What happens when a company drastically overestimates the amount of turkey that Americans will eat on Thanksgiving’s turkey dinner? If you’ve walked through a grocery store lately, you’ve already seen the freezers in the meat section filling up with frozen turkeys. Companies plan well in advance to make sure there are plenty of birds available for everyone’s holiday meals. So, what does happen if the estimate is too high?
After Thanksgiving in 1953, Swanson found itself with 260 tons of unsold frozen turkeys. The birds were placed in ten refrigerated railroad cars to keep them from thawing. The refrigeration only worked if the cars were moving, so the company kept the leftover turkeys traveling between their headquarters in Nebraska and the East Coast, while they tried to decide what to do with them.
An oft-repeated cliché is, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” The solution to excess turkey turned out to be the invention of TV dinners. While frozen meals were already in use by airlines and bars, they had not yet become available for home use. Swanson created a turkey dinner served over stuffing with sides of sweet potato and corn that could be quickly heated in the oven in the pre-portioned foil trays.
The dinners were advertised as time savers for the modern woman and connected to the new national habit of watching TV in the evenings. The cost was 98 cents. TV dinners quickly grew in popularity. In 1954, the company sold over 10 million turkey dinners. Not everyone was happy, though. Some men apparently wrote to Swanson complaining about the loss of home-cooked meals.
TV dinners quickly became a part of the American household. Other companies developed their own meals. When the microwave came along, the foil trays were replaced with microwave-safe paper ones, and dinner could be ready even faster. Now, if you walk down the frozen section of a grocery store, there is often an entire aisle dedicated to the many varieties of frozen dinners.
I admire Swanson for finding such a creative way to use up their turkey, changing the way a nation ate dinner. It is ironic that freezer meals, one of the least labor-intensive options we have for eating, have their origins in Thanksgiving dinner, a meal that requires multiple days of baking and preparation.
Perhaps this year I will microwave myself a quick and easy TV dinner the night before Thanksgiving while our oven is occupied with the pies and casseroles for the big day.
Crystal Kelly is a feature writer for Bizarre Bytes with those unusual facts that you only need to know for Trivial Pursuit, Jeopardy, or to stump your in-laws.
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