Peeling Back the Foil

What do you do with two hundred and sixty tons of turkey leftover from Thanksgiving?  That was the question that Gilbert and Clark Swanson asked themselves after they overestimated the number of turkeys that would sell over Thanksgiving 1953.  They rented a refrigerated car and stuffed it full of turkeys.  As the turkeys rode the rails, they challenged their employees to come up with a more economical solution to the problem.

Nebraska's Gerry Thomas, a Swanson salesman, made a trip to Pan-Am in Pittsburgh to study their frozen dinners served on their airplanes.  He "borrowed" one of their aluminum trays, then set to work redesigning it into three, rather than one, compartments.  While the frozen dinner idea had been around for about a decade, no one had married the frozen dinner to TV; that is, until Mr. Thomas.  By 1953, most middle-class American households no longer had a maid.  But they did have a TV set -- 33 million of them.  Why not market the dinners as TV dinners?  Gerry even designed the box like a TV set complete with a volume knob.



                                

http://blog.retroplanet.com/happy-birthday-swanson-tv-dinner/

Swanson assembled two dozen women in the Fall of 1953.  Armed with spatulas and ice cream scoops, the women assembled 5000 dinners complete with turkey slices, sweet potatoes, peas and cornbread dressing.  Each TV dinner was priced at 98 cents.  Directions on the box recommended that the dinner be reheated for only 25 minutes.

One Swanson ad showed a woman arriving home at dinner time and saying to her husband;  "I'm late, but dinner won't be."  While Gerry Thomas received hate mail from some men, complaining that they wanted their wives to cook from scratch as their mothers had, the majority of Americans seemed to warm up to the idea of a TV dinner.  In the first year alone, Swanson sold 10 million.

By 1960, Swanson added a fourth compartment:  dessert.  Two years later, they officially dropped the name TV dinner.  However, the notion stuck.  With the advent of microwaves, the foil tray was replaced by a plastic one.  At over 60 years old,, the TV dinner is still going strong.

Source:  www.gourmet.com

http://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/his1005spring2011/2011/04/10/im-late-but-dinner-wont-be/

Ten Things You Didn't Know About Thanksgiving

1.  Algonquian Indians were among the first to harvest wild cranberries.  They used them as food, medicine and a symbol of peace.

2.  Although pumpkin pies are a staple of North American Thanksgivings, they did not become popular until the early 19th Century.

3.  Oktoberfest, which is celebrated in Kitchener, Ontario, originated in Germany in 1810 after King Ludwig I married Therese.

4.  Canadians purchased 3 million turkeys in 2011 which accounts for 32% of yearly sales.

5.  Thanksgiving is a statutory holiday in most Canadian provinces with the exception of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and P.E.I.

6.  Martin Frobisher held the first Canadian Thanksgiving in 1578 to celebrate his safe arrival to the new land.

7.  In 1953, Swanson, after overestimating the need for Thanksgiving dinner, had 260 tons of frozen turkeys to get rid of.  They ordered 5000 aluminum plates with separated sections and filled them with turkey, cornbread dressing, sweet potatoes and peas, creating the first TV dinners.

8.  Only about half of the 102 people aboard the Mayflower that sailed to America in 1620 were actually Pilgrims.  The other half were "Strangers", simply people wanting to come to the New World.

9.  The average weight of turkeys purchased for Thanksgiving dinner is 15 pounds.  Turkeys will have 3500 feathers at maturity.

10.  The first Thanksgiving, celebrated by the Pilgrims at Plymouth, Massachusetts, lasted three days.

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