Prestige Television and the Return of TV Dinners
When uncertainty hit every household during the pandemic, there was a rush to transform living spaces. Attics, garages, dining rooms and spare bedrooms were turned into offices, education spaces, and craft rooms. Home gyms, bars and cinemas were reimagined, retooled, and renovated to indulgent extremes.
However, people were feathering home nests long before the pandemic. Elaborate home theaters and entertainment streaming memberships changed how people watched and ate. Hulu, Netflix and Prime kept many from making restaurant reservations and visiting movie theaters prior to governments telling them to stay at home.
Conagra took note of these behavioural changes. The food conglomerate sells billions of dollars of products annually and owns Marie Callender’s, Healthy Choice, and Swanson. The business wisely doubled down on its frozen lines and profited greatly when quarantines were enforced. If you were a conspiracy theorist, it would cause you to wonder if they knew something in advance.
Television and frozen meals once again worked in harmony. With streaming, every night became a movie night. No longer was it pizza and the latest thriller on Friday, meals were consumed several nights a week watching Tom Cruise hang from helicopters and Jennifer Aniston play the same person in another romantic comedy. A global library of on-demand movies allowed viewers to watch everything from Aquaman to Zoolander on their schedule. Comforting viewing and comfort eating were officially entwined. The second Golden Age of television was underway.
This was the era of prestige television. The term surfaced to explain the production values and subject matter of such hits as The Sopranos and The Wire. These shows were of a quality not previously experienced and there were many of them. Breaking Bad took it to new levels. It was cinematic but on a smaller screen and Walter White became one of the most intriguing characters in the history of television. In days gone by, it would have been called a “water cooler show” or one discussed at the office. Through the decades water cooler shows included The Twilight Zone, Twin Peaks, and Seinfeld.
More recently, Fargo, Handmaid’s Tale, and Boardwalk Empire were cited as seminal prestige television. When there is enough time and distance, it will be fascinating to look back and ask why many prestige shows were gritty and grim. Esquire, Slate and Vulture have covered the topic, but each only poked at an explanation. The Atlantic gave it a try, “This new strain of humorlessness comes across most palpably in programs that are also works of genre, from the police procedural (in the case of True Detective or The Killing), fantasy (Game of Thrones), to horror (The Walking Dead).”
Many prestige shows were literally dark. Even when the television screen’s brightness was turned all the way up it was hard to make out many scenes. Kathryn VanArendonk of Vulture observed, “So-called “serious” TV has so many tools to communicate complexity and bleakness — there are characters who are tough to understand, opaque stories that are hard to predict, endless layers of complication and obliqueness available to TV storytellers. There’s also a seemingly boundless permission for depictions of violence. If the goal is to make a series hard to watch, there are lots of ways to do it. It does not also need to be hard to see.” Around the world people were increasingly squinting at their screens while heating up frozen meals.
Prestige television created binge-watching. It became socially acceptable for households to consume multiple episodes of a show or shows in one evening. Binging television influences choice of food, quantity, and speed of eating. Once pandemic restrictions lifted and people were allowed to travel and visit restaurants, not much changed. Conagra’s Chief Executive Officer stated, “we believe that the shift to at-home eating and the shift to remote working will remain elevated versus pre-pandemic, and that’s good for business. And then finally, it’s impossible to argue with the notion that frozen offers superior relative value compared to perishable or away from home, which is also good for business.”
With all industries, there are downturns, but generally frozen meals excel in times of economic dips, pandemics, and other global worrisome events. Over the decades, these businesses have been highly resilient with an interesting exception. When trends tip to a focus on healthy eating, frozen food sales take a beating. This happened between 2008 to 2014 when sales leveled off and did not budge. People were actively searching for healthier alternatives and were largely deceived.
Time magazine identified an irony, “Our dining habits today are supposed to lean toward fresher, less processed food. What we’re eating might not necessarily be better for us — Panera’s Chipotle Chicken on Artisan French Bread sandwich sounds innocuous, but it’s really an 830-calorie fat-and-salt bomb. But many consumers think they’re eating healthier, and that’s what counts when we go to the grocery store, sandwich shop, or drive-through.” There was another irony, the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics found people who regularly ate frozen meals benefited by higher daily intakes of protein, fiber, and potassium than those eating at quick service restaurants.
During the pandemic, home fridges and freezers were kept full to provide a sense of security. Locked inside homes, people discovered or experimented with cooking. Quickly though, people grew tired of the work causing frozen meal sales to soar again, “beyond the unique, horrible crisis remaking how Americans eat at home, the slower-burning economic crisis is pushing middle class diners toward their freezers, too — frozen food booms during recessions.”
The frozen food industry prospered throughout the pandemic creating a renaissance of sorts. This included increasingly confident claims from companies. Birds Eye boldly stated frozen vegetables were as nutritious as fresh. The company’s vegetables are locally sourced and are not subject to preservatives. Everything is picked at peak and quickly frozen to lock in nutrients and flavor. Birds Eye went as far as to knock fresh vegetables by suggesting vitamins and nutrients are lost in the time taken to harvest, ship, and display.
Frozen products are no longer a last resort or a shortcut, they are part of the shopping list and weekly meal planning. Now in Canada, over half the dinners consumed at home involve a prepared or semi-prepared food. Food scientists have multidisciplinary resumes with training in chemistry, microbiology, engineering, and nutrition. These wizards manipulate moisture, salt, and sugar content to appeal to specific markets and preferences. Food production has shifted to manufacturing. In fact, forty-four percent of Canadian agricultural output is now destined for processing. Increasingly scientists engineer the food sold to manufacture fuel for our bodies rather than provide a fantastic dining experience.
Meanwhile, the entire landscape of meals-at-home is changing. With UberEATS and Grubhub, now any restaurant can deliver. Meal kits provide a compromise in cooking ensuring fresh and healthy ingredients arrive at the door with instructions to produce meals with relative ease. Ready-meal companies offer any dish that can be imagined. Grocers and restaurants are actively freezing their own branded dinners. This may all seem new but what is past is prologue. History shows that all of this was underway or had occurred before.
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