A Feast For the Eyes

Big slices of turkey (white meat, of course).  Mashed potatoes.  Cornbread stuffing.  And a helping of green peas.  The classic Thanksgiving dinner, the traditional meal of family gatherings around the ancestral dinner table (with the extra leaves inserted for more room and a smaller table nearby for the children.)

Except it wasn't Thanksgiving, and there was no family gathering, nor was there an ancestral table.  In fact, it helped tear families apart and change the dietary habits of Americans for generations.

It was the 1954 Swanson TV Dinner.

Bear with me for a momentary digression.  In 1992, Cecilia Tichi published The Electronic Hearth, an examination of a particular strain of early television advertising.  Her thesis was that television was introduced into the American home by a bit of clever and sustained subterfuge—marketers co-opted a traditional symbol of family and warmth and reassigned it to television:  the colonial hearth.  From before the Revolution, the fireplace hearth had been the center of the home, the source of physical heat and, often, the source of cooked food as well.  It was the focal point of the room, and all who lived there gathered around it for physical and emotional comfort.

But by the 1950s, with central heating, there was little use for the hearth except as a nostalgic entertainment on cold evenings.  Television, its promoters promised, could take its place.  

This substitution overlooked one fundamental problem, though:  television demands to be watched.  The glow from the screen with constantly shifting lights and shadows oozes into our consciousness even if we’re not looking directly at it.  Characters speak dialogue to each other (emerging out of rather tiny, imprecise speakers), and if you care about the program you’re watching, you need to pay attention.  And, since television was a “one-time-only” event in the early days, if you missed a plot point, you missed it forever (or at least until re-run season).

Leave the TV off and engage in a traditional family meal, with conversation and interchange?  Try to treat it as background and pay divided attention, both to it and to each other?  Or give in and eat meals in front of the TV, each in a separate attention bubble?

Swanson and others capitalized upon and encouraged the latter.  The war had inspired incredible advances in television technology (it was basically the same technology as radar) that transformed it from an expensive, pre-war novelty into an affordable device for the masses.  Advances in freezing and food preservation, plus the emergence of industrial agriculture in the wake of the Depression, had made the nationwide distribution of pre-packaged food practical.  Even the aluminum tray in which the food was set benefited from war production of aircraft.  And women, clinging to new-found freedoms and interests outside the home, no longer felt as compelled to spend hours preparing meals; 25 minutes at 425 and it was all ready.  It was the perfect marriage of two emerging postwar mega-industries:  Big Food and Big Telecom.  

But one more element was necessary.  You can’t easily watch television at the same time you’re eating off of a heavy oak table—too much neck craning, turning, and spilling involved.  It’s far more convenient to face the TV directly, with the food at stomach level while sitting.  Thus, another product of wartime advances in aluminum and fiberglass:  the TV tray.

So it was that, growing up, I ate most of my meals in my own room, watching my own programs (The Mickey Mouse Club, of course, Combat with Vic Morrow, The Twilight Zone, etc.) while my parents and sister did the same in other parts of the house.  

So before you complain next time you see a group of friends sitting together, but each immersed in their own smartphone world, remember:  it’s a process that started over 60 years ago.