Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren vogelbam here, what would we see if we peeked into your fridge carefully prepared meals for the week, plus ingredients to riff on? Or are we looking at more like takeout containers or a mess of condiments and nothing to put them on? Maybe something unrecognizably fuzzy or gozer No shame here aside from Mesopotamian gods. Some combination of the latter describes the fridge shelves belonging to many of us.
Maybe it's a busy schedule stress or just undeveloped cooking skills, but it can be hard to make a home cooked dinner or breakfast or lunch, So frozen meals to the rescue. A freezing foods for eating later is nothing new. Humans have been doing that for millennia, but prepared frozen meals ready to be reheated and eaten didn't come around until technological innovations in the nineteen hundreds led to affordable refrigerators
and quick freezing machines. No one person invented frozen convenience foods. It took a bunch of steps a few mishaps and some smart marketing. But let's step back from frozen meals to frozen foods period. The high quality frozen foods that retain their texture and flavor when reheated can be largely credited to one Clarence Bird's eye. Yes, that Bird's eye. He developed a system of packing and flash freezing fresh
food back in the nineteen twenties. These two parts of the process, the packing and the flash freezing, are critical because you've got two main obstacles to food being appetizing once it's reheated. One is freezer burn, which happens when frozen foods are exposed to enough circulating air that ice crystals on the surface layer of the food evaporate, leaving a terrible little dry i pocket behind. The best way to prevent this is to seal food in air tight
packaging with the surface tightly covered. The second obstacle to overcome is mushiness. This occurs because most things that we eat, alike meats and vegetables, contain a lot of water. When water freezes, it expands and forms ice crystals of increasing size that can break up cell walls within food, which
means that food will be mushy when it's reheated. But if you freeze something very quickly, the size of the ice crystals that form will be small and hopefully won't rupture those cell walls, and thus the food will hold up a lot better. Bird's Eye worked out both of these issues and launched the Bird's Eye Frosted Food Company in nineteen thirty with eighteen types of fish, other meats,
fruits like raspberries, and vegetables like spinach. It wasn't an immediate success, but partially because canned goods were already so popular, and partially because lots of stores and homes didn't have mechanical refrigerators. World War II helped the American War Production Board enacted restrictions on metals like ten for use in the war effort. Cans were made of tin, and so buying canned goods at grocery stores cost more ration points
than other foods. Besides that, lots of canned food production lines had been turned to making rations for armed forces overseas, so back at home, grocers started stocking frozen foods, sometimes in leased refrigerators. After the war, sales of home refrigerators picked up two Meanwhile, inventors had already started creating frozen meals.
In nineteen forty four, a company had started producing the line of complete meals frozen on individual resin coated paper trays that they called strato plates, originally for the Navy and then later for the commercial airline AM. The first frozen meals hit the consumer market in nineteen forty nine, when a Pittsburgh area company began selling fridge dinners on
aluminum trays. However, it was Swanson's massive nineteen fifty four advertising campaign that sealed the deal on frozen meals for consumers. Plus the rise of a technically unrelated device, the television, After World War II, television experienced wild growth. It went from being something a few thousand people had in their homes in the nineteen forties to something over half the population had by nineteen fifty five. Swanson called their new frozen meal a TV dinner to ride the exploding wave
of popularity. The story goes that Swanson executive Jerry Thomas got the idea to enter the frozen dinner foray after having been served one on a flight in nineteen fifty two. The company was simultaneously trying to solve a problem they had with Thanksgiving turkey leftovers. Not just a few tupperware containers worth either, but we're talking about two hundred and sixty tons of turkey. Thomas suggested that the Swanson brothers freeze the surplus, and two years later they had frozen
dinners on their local market around Omaha, Nebraska. They got the idea to tie the concept in with watching television and even shaped the tray a bit like a TV set. They sold ten million meals their first year after taking their ad campaign national, including a Thanksgiving tray featuring turkey, corn bread, stuffing, peas, and sweet potatoes. Over the years, America's frozen foods have continued to develop two meet our wants.
More menu options were added, including favorites like fish sticks in nineteen fifty three, pizza rolls in nineteen sixty eight, and frozen breakfasts like pancakes and sausages in nineteen sixty nine. A glance into the freezers at your local supermarket is all you need to know that today's frozen foods are distant comes to the TV dinners of the nineteen fifties. There are all kinds of single microwavable plates, bags, with complete meals for a skillet or baking dish, and party
sized platters. You can find everything from breakfast sandwiches to butternut squash ravioli, lemon grass coconut chicken, to lemon merang pie and samosa's to spiral fries, plus classics like meat loaf and mashed potatoes and beef stroganof meals, and you know, an entire wall of frozen pizzas. The first frozen pizza
debuted early on in nineteen forty nine. The industry's expansion into different foods catering to different tastes and health concerns like low sodium, gluten free, and vegan options really paid off during the first couple years of the COVID nineteen pandemic. American consumers stuck at home purchased record high numbers of frozen foods in twenty twenty and twenty twenty one. We've backed off a bit since then, but the money that we've spent on frozen foods has continued to rise due
to inflation and corporate earnings policies. It's estimated that the frozen food industry in the US will top eighty billion dollars in sales this year twenty twenty four, which means it's just about quadrupled in the last twenty years, not shabby for an industry that's been around for a little
under a century. By the way, the quick freezing process allows foods to retain not just their texture, but also a lot of the vitamins, minerals, and other good stuff that they tend to lose during the canning process, so frozen fruit, vegetables, and proteins are as healthy as fresh and a better nutritional choice than canned. However, a lot of prepared frozen meals do have a bunch of salt, sugar, and or fat added, so watch out for that if that's something you want or need to watch out for.
Today's episode is based on the article history of TV Dinners. Stuff works dot Com written by Maria Tremarky. Brain Stuff is production of by Heart Radio in partnership with how stuff works dot Com, and it's produced by Tyler Klang. For more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the Aheartradio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.