July 28-August 3, 2005

fine print

Ode to a Fallen, Frozen Hero

by Carolyn Wyman

I don't usually say grace before meals, but last week I said a little prayer of thanks over my frozen entree for TV dinner inventor (and one-time Ardmore resident) Gerald Thomas, who died last Monday. I would like to suggest other women, in particular, if not say a prayer, at least raise a tray of Healthy Choice Flavor Adventures Chicken Chardonnay in honor of the creator of the ultimate expression of the postwar convenience foods that made it possible for women to do something with their lives besides whip up breakfast, lunch and dinner. (Thus Thomas is at least indirectly responsible for the careers of Susan Sontag and Britney Spears.)

Thomas was not just a visionary on equal rights. I mean, here was a man with the imagination to see inspiration in this derided duo: airline food and the boob tube. As the story goes, Thomas was a traveling salesman for poultry processor Swanson in the early 1950s when he encountered both airline meals and people lined up in the streets in front of store windows staring at the brand-new "picture-radios." He talked the Swanson brothers into freezing complete meals, featuring their turkey, into airline-like trays and calling them TV dinners to link the magic of this new heat-and-eat meal with the miracle of television.

Certainly TV dinners were convenient for the lucky few who could afford TVs and didn't want to cook when the shows were on in the early evening, but for the vast majority, they were a cheap way of buying into modernity and hipness. Thomas' dinners, whose boxes actually looked like TVs, cleverly exploited Americans' vanity and striving the same way McMansions and Target housewares do today.

The dinners also appealed to Americans' sense of individualism and, in fact, marked the end of the days when families sat down at the table together to hear lectures on manners or how much kids in Biafra would love spinach. With TV dinners, people could eat what they wanted, when they wanted. I know my brothers and I always preferred TV dinners to my mom's cooking (although we could never say it) and the novelty of the offerings and the separation of the different foods in their individual compartments (no green pea juice-dyed potatoes!) were only part of it. The dirty secret of American family life is that many (most?) people do not cook as well as the big commercial food companies. This is particularly true in the current age of dual-career households, cooking illiteracy and greatly improved TV dinners from Healthy Choice and Stouffer's.

I know that were it not for my five-day-a-week TV dinner habit I would probably have long since starved to death (or gone bankrupt eating at restaurants). So thank you, Mr. Thomas. Though I know they say you can't take it with you, I, for one, am hoping you asked for your body to be cryogenically frozen with some of those wrinkly green peas.