TV Dinners

The history of modern frozen food begins in the 1920s, when a man named Clarence Birdseye developed the process of "quick freezing", a technique in which items are frozen so fast only tiny ice crystals form. Birdseye was able to better preserve foods and maximize flavor, but the idea didn't become a commercial success until Swanson Foods came up with the concept of the "TV dinner" in 1953.

Two important factors made the TV dinner instantly popular. First, television was at the height of its golden age during the 1950s, and Swanson timed the development of the product perfectly. Families were gathering in front of their sets to watch shows such as "I Love Lucy" and "What's My Line?" on a regular basis. Swanson created a large-scale marketing campaign to associate their product as much as possible with the television. Commercials depicted families enjoying TV dinners in front of a set, and advertisers even designed the packaging to look like a television -- right down to the channel and volume knobs. The second factor was the unique feature of the segmented aluminum plate. The turkey never touched the peas, the peas never touched the potatoes, and so on. This simple convenience attracted consumers -- adults as much as children don't like their food to mix -- and the TV dinner quickly became a pop culture phenomenon.

I think that TV dinners are extremely handy when you need a quick dinner and also if you wanted to watch a programme on TV but was eating at the same time. But I think that they have made us quite lazy, you can't get any lazier than not wanting to sit down at a table with your family and instead reverting to the TV for entertainment. They also make us lazy when it comes to making food. Another bad thing about them is that they are unhealthy to have on a daily basis yet they are appetising because of their cheapness.

I got a lot of my information from: http://people.howstuffworks.com/swanson-dinner.htm