You don’t hear the term “TV dinner” much anymore.

It was still a fairly new term in 1954. And it was a very specific thing – it came frozen in an aluminum tray with compartments.

The main maker of these meals was Swanson, an independent food company that was a year away from acquisition by Campbell Soup. The first TV dinners were turkey – there was a compartment with a couple of slices of freeze-dried turkey, gravy and stuffing, a smaller compartment for the worst mashed potatoes you can imagine, and a space for dessert, usually some cranberry muffin kind of thing.

Eventually, Swanson sold varieties such as fried chicken, salisbury steak, and macaroni and cheese.

It usually took about 45 minutes to an hour to heat the dinners in a conventional oven. 

Fast forward to 2024: 45 MINUTES! Are you kidding?

Between the Swanson TV dinner and what’s in your freezer right now was a device that was actually around in 1954.

The discovery that you can heat food rapidly with a microwave beam came in the 1940s. And there were microwaves in use in 1954 – if you could afford the $3,000 they cost, the equivalent of nearly $35,000 today.

When the price became a bit more reasonable, around $400, in the late 1960s, companies began selling them to a mass audience. Sharp, Amana and Litton were the first popular makers of the devices, which most people discovered in the break rooms of their workplace. 

Microwaves never really caught on as a way to cook a regular dinner. What they were for was heating things fast. You could boil water in two minutes, pop corn in one, melt butter and reheat leftovers.

And the frozen TV dinner became a frozen meal. 

Swanson was actually slow to pick up on the idea that maybe its frozen dinners weren’t suitable for the microwave age. For one thing, you can’t put an aluminum tray in a microwave.

What was once one case in a supermarket is now a whole row. Meat, fish, vegetarian dishes, pizza, ethnic foods. There are few foods that can’t be heated or reheated in a microwave. And dinner is ready in 5 minutes or less, especially on a night when you come home late from work and have no energy to mix any two ingredients together to create a meal.

But microwaves aren’t the only thing that would come as a surprise to our parents.

Food processors, a more advanced form of blender, came into popular use in the 1980s after Cuisinart developed its machine. Bread machines baked loaves in people’s homes in a couple of hours. Air fryers are making french fries safe to eat again.

And the ultimate in convenience food started out as a new use for an old device – the toaster. In 1964, Kellogg’s introduced Pop Tarts, described as a toaster pastry. It is one of the most popular convenience foods in American history – the subject of a forthcoming movie by Jerry Seinfeld.

Bon Zappetit!