What Do Thanksgiving and TV Dinners Have In Common?

In 1953, an employee at C.A. Swanson & Sons overestimated demand for Thanksgiving turkey and the company was left with some 260 tons of extra frozen birds. As a solution, Smithsonian reports, a Swanson salesman ordered 5,000 aluminum trays, devised a turkey meal and recruited an assembly line of workers to compile what would become the first TV tray dinners. A culinary hit was born. In the first full year of production, 1954, the company sold 10 million turkey TV tray dinners.

Yes!  Turning lemons in lemonade!  We say, “Well done!”.

P.S.  As a side note memory here, in my family we never had any kind of “junk food” growing up.  Everyone in my family cooked and we also enjoyed very fine restaurants as well as the occasional hamburger and milkshake…it was the 50’s after all.  On the evenings when my parents went out and left us with a babysitter, so that my mother didn’t have to cook us dinner before she went, we were allowed to have this new “convenience food” from the market that everyone was talking about….a Swanson turkey TV dinner.  We used to beg my parents to go out just so we could have them….not because the food was so remarkably good (though I don’t remember it being bad) but rather because it was such a novelty.  The research on this post was done by my dear chum Jackie, and though I had more than my share of Swanson frozen TV turkey dinners, I never knew of their origins. I’ll bet you did’t either. As the late Paul Harvey would have said “Now you know the REST of the story!” 🙂