One of the biggest hoax’s perpetuated on the American eating habit was the introduction of the “TV Dinner”. Wikipedia describes it as such; “A TV Dinner is a packaged frozen meal that usually comes portioned as an individual meal….it requires very little preparation and may contain a number of separate elements that comprise a single serving meal”. It’s popularity burst into Supermarket aisles and onto American dining tables just as the new decade of the sixties was dawning. By 1960, nine out of ten households had a television comprising an astounding number of 52 million sold. Programing at that point only lasted until about nine o’clock in the evening before signing off. So every minute it was on , Americans were mesmerized by it. TV dinners were invented, as marketed in advertising, ” to get Mom out of the kitchen, to spend more time watching her favorite entertainment”.
Well, my Mom didn’t want out of the kitchen. She took her responsibility of raising three young boys very seriously. When she planned a meal, nutrition was very much on her mind. She planned three meals a day many days in advance and seldom deviated from the plan. To her way of thinking TV Dinners were an assault on Motherhood. So while other kids were getting to try turkey and sweet potatoes cooked in minutes in aluminum foil, we still had to wait an hour or so for our meals. Her opinion was so strong and deeply rooted that TV Dinners were OUTLAWED in our house. As a matter of fact, it kind of had a boomerang affect on her meal choices. Ham & Beans which took all day to cook began to appear more often on the nightly supper table. It was a kind of subliminal response to the instant meals being served next door at my buddies house. It seemed, the longer it took to prepare a meal, the more sustained we were.
Never a big fan of Ham and Beans, I lobbied long and hard on behalf of Swanson instant dinners. My ten year old argument that every body I knew was enjoying them. This argument was instantly dismissed with the age old response, “if everyone else was jumping off a cliff, would you do that too?”. She felt so strongly about this new fad that we were even forbidden to eat a TV Dinner at someone else’s house. With that ringing in my ears, I began to invite myself to supper at some of my friends houses. That didn’t work because we had a rule that we were to phone home to ask permission to miss a meal. During the permission call, Mom would ask to speak to my buddies Mom to see if it was ok. During that conversation it was conveyed that I was to be sent home if TV Dinners were being served.
Mom did get more creative with her meal choices and we began to see fantastic desserts show up at the end of the meal. Because my Mom was a great cook and her meals were usually worth the sacrifice, the TV Dinner ban was upheld for several years at our house. Dad thought the whole fiasco was hilarious. He always watched the fifteen minute news broadcast at six pm and every time a Swanson commercial aired, he would wonder aloud, to know one in particular, about the taste of that item. To which my mother would respond, “you’ll never find out in this house”, which would illicit a loud chuckle.
I eventually did sneak a forbidden dinner at a friends house and had to admit, it wasn’t worth the trouble. It sure didn’t taste like Mom’s cooking. Mom’s ban on frozen ready to eat meals lasted well in to the decade. In 1964 my sister was born and having a baby around kind of took time away from meal preparation. She still, however, insisted that we were home and at the supper table at 5:30 in the evening. Most nights everything was from scratch, but once in a while, something thawed, was served. We never mentioned it and I never saw a TV Dinner at our house until I was almost a senior in High School. By then so much of the current culture had changed, TV Dinners seemed insignificant.
I never did develop a taste for frozen meals and rarely eat them now, but I would give anything for a plate of my Mom’s Ham and Beans today.