Better Off Frozen?

It’s Ann here today. Andy is in OurLittleCorner carping about our unfair world.

This recent article in The Atlantic Magazine – Frozen Food’s New Wave – got me started on today’s topic . It’s a good read…all about our love/hate relationship with our grocery store’s freezer aisle. The article’s author states that in the last 10 years freezer food has evolved so that it is “no longer simply a tool for convenient, mediocre eating…[instead] it transformed into a second pantry, stocked with cooking shortcuts and premade foods that satisfy more discerning tastes. “

I was even more interested in the comment in the same article made by Nicola Twilley, author of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves:

“Frozen food is often actually fresher than refrigerated food,” Twilley told me. People “literally seem to picture it coming from the farm to the grocery store to them in about a week, and that is not how it happens,” she said. “That green bean has sat in a refrigerated warehouse for weeks, longer than you can possibly imagine.” And when a fruit or vegetable is picked and stashed in a refrigerated warehouse, Twilley explained, it consumes its own natural sugars and vitamins to stay alive, which can reduce both its nutrition and its taste. Frozen vegetables and fruits, though, are arrested in the moment soon after they are picked. As a result, they’re better preserved.

And just a few days ago The National Geographic posted an article online with the same reminder: frozen produce may be healthier than fresh produce.

While I may be an enthusiast for frozen corn, peas, spinach, and edamame…and for the frozen homemade jams which we always have, my hesitancy about frozen purchased dinners may go back to about 1954, when I was 10. That’s about the time that TVs arrived in most U.S. homes and about the time that Swanson introduced their frozen TV dinners.

My mother was a very good cook. But she also loved serving us those Swanson dinners. And serving them often.

According to an old Gourmet Magazine article, “The TV dinner gave women (who were predominantly the family cooks) more free time to pursue jobs and other activities while still providing a hot meal for their families. One of the first advertisements featured a stylish wife right out of a Mad Men scene, pulling a Swanson dinner out of her grocery bag and insisting to her husband, ‘I’m late—but dinner won’t be.’

Not everyone was keen on the TV dinner, especially the occasional displeased husband. Thomas [the Swanson salesman who came up with their TV dinner idea]told the Associated Press in 1999 that he received hate mail from gentlemen saying they “wanted their wives to cook from scratch like their mothers did.”

(An aside: We’re so aware today of all the different foods and ingredients that can harm our health that I can’t help but wonder whether we War Babies and Baby Boomers have suffered from one too many TV dinners. Did those partitioned aluminum trays add any poison to our systems? And I won’t even mention salt and butter – since I’m an admitted salt and butter addict).

TV dinners were pretty passé by the time our kids were growing up. Whoops – that’s an incorrect statement. TV dinners were actually very trendy in the late 70’s/early 80’s, when our two kids were growing up, and they remember my “letting” them eat a Swanson Fried Chicken Dinner with “apple cake cobbler”or Salisbury Steak TV dinner every time Andy and I had a night out. They can correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe they thought of those dinners as very special treats! Was that a critique of my from scratch cooking?

Now some 40+ years later – when I’m not cooking from scratch for Andy like his mother did – or maybe didn’t – we’ve found a winner frozen purchased “dinner” that we eat regularly and with enthusiasm. And we make special trips to Trader Joe’s just to get it. It’s Pork Gyoza Potstickers. And I’ll admit that as much as I enjoy cooking, I look forward to that night off, when Andy takes over the kitchen and serves me these delicious little frozen dumplings and a homemade dipping sauce to go with them.