From TV Dinners to Smartphones
The 1950s meal was a gateway drug for screen addiction.
ET
William Gottlieb/
Our zombie-like modern addiction to screens isn’t as new as you may think. In the late 1940s, television sets began to appear in American homes. After gathering at the supper table to dine and talk about their days, parents and children moved into the den to be entertained by the novel contraptions. So far, so good.
Then two things happened.
In 1950, newspaper advertisements began promoting “TV trays” or “TV tray tables.” These were storable metal trays on tubular legs. Tray tables had one purpose: to be unfolded before a TV set so that instead of conversing with others around a dining-room table, people could eat while mutely staring at a TV screen.
The TV tray tables were generic; no one owned the name. But the second society-altering development was trademarked.
Nebraska-based C.A. Swanson & Sons Co., which began as an egg-and-poultry concern, introduced something called the TV Dinner. In 1953, when Swanson purchased some of its initial advertising, the phrase had almost no foothold in American culture. Within a couple of years, most Americans were quite familiar with TV Dinners.
These frozen meals were arranged in heat-and-serve aluminum trays with three compartments. The outer package featured an illustration of a television screen with a picture of the food as if it were being broadcast.
The first Swanson meal to lure families away from the dinner table evoked warm thoughts of Thanksgiving. From an early commercial, starring a silky-voiced pitch man standing near an onstage refrigerator:
“You serve big and hearty slices of moist, tender Swanson turkey, with grand giblet gravy and special corn-bread dressing, and fluffy, whipped sweet potatoes with golden Swanson butter, and garden-fresh peas with more butter.”
About 10 million TV Dinners were sold in 1954. New entrees were added: fried chicken, pot roast, Swiss steak. Before long, crack Swanson engineers added a fourth compartment to the aluminum trays, for dessert. All hail apple crisp!
The seductive power of the screens, beckoning families from their dining rooms, was unstoppable. Sensing a business opportunity, Swanson took out more, unambiguously worded, newspaper ads: “Watch your favorite TV shows and serve a turkey dinner, too!” The ads featured pseudonymous home economist Sue Swanson, who promised that you purchased three TV Dinners and sent back the wrappers, Swanson would promptly mail you a “big silver dollar.” How could the staid old supper table compete with that?
The TV Dinner was an early, if unintended, step toward our current world in which unblinking people can’t look away from the screens they carry everywhere, oblivious to what is going on around them. Back then, a skeptical Los Angeles Mirror-News columnist, Hal Humphrey, wrote: “Most of us spend too much time watching TV anyway. Why ruin our stomachs as well as our dispositions? Mealtime used to offer us an excuse for getting away from the darned thing.” He had no idea how good the families of those one-screen-per-household years had it.
Mr. Greene’s books include “Chevrolet Summers, Dairy Queen Nights.”