for whatever reason, kind of the explosion of a, like a foodie trend among, I guess, millennials, the growth of grocery store chains like Whole Foods instead of, you know, other traditional chains like Kroger or whatever they have where you are. And you saw like sales at fast food restaurants like McDonald's went down in favor of places that were perceived as selling slightly more upscale fast food like Panera or even like Chick-fil-A that's considered like a slightly fancier, maybe a little bit more expensive sandwich than what you would get there.

And that was part of this pivot of a generation saying, well, if I'll never be able to afford a home, maybe I can, maybe I can appreciate like use part of my budget on that. That was kind of like that joke about millennials spending all their money on avocado toast. Like that was a dumb thing to say, but they were talking about a trend of, well, if I can't have the things my parents had a home, you know, vacations, that kind of thing that I'm going to spring for something that's a little bit nicer and a little bit maybe better for me. And so you saw a little bit of a pivot away from anything that was perceived as like ready-made junk food or whatever. Now that's separate from like frozen food, because again, frozen food can involve like a bag of frozen crab legs or frozen sirloin steaks.

So the actual what we think of as a TV dinner where it's a four course meal all piled into a tiny little tray that's and it's all cooked as one thing together. That's that's what I think people started to turn their nose up at at that time. Yeah, absolutely. With the humongous recession, I think some people found they had slightly more time on their hands. And so then maybe you turn to frozen food where it's like just a bag of frozen vegetables. And then you do something exciting with that in your kitchen. And then you also cook another element separately. exciting with that in your kitchen. And then you also cook another element separately. And like, you know, you like build a meal with frozen food and groceries, where, you know, maybe in a better time, you are too busy having a job. You know what I mean? Like, because the economy is going

better, and you can. Yeah, it's, it's a, it's these strange, like, trade offs and optimizations that people have reached for as things got dire. It's also coincides with the rise of social media and the whole, again, the joke there with Instagram, it's like people posting pictures of their lunch. But that became a legitimate thing where people were like using the meals they were preparing for themselves as a status symbol of like, yes, I have put in the effort to make, you know, a fancy little salad for myself rather than heating up a turkey and macaroni and cheese dinner that came in a lean cuisine frozen thing, like making something that looked presentable. And that was, I think that

became kind of a social trend through, you know, the rise of social media too. Because a lot of these TV dinners do not look appetizing when photographed, unless you do a lot of extra food styling work on the plate after the fact. Wow. Yeah, even I feel like some of those brands even just decided once social media came around, they would become jokes instead. Like there was a Steakums Twitter account that was just bits. And Denny's is slightly different from this, but Denny's decided let's be hilarious on Tumblr. Maybe it's because as people got more into, I'm going to style and create my own nice-looking food,

then the not-nice- looking branded foods of the world said, well, what's our niche? Maybe it's just to be weird because we won't look good here. It was to get people to try to consume it ironically. Same with the Burger King and their intentionally creepy mascot. It's like, wouldn't it be funny if we all ate Burger King today? I actually think that has had limited success. I don't know that people consume food that way, that it's definitely what they were going for. Because it's like, we can't go for quality. We can't claim that it's even the best price for what you get. So maybe we'll just ride the joke and say, hey, wouldn't it be funny if we ate Steums today even though we don't even know what that technically is

in terms of in terms of food i i couldn't describe you what what's in its steakums or in fact i didn't know that product was even still being sold until that twitter account went viral right yeah i've never had one or explored what it is and it's probably like the name leads me to believe it's basically anything except steak you know what i mean like i whatever's at the front of the name is probably false it's like the way i think velveeta cannot use the word cheese in their box it's like velveeta nutrient block or something like they can't they have to carefully avoid or it's it's cheese and it's misspelled in some way, C-H-E-E-Z or something. Yeah, I did a sketch once where I was running a lunch meat company and it was so low grade, I was required to call it bolognish. I couldn't actually call it bologna.

That was fun. And made up, but kind of real. You know what I mean? And I think we can get from here into the takeaways for this episode, because especially this first one goes off of that last number going into takeaway number one.

TV dinners became a thing because of a one time turkey overload. TV dinners are a thing, are a product because they were sparked by one situation in 1953 where there was too much turkey and the company needed to do something with it. Yeah. One of a bunch of foods that happened for that reason. You can search this too, like the chimichanga, the fried burrito was due to somebody having thousands of stale tortillas and they couldn't figure out how to make them edible.

So they're like, well, just throw it in the deep fryer. Everybody likes that. This is one thing that capitalism is good at, is we do not like throwing things away if there could possibly be a profit made from it. So a lot of the things you love are actually somebody like can't afford to toss all of this. How can we make it edible and technically not dangerous to eat?

And it's like, well, you can freeze it. It's going to taste like crap. But it's like, yeah, but who's going to want a bunch of frozen turkey? And then somebody had a stroke of genius. Yeah, it's kind of a virtuous cycle. Capitalism saying we will prevent the food waste. Sure, by kind of tricking people into eating weird food, but we'll prevent it. Like, you know, that's good. I want food to get

used. Great. Yeah. This is my maybe most unpopular take, that all of the things we complain about with food, like they used to have, there's a famous Jamie Oliver video where he was showing what McNuggets were actually made of. And it's like, well, this is meat scraped from chicken bones and then ground up and then made into nuggets. And then he did that. He like, he showed that to a bunch of children and that they still wanted them. It's like, don't you understand though, that if you care about the environment, you care about waste, you want to use every part of the chicken. Like to me, that's, that's good. If it's, if it's actually edible and it's not dangerous and people enjoy eating it, then good. You found a use for something that otherwise would have went into the trash.

That should always be the goal. If you insist on only eating the prime cuts of meat, you're going to, what, throw away the rest of the cow? Like, it's bad enough that you had to raise and kill the cow in the first place. But if you're going to do it, use all of it. Find a use for the hooves. Find something to do with the fur. Use it, you know. So same thing here. Like we can kind of turn our noses up at, you know, what's, it's like, wow, you don't even know what's in a hot dog. It's like, well, you know, tell me if it's legitimately dangerous. Don't just say that. Like if there, and if it's not, then what, let people have it. I fool me and then it'll be fine. Yeah.

But yeah, but that, that last number in the number section, we talked about a, you know, 60 year upward trajectory of TV dinner sales and TV dinners have a specific starting point that was at the start of that. Some amazing sources on this, mainly a Smithsonian Magazine piece by Covey Bioccolo, and then also the Library of Congress's website that has some great, it's a series called Everyday Mysteries, and it's about how this came about. But the invention of TV dinners is amazing to me because all of the technological parts happened some years before the actual product. The invention really came from an idea, but all the parts already existed and had already been invented. The main frozen food process goes all the way back to 1925. frozen food process goes all the way back to 1925. And if people know the name Birdseye from Birdseye Frozen Food, that was a guy named Clarence Birdseye, who was a naturalist and fur trapper.

He was living in remote parts of Labrador in eastern Canada, learned from native Inuit people that they froze their food by freezing it very quickly at very low temperatures, just in essentially the snow and the climate there. And when they did that, it prevented water from forming large ice crystals, which damages food. And so Birdseye went back to the US, invented a machine that did all that. And he was able to do fast freezing, very cold freezing that generated better frozen food. fast freezing, very cold freezing that generated better frozen food. Because in his time in the 1920s, most frozen food like did not hold together like we like we think of it today, it would just sort of collapse into mush when you tried to handle it. And and in the 20s,

people preferred canning for most like preserving food, because at least that didn't like, for most preserving food because at least that didn't turn into a paste when you tried to eat it. And this barely needs explained. Just buy some fresh fruit, some strawberries or something, and put them in your freezer and then get them out a week later and let them thaw and try to eat them. They'll turn into mush. And it's the exact reason that Alex just explained. When you freeze something slowly, you get very long ice crystals that form and then destroy the tissue. They puncture the cells, whether it's a fruit or whether it's meat or whatever.

So the process of freezing and thawing, again, this is why you can buy like a bag of frozen chicken breasts, cook them and they're fine. That if you buy fresh and then you put them in your freezer and cook them, they are robbery or there's freezer burn or whatever. It's because you don't have their process. They've got a freezer that can basically like flash freeze the stuff in minutes, whereas your freezer is going to take hours to fully freeze it. And it's, it doesn't preserve it in the same way. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and as much as I was saying, our kitchens have incredible stuff in the United States.

We don't have this industrial flash freezing system. But stores do now and food producers do now because of this inventor, Clarence Birdseye, who, I don't know, probably lifted billions of people out of hunger over time with this process. And anyway, with that system, that meant that frozen food started to take off because they first used it for fish, then they used it for vegetables and everything else. And from there, frozen food got a lot better. NPR's The Salt Blog says that that sparked stores and domestic kitchens to acquire freezers. Because if people heard the refrigerator episode, they know that the freezing component was kind of separate initially.

And then after World War II, frozen food got a huge boost because it meant people could put entire meals on the table without women having to spend hours in the kitchen. Because after World War II, there were more women continuing to be in the workforce as they had been in the war. And this is right here, as some listeners know, I am an award-winning science fiction novelist. I have won a single award for one book several years ago, but still, it doesn't matter. Until the day I die, I am still an award-winning science fiction novelist. The hardest part, when writing about the future, it's very easy to invent new technology because

it's very easy to say, well, computers will get smaller and everything will have screens on them or whatever. It is very, very difficult to predict the social changes that come about due to a combination of inventions. So like here, having a freezer in the home, an electric freezer, if you had told someone in the 1800s about that, they would have probably thought, oh, that'd be convenient because it'd save us from having to, you know, freeze dry beef and it would, you know, but they would not have comprehended that it would take food preparation time from the, I don't know, three or four hours that used to take to cook a dinner. If you think about the time it took to, you know, to peel and chop vegetables, to boil potatoes, to then, you know,

bake the meat where it's literally, you know, back then the woman's, you know, it's half her day is getting dinner ready and then the cleanup after the fact and all the pots and everything else. The idea that this would lead to the invention of a thing in a box, you just take it out of the box, put it in the oven, and when it comes out, you've now got an entire meal with a meat, two sides, and a dessert all in one thing. That's the part that would have been hard to predict. And not the invention of that meal, but the idea of what that does to society when a woman

no longer has to spend four hours making dinner. And it can be literally a five-minute process, getting it out of the freezer, sticking it in there, getting it out, unwrapping it, eating it. And the fundamental change that is when, you know, women, you start to get two income households, what that does to leisure time, the way, you know, the whole social dynamic, everything changes when you suddenly don't have one of the partners in a marriage having to spend half their time making dinner. It is a profound, earth-shaking change, and one that you wouldn't predict in advance because it's the intersection of so many different things. Of World War II, all the men going off to war,

women having to go to work while they're gone, what that does for feminism, women's liberation, they're gone, you know, what that does for feminism, women's liberation, and just the way we live our lives. Just those few inventions, the freezer, frozen food, you know, were a huge change on their own. And then the idea of introducing television into that is yet another change. That, again, all of these, it's not just technology. It's technology plus the culture that comes up around that, you know, and it's in its aftermath. Yeah, exactly.

And it might be even a bigger change than that mid 1950s change of televisions descending into into all the homes in the US. Like you, you have this nuclear family people have been encouraged to choose where it's two adults. And suddenly one of them has a lot more time now. In a way that is not only a revolution in terms of people's time, but also a revolution in terms of what people perceive as the rights of that female partner, you know, like, like, oh, now, oh, now suddenly they can just keep doing this thing that was a wartime measure where they screwed a few bolts into a bomber. Like now they, now they can just really keep doing a job or some other kind of thing. It's, it's a humongous change and also makes eating meals way easier in a way that's very tangible. And man, what a, way easier in a way that's very tangible. And man, people living in the 40s and 50s,

they just experienced a lot all of the time. We think we do now, but I think it's mostly sweeping problems and having a lot of access to information. For them, it was some really fundamental changes. Yeah. It is impossible to overstate the old people of today what they've seen. If you have somebody who is 70 years old now and was born in 1950, they were born into one world and have now aged into a completely different one. Whereas if you have somebody who's born in the year 2000, they've always had the internet. They've always grown up with some form of social media. They've seen some changes.

Nothing like what these guys, what these guys have seen, nothing. And especially like, not just in terms of technology, but in terms of the role of women in society, minorities in society, the attitudes, it is a change that is impossible to comprehend if you weren't there for the whole thing. Yeah, really. And now I'm just remembering that the current president and the previous president are both from that generation, too. I don't know if that's good or bad that we went that way, you know, in a vacuum, that that generation keeps being the president. Very strange.

I am. Another one of my unpopular beliefs is that I tend to be slightly less judgmental of the very old people who are too scared of the world or too resistant to change. Because that's a lot of change to ask a human being. Humans are very adaptable. That's a lot of change to ask a human being to adapt to without question. And the fact that some people get so terrified of it that they go the other way or whatever. I don't approve of it, but I do understand it. That's a lot. And as far as changes and new things, the other technological component here with these TV dinners is just the entire overall presentation of a tray with compartments with a couple of different foods, and you heat it all at once, give it to somebody.

That had existed since the 1940s. And again, partly because of World War II. But according to the Library of Congress, there was a company called Maxson Food Systems, and they manufactured the earliest complete frozen meal in 1945. And Maxson manufactured them under the name Strato Plates because they were designed to be reheated on military airplanes and civilian airplanes. And the meal was a basic three-part equation of meat, vegetable, and potato. And apparently this company started to consider selling it to the retail market, but it was a small enough company that they didn't have the cash to scale up. And also their founder, Mr. Maxson passed away right when they were looking at doing this. So, so the TV

dinner existed before 1953, when it becomes a thing, it just hadn't made the leap into a business situation and mental schema where people were ready for it. I also suspect that those meals were awful. Yeah. The first attempt at any technology is never great. I'm going to bet that very first round of TV dinners made specifically for people who were isolated on a plane and just had basically a captive audience. They had no other options. I'm going to bet those, if you were forced to eat one today, that it would be unpleasant. Yeah, nobody was hopping out to eat something better in Berlin. You know, yeah, it was what it was.

was hopping out to eat something better in Berlin, you know? Yeah, it was, it was what it was. And I also just anecdotally, like I hear and read things about military food being amazing now. And for all I know it is these MREs and stuff, but my, my grandfather, because of his air force experiences will not eat Turkey anymore because he was given so much like, like frozen preserved turkey that was not good over and over again in the military that he's done that entire food's over for him still. Cause turkey, turkey is a meat that is hard to get to make right. Even when you devote like 12 hours to cooking it, it's easy to mess it up. Like if you're not carefully basting it the whole time, if you've not shopped carefully for it. So when you've got a thinly sliced piece of Turkey that has been flash frozen and then stored for four years in a,

in a military warehouse somewhere, and then you're, you're consuming it after having somehow heated up on whatever heating unit they have on a bomber or transport plane or whatever. Right. Yeah, I can see what coming out the other end. If you said, okay, I want you to eat this blindfold and tell me what substance you are eating here. Is it turkey? Is it fish? Is it beef?

I think they would just say it's some leathery thing and I guess gravy. Some kind of salted uh sauce that i guess is gravy right anything can be a gravy right like and it's like i don't know man i feel like there's got to be some rules it's not food floats in it so it's a gravy but that's probably what they try to do but yeah so we had had the flash freezing in the 1920s the tray of meal that you heat up all at once in the 1940s they also even came out with folding tv tray tables before tv dinners

apartmenttherapy.com says that those were advertised as early as 1952, because it'd just be a tray for like, you know, snacks or a cup of coffee or whatever. But as far as actual TV dinners as a thing, those began in 1953, really into 1954. And I love this story. According to Smithsonian, there was a Nebraska company called C.A. Swanson and Sons, and you may know the Swanson name today from TV dinners. C.A. Swanson and Sons had too much turkey left over after Thanksgiving of 1953, and specifically they had 260 tons of frozen turkey, and it was sitting in 10 refrigerated railroad cars. Also, quoting Smithsonian here, the train's refrigeration only worked when the cars were moving, so Swanson had the trains travel

back and forth between its Nebraska headquarters and the East Coast until panicked executives could figure out what to do, end quote. So there was just a train of turkey going back and forth until their business could figure out how to unload it. It's amazing to me. It was a turkey snowpiercer. It's this dystopian train that never, that just runs and runs in a circle, never stopping. Because if it stops, everything will die. It was literally the exact same premise. Because if the train stopped moving, the refrigerator stopped working and it would all go bad.

So it was, just had to keep moving forever. I want there to be the one rich guy at the front of the train, but he's just also eating turkey and hates it. Like this is good for no one. This is a bad snowpiercer. We can't,

we can't stop the train until you've eaten all of this turkey because we have no place to throw it away yeah yeah it's just i man then the 20th century the best and so so anyway so swanson has this train doing an indiana jones map red line back and forth between Nebraska and the East Coast to keep the turkey frozen. And then somebody at Swanson, it's debated exactly who, but somebody came up with the idea of take the turkey, put it with a couple of like comfort food sides that are Thanksgiving or holiday feeling. And sell that as a ready to heat frozen meal. And also, most importantly,

you brand this as a TV dinner, right? It's not just that it's a convenient frozen meal of turkey and sides. The branding is this new invention that is also sweeping the nation in 1953, the television. We have created the perfect dinner to eat while you watch it. Like we've, we've combined all the modern things at once. And you'll be this amazing, happy person enjoying your TV dinner, a thing we came up with. Yeah. And we're going to get into that a little bit more in a moment, but that was the real innovation because the actual, the innovations of being able to freeze food. And as you can imagine, if you know anything about food preparation, having meat and vegetables side by side on a dish, like the risk of cross-contamination, you know, if something like if there's E. coli or something in the meat and that getting into the potatoes or the corn or whatever, and making sure that it's all getting heated to the right temperature, that it's all being separate. There was a lot of literal technical problems to solve there to make the TV dinner happen. But the real innovation was calling it the TV dinner. Whoever came up with that name,

they're the one who I think caused the revolution to happen, as opposed to whoever, like all of the many challenges that had to be solved in terms of like, well, how do you seal off the tray? What do you make the tray out of and all that? Yeah. And I think people recognizing the importance of that branding is part of why it's debated who came up with it because people want credit for this revolution. Library of Congress says a likely inventor is a Swanson salesman named Jerry Thomas, who just thought of this. It also might've been the actual Swanson family members running the company. Either way, they say a key person behind the scenes was Betty Cronin, the bacteriologist for Swanson, who figured out from jump, I guess, a pretty good way to keep it safe,

like kill foodborne germs and heat the meat and vegetables properly. Because in the prep for this, we tried to look up major recalls of frozen foods. and maybe we didn't do it good, but we couldn't find any like sweeping huge troubles with these. It seems like from jump, they've done pretty good safety. But, and Swanson was also well positioned to do this because they were a name brand for frozen meals, such as pot pies. And so they, you know, kind of put all the pieces together conceptually. And in 1954, in the first full year of sales, they sold 10 million units of TV dinners. And the following year, they got bought out by the Campbell Soup Company, which scaled it up even more from there, because it seems like basically immediately everybody saw how lucrative

and popular this idea would be as soon as it was an idea. They said, oh, yeah, TV saw how lucrative and popular this idea would be. As soon as it was an idea, they said, oh, yeah, TV is fun. A dinner for it is very fun. Let's let's immediately manufacture these for everybody. And I think sometimes we don't appreciate the challenges that had to be overcome to make seemingly simple things happen. Like I've been joking over and over again about how bad these meals were. But think about it. It takes a completely, if you're at home,

like say you're going to prepare a pot roast, mashed potatoes, some peas and carrots, and a brownie. All of those dishes I just named are going to take a different amount of time to cook and must be cooked at a different temperature to make a meal where it can all be put in one container at one temperature for the same amount of time and all be done to the exact right degree is an enormous challenge. Like that's crazy because those things are completely different foods, completely different densities,

textures, everything else. So figuring out how much cooking has to be done in advance, you know, the meat is fully cooked. So how do you prep it so that in, you know, TV dinners in the oven were 25 to 30 minutes, I think. So it's like in 25 to 30 minutes, the turkey has to be the right temperature, but not dried out. The mashed potatoes have to be the right temperature but not dried out. The mashed potatoes have to be the right temperature but not dried out. And somehow the brownie, the corn, all of that, that's actually a crazy challenge and probably took a whole bunch of experimentation and a lot of bad wasted food to get there. Like not just a safety issue but just having it so that it all turns out to be edible and edible to the point that it would replace the home cooked meal for many, if not most households from then on.

biggest challenge is just to say like, Hey, you know, the thing you've done your entire life, do it our way now is always hard. And, and changing the meal, you know, whether or not people sit and eat it together and look at each other and stuff, just changing the basic meal for everybody, you know, at McDonald's has accomplished it maybe. And then these guys, I can't think of too many other companies that did it. Off of that, we are going to a short break, followed by a whole new takeaway. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes.

I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. and NPR. curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience, one you have no choice but to embrace, because, yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. And with that, I think we can get straight into the other big takeaway for this main episode. Takeaway number two. The TV part was a much bigger societal change than anything in the dinner portion. Because, you know, as we said, the frozen dinner kind of developed separately.

And this idea of eating it with TV was the real hook. And as we'll discuss, kind of a bigger change than eating frozen food. Yes. And this is why I wanted to be on this episode. This is the change that I found fascinating. Because they're not just selling a product. They're selling a change in lifestyle. And you can go look up old ads for TV dinners. And it's the whole family, the whole happy family sitting together on the sofa watching TV.

And they've all got the TV dinners. And I think in the ad I found, they didn't even have the TV trays that you mentioned were already an invention. Like they've all got them on their lap. Yeah. Which was not the way you wanted to eat a TV dinner. That, that metal,

that metal tray was extremely hot. You did not want to sit there with that thing either in your hand or on your lap, unless you had like a cushion or something under it. So it made sense they had to invent something else to make this possible. But the idea of the family dinner looked one way for, you know, this American myth of the American family, like this Norman Rockwell vision of everybody at the dinner table talking about their day

and trying to replace that with, no, it's equally wholesome if you're all sitting down to watch Jeopardy or whatever is on at that time. Yeah. Oh, if only Jeopardy. Oh, love it. And especially thinking of the trays, I grew up with so much microwave food that it took until sitting and researching this to realize that TV dinners came along way before microwaves were popular. And so they were in these like aluminum trays that are oven safe, but you know, could not go in a microwave. And yeah, putting that on your lap without like the thickest pants in the world and a pillow or something is a crazy idea to me. Like it's a metal

tray straight out of the oven you need some you need a surface to put it on unless you want weird burns yeah but again not having to like get it out and put it to plate the stuff that was equally part of the appeal because there's no dishes to do like like the tray goes right in the trash so the whole thing with america kind of becoming a disposable culture also that was part of it because once upon a time you reused all of your stuff, you know, you use the same plate for 20 years. So, you know, those were your mom's plates, but here this thing came with its own plate. And when you're done, you just threw it in the garbage. Yeah. Yeah. And the, the ads definitely encourage people to

do the convenience. We'll link, um, uh, Smithsonian's American history museum has a lot of the old ads. One of them has a tagline, how to catch the early, early show with an easy, easy dinner. There's another ad that the tagline is, I am late, but dinner won't be. And then it's a lady who's like rushing back from the store. But you know, good news. She already has an entire tray of food that she can put in the oven for 30 minutes, which in a pre-microwave culture is the fastest meal can possibly happen if it's not a sandwich. It's incredible. Yeah.

And I think that ad is very careful in how it's constructed. I assume you'll link to it in the notes. Yeah. She's back from doing household stuff. She's back from shopping. It looks like I'm late, but dinner won't be the real selling point was I'm back from work. The dinner won't be late.

So, but it would have been a political hot button to show her coming back from the office. Because again, to be clear, this change we're talking about, many, many, many husbands were not happy with this. They liked the idea of the wife bringing in a second stream of income, that the idea that dinner was not going to be this lavish home-cooked meal, but rather something brought home from a drive-thru or a frozen thing that was made that they were, they did not see that part as a positive change. And so here they've carefully

set it up. It's like, well, in the course of doing all of my good wifely duties, I'm late coming back, but we've still got a frozen meal we can make. When in reality, the message is, you know, the office closes at five, you've got to rush home and get, get dinner going. And now you can just shove this thing in the oven and it's fine. And trying to make them like, feel like there was a tension there, like not feel guilty. Like they're, they're not able to do their proper wife and mother stuff. Yeah. I, man, such a good call looking closely at this art because she's carrying, it's not work stuff, but, and she's got like one of those round decorative, I think it's a hat box or something from like an old timey department store. And it's all very like, I've been doing lady errands.

No, no, I wasn't working. We're not, we're not pushing that. No, no, calm down. I've been doing lady things out. Yes. And then there's also a clock on the wall behind her showing the time 6.05, which I think means she is five minutes late. That's the lateness she's concerned about. It's amazing. I love the gentleness of the way they're expressing this change to the men.

This sales pitch, both the overt part and the coded part, really, really worked. And Swanson's branding made them the leader. We mentioned that Maxson company that went away because they didn't get going at homes in time. But there was also a company called Quaker States Foods selling Frigidinners. But there was no TV hook or anything. It didn't go with it. There were also more popular imitations from banquet foods and Morton frozen foods because they both sold this TV dinner idea. They sold this thing where, okay, you know, as society changes and technology advances, you can have this exciting, convenient dinner and then throw the

whole tray away. Like, like that scene in Mad Men where they finish a picnic and dump everything from the blanket into the field because, you know, it's, it's the mid 20th century, man. Everything's going great. Throw it out. It's yeah. And I will admit prior to doing the prep for this episode, I actually didn't know that TV dinner, I thought that was just a slang term we all used to sarcastically refer to this food we ate while watching TV. I did not know that that was Swanson's actual name for the product. Same. But I, even though there were a bunch of competing companies making these, I fully believe that their choice to market it and call them TV dinners is what let them take over and what let it is what put that into and made that universal in homes. Because tying it to this new technology and saying it's it's OK, it's OK to eat this in front of the television.

We know this is what you want to do. Dad wants to watch the news or the baseball game or whatever. And we are like this, tying the two products together, tying the two habits together. And this fundamental change in like how we live our lives, whoever came up with that was a genius. I refer to, we reference Mad Men probably a lot in the show. I know a lot of people don't watch it, but it's a show about 1960s era advertising executives when basically modern consumerism was invented. So it's about that, the invention of like the way we live now. And calling this product a TV dinner is such a Mad Men, Don Draper thing to do, where it's like a stroke of genius, where we are sending a message about, you know, this is how people are going to be living. So we're just going to embrace it and meet the consumer halfway rather than try to pretend that nothing has changed because everything has changed. So it's, yeah. But now the thing is they actually dropped that branding in the 1960s.

I don't know why. I couldn't find why. If it was because it had taken on negative connotations or because the products had been so widespread they didn't want people to think they could only get them in front of the TV. But the fact that 60 years later we still know the term TV dinner shows how compelling a name and idea that is because it didn't matter that they stopped calling them that on the box. People kept calling them that and not just the ones from Swanson,

but from anybody like that meal in that metal tray with all the stuff there together, that is forever a TV dinner. Yeah, wow. One of the stickiest ideas ever. And Swanson, the TV dinner branding, is really what put them over the top, because they also marketed the stuff as being sold at a low price with high value. There's one ad I found where the tagline is just, low price with high value. There's one ad I found where the tagline is just trust Swanson, and then it's followed by the line, who else gives you only choice slices of slender turkey, end quote. But that doesn't really seem to have been the hook that helped sell them. And also, I like Thanksgiving always reminds me that I like turkey a lot. And most people do not like I don't

think turkey was an amazing hook for selling, selling this food to people. No, but you can see them pushing like the trust issue where it's like, this is not mystery meat. I can't emphasize enough how in the history of America, like not necessarily knowing what you were getting in the canned, like in the can of beef stew, like what type of actual meat was in there, what an issue this was for people. So when you had some sort of new, like we were joking earlier about, you know, we don't actually know what's in Velveeta cheese or we don't know what's in a lot of stuff that was, you know, you get a brand new type of food and it's in an unusual

container or an unusual preparation, having to reassure people no this is actual turkey i know it doesn't taste like it this is actual like top of the line same thing with like subway having to come out a few months ago and reassure people that their tuna subs actually did have tuna because somebody claimed to have done like the dna test and found that they could not be identified as tuna like no this is actually choice grade, whatever white flake tuna, whatever the terminology they use. It's like real tuna sourced from this place. It has been processed to a point that, yes, you do have to reassure people.

No, there was an actual turkey involved at some point. It may not be readily apparent from the end product, but I assure you there are elements of turkey in this. And also it seems like, at least in the first couple decades, there was still plenty of reason to shoot for, hey, please think of this as quality food. It turns out that the meal trays were not microwavable until 1986. You know, before that it was aluminum that'll do a bunch of sparks or whatever in your microwave. But so before that it was, you know, a 25 to 30 minute cooking time. And for the, for a long time,

this product started out as something that was not the, you know, like two to three minute microwaving a meal thing that I think I associate with a TV dinner in my head, which makes you really feel much more like you're just going to get a sodium bomb. And you, the listener, can Google current nutrition of TV dinners. One example is the Hungry Man brand mesquite-flavored classic fried chicken, which is more than 1,000 calories and just shy of the daily adult maximum of 2,300 milligrams of sodium. When it wasn't an extremely rapidly microwaved item, when you actually put it in the oven for half an hour,

it's more of a thing where you actually want to push that it is real food, it's similar to the other things you bake in there. It's also funny the comparison that these days spending 30 minutes cooking a meal seems like you're doing a straight up full on meal. But the idea that back then you would stick it in and you only have to wait 30 minutes and you'll have to do anything else was a miracle. And you don't have to do anything else was a miracle. Whereas now I know like college kids who eat cereal for every meal because the time it takes them to pour it into the bowl and put the milk in is all the time they're willing to spend on food. If they're not ordering a pizza or something, like if they're making something themselves, it's like a bowl of cereal. Because even that 25 seconds is almost too much time to spend cooking. So the idea that only 30 minutes,

it'll be ready in only 30 minutes seems almost absurd now considering, yeah, you can microwave all of these meals now have microwave instructions that'll have it to you in three or four minutes. Right. Yeah. And in terms of the health aspect, that's always been one of the trade-offs. Like if you want to preserve meat or whatever, you've got to do certain things to it. But also it was one of the trade-offs of not, you know, back in the olden days, if you sourced the meat yourself and you prepared it yourself, you knew exactly what you were putting in it. Once you turn over the food prep to a third party, whether it's a frozen food company or a restaurant, you do kind of lose the ability to control what goes in it. I think part of like the modern obesity epidemic goes to like this massive spike in eating at restaurants or eating fast food,

is that you just, you've lost control of what goes into the food because you're not, you didn't make it yourself. I think that's another quietly underappreciated change is that it's just, it would be easy to adjust, for example, how much salt you're using if you cook every meal yourself. But when you just buy it off the shelf, you don't pay close attention to the label. You actually don't know because I'm guessing those hungry man meals, like the fact that this thing has two 2300 milligrams of sodium, I'm guessing it probably does not taste that salty. That's the thing. It's because it's the way it's, it's just the way it's made. Yeah. It's what holds it together. And, and also I learned that hungry man is a modern

brand run by Swanson. So these are also people who've been doing this forever. It's not like they just got into the field and messed it up or something. This is the go-to method of doing it. Yeah. To be clear, all the food you eat is made by like three companies. Yeah, that too. But yeah, and with these, as we said earlier with the numbers, these TV dinners as an item are beginning to decline from that 1953 start to the first decade of the 2000s. They grew and grew.

They're starting to go down a little bit. But also the act of eating dinner in front of a TV was kind of also invented with this and has only gotten more popular. In 2013, NPR ran a study in the US and found that about a quarter of kids that they surveyed in the US ate with a screen going. Like maybe it's a family dinner, but the TV is on or somebody's using an electronic device, there's a screen somewhere. Also, they said about half of kids' families did not sit together for dinner at least once a week, usually because of scheduling, because everybody's busy with something at this specific time. Also, The Atlantic said that as of 2012, almost half of households in big American

cities had just one resident. They were just one person living on their own. And there's not a follow-up statistic for that. i just figure a lot of those people are looking at a screen while they eat because like why not they're eating by themselves like who like are they just supposed to stare at a wall they could but they probably don't yeah if it's not a screen then they're reading a magazine or yeah something yeah look at something but yeah that's yeah going back to beginning days, the idea that you're just always consuming media while, or yeah, they may be listening to a podcast. Like the idea that you're consuming media while doing the other thing is now just normal to the point where somebody doesn't do it. It's kind of considered unusual, I guess.

Yeah, it's definitely the shift. Yeah, it's definitely the shift. And we also like, looked around for internet resources on whether eating in front of a screen eating by yourself, whether that changes your eating habits, you can find stuff from the Cleveland Clinic or from Harvard Health that will link that does suggest people eat a larger amount if they're distracted by a show, because there's there's a gap between when you eat something and when you feel full from it. It's reportedly about 20 minutes. And so that gap is something you're dealing with no matter what, but if you're watching a show that maybe distracts you from being mindful of it. So for that one reason, there might be some impact of watching a thing on how you eat stuff. Yeah, it's one of those things that's extremely difficult to study. I've got another link here where they did an analysis and found that there does seem to be a difference between how you eat, whether you're eating alone or if you're eating with your family, but whether or not the family is watching a TV or you're eating

alone while watching TV. The TV didn't seem to make a difference, but the group and setting of what you ate did. I personally, when I've had weight problems in my life, I feel like it's been related to me while I'm working on the computer or whatever, just continually snacking because you're not aware of how full you are. It's just like an absent-minded habit. But that may just be me. This is one of those things that's extremely difficult to study because if you don't have people in a controlled setting, you're just basing it on self-reporting.

You're asking them, did you eat more when you watched the TV? And people don't tend to tell the truth about their diets. But if you do it in a controlled experimental setting, now you've taken them out of the natural habits, so they're not going to behave the same. This is why diet is one of those, like, obesity, it's one of those extremely difficult things to study and get to the bottom of because it's really hard to get a look at people's habits in any kind of ethical way,

short of just straight-up spying on people without their knowledge. Right. Or those mid-20th century psychology experiments that were human rights violations. Yeah, back when they just didn't care. They just kidnapped several orphans and just saw them. Yeah, you're in a pretend prison now, and here's shocks. Just crazy, horrible stuff, yeah.

But did you, like growing up, did you eat in front of the TV or did you, did you guys all gather around the dinner table? We made a point of gathering at the dinner table and I'm, you know, I'm glad we did. And I think it was for a few reasons. It was partly that we only owned one TV and it was in, it was down in the basement. It was not where the dining table was upstairs and the main floor. And I think also my parents really prioritized that as like time when, you know, we'd all actually like sit and be together and stuff. But because also otherwise they were like not anti-technology. I got as much screen time as I ever wanted. And I think the idea of eating TV dinners was like

a baseline that we were trying to stay above. This is kind of me guessing, but I think we just wanted to do the better thing than that. Like we knew about it and we were like, we're going to be at a higher level. That's the plan. I wasn't aware of that at the time, but it was clear looking back that my parents were trying to do the same. Like they were trying to, there was some social pressure to like, no, let's go into the dining room around the table, you know, and get the stuff that we have piled on that table off and put the food there instead. And let's all eat together as a family. But ultimately, you know, my dad and my mother both did shift work. The shifts didn't line up like the odds. Everyone

was free and open at six or 7 PM to actually sit down and do this, I think got rarer and rarer as time went on. And so I remember eating more meals in my room in front of the TV or on a TV tray in the living room in front of the television. And yeah, once you got to where every room has a TV in it, you can just have it on. And that's the thing where I think that was a change that occurred against their will, but it was more just, this is how the system has changed. You know, there's more jobs that work you overnight or that work you in the evenings. There's more, you know, it's now an expectation that both parents work and as soon as the kids are teenagers, they get jobs.

And the idea that you could sit down and have an entire hour to prepare a real, like actual cooked meal and then sit down and eat it together, that would be more like Sunday dinner being a special occasion when we can actually do that rather than that being the expectation. Wow, yeah. Because it was designed as like, oh, we're being very conscious about this being a time we can do it. And then also sometimes people's schedules don't allow it. And so, you know, then we do our best, but we like knew that was the plan at least. And, and also we ate a lot of frozen food. Like we, we didn't eat these pre-determined trays from

one company that you just unbox and put in, but we would eat meals where a lot of the components were frozen and heated in an oven, you know, like that, that was so common. That's great. Heating up a frozen lasagna or a frozen pizza, something like that. It's not a TV dinner, but it's still a box that we put in the oven. And it was often, for me, I liked those better than what we would have made fresh because I think it's because it's what I was raised on. Yeah, same. But to try to bring this to some sort of a conclusion, it's I think looking into the future, the real habit I would look at now with the pandemic and the shift to people working at home over Zoom. I think the process of eating your meal in front of the computer or eating it around your laptop is the real change rather than eating it while consuming entertainment.

your laptop is the real change rather than eating it while consuming entertainment. But the idea that I've been working from home since 2007, so I've got 14 years of this. I can tell you right now, because work is always there, like in the next room, it is very tempting when you're eating a meal to be thinking, well, if I'm just eating anyway, like I'm just wasting time, I might as well catch up on my email. And so you've got the laptop over here and you've got, you know, whatever you're eating over it right next to it. And I think that is a habit. I would not be shocked to find out that there are now 10 million more people doing that than there were five years ago, just because it's now expected for so many people that you have a home office set up and you've got a desk and that you might as well just power through and catch dinner while you're working. And the kids can go eat in their rooms, whatever, while they're looking at their phones and that that that is the new thing.

Yeah. Wow. Because it is it's unstudiable and I think has just swept the nation, like those 1950s TV purchases. That's just a thing now. something that's been around forever, but the whole joke of somebody on their computer eating chicken tenders, that's, that's because it's a meal you can eat with one hand while typing or while using a laptop, you can just reach over and grab one. It's not like trying to eat a big messy sandwich or spaghetti or something like that, that you absolutely could not eat while using a computer. And then I think once, you know, 10 or 20 years from now, when self-driving cars become common, then meals that can be eaten while your car is driving you somewhere will become a big thing. Because again, why waste, why waste that commute? Wow. So as right now, I don't doubt there's people in their cars drinking smoothies or eating those cliff bars or something like that on the way to work. But the idea of, well, no, you've got a 40 minute commute. Here's a, some sort of scrambled egg

meal. You can actually eat in your car. That's an actual meal. It'd be the exact same type of change. Like it's, it's like, here's somehow we've made something that's more like an actual, that's like actual food, but can be consumed in a space where you normally wouldn't. And it's all about this distinctly American thing that we then push on the rest of the world of, it is shameful to ever be doing just one thing. You always must be multitasking. You could be just an octopus doing eight things at once, always. Yeah. And the idea that relaxing is an actual thing that is part of the things you need to be doing in a day is ludicrous. The idea that your brain ever needs to rest or slow down or digest the information it's taking in is nuts. If you stop moving, you're like a shark.

If you stop moving, you're like a proverbial train full of turkey. If you stop moving, you will just spoil and rot, then you will be no good to anyone. Man, I just keep thinking about that turkey train. Like there were executive meetings where it's like, what's on the agenda, Gladys? And just Gladys' entire list is the turkey train. Like, it's just really funny to me. I was going to make this really tense potboiler thriller about this train full of turkey. And they're getting down to the final hours of, we've got to find something to do with these 300 tons of turkey, of rolling turkey.

And they try to stop the train and it won't the brakes fail and so it's like we got to stop the turkey train before it it runs into the this gravy factory in pennsylvania and they don't stop it in time but the good news the silver lining is we discovered a new type of food discovered a new type of food. Folks, that is the main episode for this week. My thanks to Jason Pargin for cooking this one up with me. So helpful. So great.

Anyway, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. If you support this show on patreon.com, patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is Orville Redenbacher, a shockingly important real guy. Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of almost six dozen other bonus shows, and to back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring TV dinners with us. Here is one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, TV dinners became a thing because of a one-time turkey overload. Takeaway number two, the TV part was a much bigger societal change than anything in the dinner part.

Plus tons more stuff about the entire history of television, the entire history of dinners, and more. Those are the takeaways. Also, please follow my guest. He's great. Jason Pargin is at JohnDiesAtTheEN on Twitter. That's JohnDiesAtTheEnd minus a letter. Jason also has a new Substack, which is an email subscription service. You can get amazing writing and ideas from Jason in your inbox. We'll have a link for that. And his newest book is entitled Zoe Punches the Future in the D**k. That's written under the soon-to-be-retired pen name David Wong. He also has a huge range of other amazing novels, such as John Dies at the End. Get one for the holidays. Get one for a gift.

You know, share a piece of writing with somebody you care about. Many research sources this week. Here are some key ones. Tons of great articles, in particular a piece for Smithsonian Magazine by Covey Biaccolo. Also a whole set of online resources from the Library of Congress, and a blog they run called Everyday Mysteries. And then tons of pieces from The Atlantic, The New York Times, NPR, and others covering the entire modern phenomenon of how we eat and what we look at while we eat it. Find those and many more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun. And beyond all that, our theme music is unbroken, unshaven by the Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks

to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our patrons. I hope you love this week's bonus show. And thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.