Stuffed: An Insider's Look at Who's (Really) Making America Fat and How the Food Industry Can Fix It

Read an Excerpt

Stuffed

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

A boxcar full of turkeys

It all started with a turkey. Well, actually, not one turkey but many turkeys. The year was 1953. Thanksgiving had passed, the economy was booming, and Christmas shoppers around the country were getting ready to throw down some of their hard-earned cash for a little bit of Christmas cheer.

But the mood wasn't so great at C. A. Swanson & Sons, an Omaha-based frozen food company. Somehow, Swanson had overestimated America's hunger for turkey that Thanksgiving, and they found themselves with more than half a million pounds of unsold turkeys. This would have been a lot of food in any era, but back then it was astronomical. Not to mention that Swanson didn't have enough refrigerated warehouse space to keep the turkeys from spoiling. Facing the prospect of having to write off all these birds as a huge loss, Swanson piled the turkeys into refrigerated boxcars while they searched for a buyer. As the boxcars traveled back and forth from Nebraska to the East Coast, the company's owners looked for a solution that would save them millions of dollars.

As the legend goes, one of their salesmen, Gerry Thomas, had been in Pittsburgh, checking out the catering kitchens of Pan American WorldAirways when he heard about the company's problem. On the flight home, he began doodling, thinking about the hot tray the airline used to keep food warm. Why not use it to keep food cold, he wondered. In his sketches, Thomas ended up designing a three-compartment tray—a sort of takeoff on the old army mess kits, but also something that drew upon the airline's reliance on serving different foods steaming hot. The food in these trays would be kept in the freezer until it was ready to be eaten, at which point it would be heated up and served. In a matter of minutes dinner could be served with little to no preparation.

Initially, nobody at Swanson's headquarters was bowled over by the idea, and they produced only 5,000 of the meals. But eventually they warmed to the concept. They initiated Operation Smash, a national marketing campaign consisting of a blitz of television and print ads. Two headlines read: "Swanson's fixed it for you! Complete turkey dinner on a tray." "My boys are crazy about Swanson TV Dinners."

Soon enough consumers responded with a demand that far outpaced the supply. The company was blindsided by the fact that Americans seemed fascinated by the prospect of eating this new, convenient meal in front of their televisions. And just like that, the TV dinner was born.

Though Swanson did not invent the frozen food concept, its multiple compartments and use of leftover food changed the way the food industry made money and the way America ate its meals. Almost overnight, it seemed that millions of kids were plopped in front of the black-and-white televisions with the aluminum pan in front of them. A few slices of bland turkey in gravy with some cornbread stuffing, sweet potatoes, and perhaps the sorriest-tasting—certainly the sorriest-looking—peas on the planet. It wasn't very appealing, but it was convenient, and the postwar generation quickly and steadily bought into this new concept of convenience foods. Mom and Dad had the evening out, and the babysitter stood in as cook and waitress. In its first full year, more than 25 million tins were served in living rooms and kitchens across the nation. A phenomenon was born, and in one single moment, the face of food in this country began to shift.

There are many people who trace the beginning of our national obesity epidemic to the start of the fast-food chain, to a man named Kroc and the Golden Arches that he started in Des Plaines, Illinois, in 1955. While I'm the first to admit that fast food and all of its offshoots played a big role in our current situation, for my money, the story of the Swanson TV dinner holds the real key to understanding why we're so fat. The TV dinner marked a lot of firsts: the first time that we embraced en masse convenience over cuisine; the first time that it was better to be easy than to taste good; the first time that a preprepared (frozen) meal was served ready to heat and eat at home.

But of all these firsts, perhaps the most important, the one that has affected our waistlines and our taste buds the most, is that the Swanson TV dinner marked the first time that a food industry marketing gimmick seduced what might have been our better judgment. After all, the TV dinner was just a way to boost a company's struggling bottom line and cut its losses. On the surface, from a food perspective, there appeared to be little benefit to the consumer. The taste was awful, the food unappealing, and the choices limited. I mean, seriously, who wants to eat frozen Thanksgiving turkey in February?

And yet it turned out that was exactly what a lot of people wanted, and they wanted to do it because of how it had been sold to them. They had been sold on the idea that the convenience of this product was their ticket to a happier life. It had nothing to do with the actual food, and everything to do with the image of the food that had been projected. It had to do with the convenience, the slick packaging, and the easy cleanup. Anytime, anywhere, you could have a meal that you knew. It might not have been a good meal, but at least it was familiar.

The Swanson TV dinner appeared at a moment when our culture was changing how it thought about food. Televisions were making their way into people's homes, and food companies had begun to use this new medium to advertise their products, feeding consumers hungry for new ideas with spoonfuls of new ways to spend money on food. The idea that convenience trumped taste played right into the mind-set of that moment and it was all too infectious—from the boardrooms of the nation's food consortiums to the glass doors of Madison Avenue. Food shopping, which up until then had been more of a local endeavor, started to become a national enterprise, and when people went to the store, there were certain brands they expected to see—the brands from the television commercials.

---

Excerpted from Stuffed by Hank Cardello Copyright © 2009 by Hank Cardello. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---