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I should be making dinner. I should be. This is the refrain of my days: the things I should be doing. They include but are not limited to: working more / working less / reading / rereading / checking email / putting down the phone / scrubbing the toilet / cutting back / cleaning with vinegar / pulling weeds / playing pretend with my kid / calling my grandmothers / being present / getting the writer those notes / scheduling an appointment / capturing the moment / reading aloud / ordering groceries / saving / returning library books / checking in / exercising / dusting / picking up / dropping off / having more sex / composting / making friends / staying relevant / learning something / cooking more vegetables / eating less dairy / making do / getting outside / calling my representatives / eliminating sugar / thriving / getting involved / practicing self-care / buying insurance / making a will / watching that show / listening to that podcast / taking steps / investing / reapplying sunscreen / worrying about what is in the sunscreen / having more fun / thinking about dinner. Always thinking about dinner.*
Tracing the convoluted origins of the TV dinner, some anonymous person at the Library of Congress writes:
In 1949, Albert and Meyer Bernstein organized Frozen Dinners, Inc., which packaged frozen dinners on aluminum trays with three compartments. They sold them under the One-Eyed Eskimo label, and only to markets in the Pittsburgh area. By 1950, the company had produced over 400,000 frozen dinners. Demand continued to grow, and in 1952 the Bernstein brothers formed the Quaker State Food Corporation. They expanded distribution to markets east of the Mississippi. By 1954, Quaker State Foods had produced and sold over 2,500,000 frozen dinners!
The concept really took hold in 1954 when Swanson’s frozen meals appeared. Swanson was a well-known brand that consumers recognized, and Swanson launched a massive advertising campaign for their product. They also coined the phrase TV Dinner, which helped to transform their frozen meals into a cultural icon.
But this is where different stories begin to emerge. Until recently, the most widely credited individual inventor of the TV dinner was Gerry Thomas, a salesman for C.A. Swanson & Son in 1953. For example, the American Frozen Food Institute honored him in their “Frozen Food Hall of Fame” as the inventor of the TV dinner. However, his role as the inventor is now being disputed.
History, that ever-tangled knot of narrative threads, even when it comes to frozen foods in plastic trays.
In my memory, the TV dinners I ate were few and always a strange sensory experience: some portion viscous, some portion unexpectedly chewy, some portion unappetizingly dry. (Better were frozen pot pies.) And yet to eat a freezer dinner was an event, a rare treat in a household where home-cooking was the norm. It signaled a stop, a small glorious break in the usual pattern. Funny how breaks can help hold a thing together.
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A friend sent me Anne Helen Petersen's dissection of the nap-dress phenomenon—the seemingly inexplicable and sudden ubiquity of adult women on social media disporting themselves in smocked nightdress-looking garb. (It has been written about extensively, because picking on the aesthetic proclivities of middle-class white women never gets old). Petersen is most interested in its manifestation in mother-daughter matching outfits, tracing the trend's genesis to the world of Laura Ashley—by her account, a sinister locus of prim Victoriana, whiteness, and sexism, charmingly packaged in ditsy-floral prints. This may all be so. (My attention waned as the argument drained down to yet another invocation of the special problems of Millennials; generational frameworks sell, but wow, are they blinkered).What is interesting to me is how these dresses so blatantly embody a larger phenomenon: easiness. A wish for ease is not limited to any one age or group or time, though as a human being in this particular time, I see it showing up everywhere and wonder if it was always like this: the promises that if you add x or cut out y, suddenly everything becomes as effortless as twirling in an unstructured cotton dress, that tiredness will disappear, that your skin will glow, that somehow life will manifest what you want. There is ease through addition—the things you buy/eat/do to make it all somehow better—but also ease through renunciation—cutting out the stuff/meat/relationships weighing you down. There is the satisfying ease of everyone, all together, understanding simple stories furbelowed with surface complications: YA novels, comic book movies, prestige TV. The lulling ease of the endless, endless scroll, with its pretty pictures and dances anyone can do, camera tricks anyone can master. Ease is the end of all. We work so very hard to work less hard.
I think about all of this while I am cooking dinner. And I think about what happens when there isn't an easy way anymore. On the radio, someone who leads a website for folks getting ready for various disasters is explaining that prepping is all about the reality that the next few decades are going to be harder than the decades that have come before. This strikes me as indubitably true. It is also very sad. I think of my grandparents, and the blue-collar work they did and the grinding hardness of the lives they led; I think of their delight in and gratitude for giant chilled grocery stores with cavernous aisles and chain restaurants with their early bird discounts, for cars and highways and two bathrooms and a yard, all the wasteful abundance that is screwing us over. I think of myself, and the many conveniences of my life. But it seems that we have finally reached the event horizon of easy. From here on out, it all becomes harder. And despite the peppy sloganeering, I am not so sure that "we can do hard things." I've seen that "we" this past year. It's a tetchy and fractious and mutinous we, unwilling to trust, unwilling to bend or accommodate, even at the level of letting a child use whatever bathroom that makes them feel safe. Perhaps I should be buying more canned food, more jugs of water.
It's time to make the salad. I read an article about salad dressings today that filled me with ridiculous rage; the author chirpily extolling the virtues of the homemade, insisting that making a salad dressing is not that much work. But even a little bit of work is ... more work. And there is already so much to do. How to keep adding a little bit more, a little bit more. That's the question. The siren song of ease sweetens, but I suppose the only solution is to tie myself to the mast and keep sailing on, to mix the oil and vinegar, eternal opposites, and get the food on the table.
It's time to make the salad. I read an article about salad dressings today that filled me with ridiculous rage; the author chirpily extolling the virtues of the homemade, insisting that making a salad dressing is not that much work. But even a little bit of work is ... more work. And there is already so much to do. How to keep adding a little bit more, a little bit more. That's the question. The siren song of ease sweetens, but I suppose the only solution is to tie myself to the mast and keep sailing on, to mix the oil and vinegar, eternal opposites, and get the food on the table.
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ISTOCK photo of TV dinner found here.
