Looking back, it’s all Nicolas Appert’s fault. It was the Frenchman who, in 1804, devised a method of preserving meat by heat-sealing it in metal cans. He won a prize from Napoleon for his efforts,
but the convenience-food revolution he triggered is still being played out around us.
Boil-in-the-bag technology was developed by Birdseye in the ’60s; but the first ‘proper’ ready meals predate even that. Swanson’s TV Dinners came frozen, on a metal tray which you shoved in the oven. They were a runaway hit on their launch in 1954, when 10 million Americans paid 98 cents for a slab of steak, meatloaf, fried chicken or turkey, served with potatoes and luminous green peas.
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Fifty years on, the ready meals landscape is impossibly crowded, especially in the UK where we spend more on them per head than any other European country apart from Sweden (£1.9 billion in 2002). This isn’t something to be proud of. The Consumers’ Association calls ready meals ‘a recipe for disaster’, emphasising their high fat and salt content, scares like last year’s over Sudan 1 dye-contaminated chilli powder, and the fact that much of the meat in them is ‘mechanically recovered’, obtained by forcing carcasses through a giant mesh to produce a protein slurry that is then bound back together with chemicals.
Anyone who regularly reads grown-up newspapers knows ready meals are bad news and should be avoided if humanly possible. The problem is that, for most of us, avoiding them isn’t humanly possible. We’re rushed, stressed and in need of speedy ‘meal solutions’. Supermarkets know this well; so well, they’ve dreamed up a whole new retail concept, ‘premium’ or ‘gourmet’ meals designed to resemble home-cooked or ‘restaurant-quality’ food, which – if the blurb on the packaging is to be believed – are made by ‘skilled chefs with only the finest beef or chicken from tiny smallholdings in the West Country’, etc, etc… They’re really not good value, but that’s okay. Time-poor, dual-income families are happy to pay through the nose because it makes them feel better about not being around in the evenings to cook their children lavish organic feasts. (Alarmingly, kids are big consumers of ready meals.)
But do these gourmet offerings pass the taste test? If you’d only ever eaten freshly prepared food and someone slipped you one, would you be fooled? My wife Cathy gave up ready meals ten years ago when a series of food allergies forced her to reconsider her diet. The allergies vanished, but her healthy-eating regime persists to the point where now the mere thought of ready meals nauseates her. This is a shame, because for the next six days I intend to assault her palate with them, hoping I have time to transcribe her reactions before she vomits all over the floor.
The verdict >>
Time Out London magazine (Issue 1846)
