How Did the World’s First Pre-prepared Frozen Meal Come About?

Swanson thought this was a brilliant idea. The company designed a turkey dinner, served in small compartmented trays, packaged in paperboard cartons and then frozen. Each tray was divided into several sections – one for the meat (initially turkey, later expanding to chicken, beef and fish) and another for vegetables and sauce. This was the world’s first pre-prepared frozen meal, and it was an enormous success from the moment it was introduced. Beyond convenience, what won the American public over was its name – “TV Dinner” – and its packaging, modelled on the shape of a television screen. After all, it was the early 1950s, and television was still a modern, exciting novelty. A year later, Swanson & Sons had sold more than 25 million TV Dinners, and frozen food had become a way of life for many households. Today, the annual sales of frozen food in American supermarkets exceed 5.9 billion US dollars. The trend is strong in the UK too, where consumers cheerfully tuck into 400,000 tonnes of pre-prepared meals every year.

Metal cans can now hold everything from soup to soda. Americans open more than 200 million cans a day. To our delight, the recycling of aluminium cans (aluminium being an almost inexhaustible resource) is easy and quick — an old can can be turned into a new one and back on the supermarket shelf in under 60 days. In theory, this means a shopper buys the same piece of aluminium six times in a year. Only very few foods cannot be canned, and in some cases, canned food may be even healthier. Tinned tomatoes contain higher levels of lycopene – a powerful antioxidant – than fresh ones.

Perhaps war gave rise to sealed glass jars and tinplate cans, but war may also be what spells their end. The retort pouch developed in Natick is being adopted by an increasing number of food companies, and a growing number of products on supermarket shelves are now packaged in retort pouches, including those previously sold in tinplate cans or glass jars. From luncheon meat, tuna and smoked salmon to cooked rice and all kinds of pre-prepared foods, everything is being packed into this lightweight new pouch. These pouches are typically designed with three sides sealed and a wide, flat base so they can stand upright, and some even feature a resealable zipper. Like their military counterparts, they have an inner layer in contact with the food, an outer layer made of nylon or polyester (onto which printing can be applied), and a middle layer of aluminium foil (to keep out oxygen and moisture). Most importantly, you can replace the aluminium with new barrier films so that the food inside is visible, and – perhaps even more important, as consumers increasingly favour convenience foods – the pouch can go straight into the microwave. Retort pouches are not only lighter and easier to open; they also offer the food industry the single greatest advantage of all: they take up less space, saving on shelf fees.

Tomatoes, then, may be the first food to make the switch away from the can. The Swedish packaging company Tetra Pak – the company that put the Rausing family among the world’s wealthiest – has begun supplying the UK supermarket chain Sainsbury’s with tomatoes packaged in “Tetra Recart” cartons. A Tetra Recart is a rectangular carton made using technology similar to that of a retort pouch. After heating and sealing, the food inside can be stored for 6 to 18 months. Furthermore, the company has pointed out that flexible packaging can spare British fingers from being cut open by can lids – according to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, this happens more than 2,000 times a year.

III. Modified Atmosphere Packaging

In early spring 2005, Spain was hit by a severe frost that left it unable to supply British supermarkets with salad vegetables. With harvests damaged, Spanish exporters could not fulfil their lettuce orders. Lettuce prices soared by around 80%. All of a sudden, produce that would normally have crossed Europe by lorry to reach Britain had to be flown in from the west coast of the United States instead. Airlines found themselves unlikely beneficiaries of a boom in lettuce imports. As global food supply chains have become ever more tightly interconnected, the weather in a far-off country has become an issue that supermarket managers and freight agents watch closely. In the world of “globally traded perishable food”, a frost in one country can fill another country’s aircraft with lettuces.

As well as keeping a steady stream of fruit and vegetables flowing, airlines have also profited from an increasingly popular type of food. This is “fresh-cut”. Fresh-cut refers to fruits and vegetables that come in small sealed plastic containers, already peeled or washed and sorted, sliced or chopped, ready to eat straight out of the pack. Initially, fresh-cut meant bags of washed, sliced lettuce. Now there are also pineapple chunks and apple slices, or mixed vegetables sold as an “Asian stir-fry vegetable mix”, catering to consumers’ appetite for convenience.

Of course, for some people, chopping vegetables is part of the pleasure of cooking and eating. However, food suppliers can tell from the demand they receive that there are enough lazy cooks among consumers to justify the extra cost of this new format. The time spent preparing a meal is also shrinking. Today, most people spend around half an hour preparing a meal. It is estimated that, by 2030, the ideal preparation time will be just 5 to 15 minutes. With already-peeled, pre-cut fruit and vegetables, such a timeframe is clearly achievable.

Preserving fresh-cut fruit and vegetables is a major challenge, as fruits such as apples and pears quickly turn brown once sliced. Modified Atmosphere Packaging (MAP) is commonly used for pre-cut bagged salads, by pumping nitrogen or carbon dioxide into the container to reduce the oxygen level inside, slowing the growth of any unwanted organisms and preventing browning and wilting. Strawberries in a modified-atmosphere pack can last two weeks after picking. Research into new ideas continues. US scientist Olusola Lamikanra has been researching how to “deceive” a plant’s sensory system. He found that cutting fruit and vegetables while submerged in water creates a barrier that prevents the physiological and biochemical changes triggered when a plant is damaged – changes that lead to fruit decay. Breathable plastic films are also being developed, using a laser scoring system to select films with different permeability levels to meet the requirements of various foods. For example, a soft-pack pouch of tinned pineapple will burst if too much carbon dioxide builds up inside.

Of course, whether this type of packaging is healthy, whether it preserves the flavour, and what the quality is like are another matter entirely. There is evidence that modified-atmosphere packaging can destroy important nutrients in food. In any case, fruit and vegetables taken out of a plastic wrapper are simply never as good as those picked that same day.

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— From the Introduction to The Feast: The Food That Built and Unbuilt Our World