It’s a typical November Tuesday for Mary, who lives in the northeastern United States. She’s forty-four, has a college degree, and her family is prosperous—in the top quarter of American households by income. So how did she spend her day? Is she a lawyer? A teacher? A management consultant?
No. Mary spent an hour knitting and sewing, two hours setting the table and doing the dishes, and well over two hours preparing and cooking food. In this, she isn’t unusual. This is because it’s 1965, and in 1965, many married American women—even those with excellent educations—spent large chunks of their day catering for their families. For these women, “putting food on the table” wasn’t a metaphor. It was something that they did quite literally—and it took many hours each week.1
We know about Mary’s day—and the days of many other people—because of time-use surveys conducted around the world. These are diaries of exactly how different sorts of people use their time. And for educated women, the way time is spent in the United States and other rich countries has changed radically over the past half-century. Women in the United States now spend about forty-five minutes a day in total on cooking and cleaning up; that is still much more than men, who spend just fifteen minutes a day. But it is a vast shift from Mary’s four hours a day.
The reason for this shift is because of the radical changes in the way the food we eat is prepared. For a symbol of this change, look no further than the introduction, in 1954, of the TV dinner.
Presented in a space-age aluminum tray and prepared so that the meat and the vegetables would all require the same cooking time, what some marketing genius called a “frozen turkey tray TV dinner” was developed by a bacteriologist named Betty Cronin. She worked for the Swanson food-processing company, which was looking for ways to keep busy after the business of supplying rations to U.S. troops had dried up after World War II. Cronin herself, as an ambitious young career woman, was part of the ideal target market: women who were expected to cook for their husbands yet were busy trying to develop their own careers. But she resisted the temptation. “I’ve never had a TV dinner in my home,” she said in a 1989 interview. “I used to work on them all day long. That was enough.”2
But women didn’t have to embrace the full aluminum-foil TV dinner experience to be liberated by changes in food processing. There were also the freezer, the microwave, preservatives, and production lines. Food had been perhaps the last cottage industry; it was something that for generations was overwhelmingly produced in the home. But food preparation has increasingly been industrialized. Our meals have been outsourced to restaurants and takeaways, to sandwich shops and to factories that prepare ready-to-eat or ready-to-cook meals. And the invention of the industrial meal—in all its forms—has led to a profound shift in the modern economy.
The most obvious indication of this is that spending on food is changing. American families spend more and more on eating outside the home—on fast food, restaurant meals, sandwiches, and snacks. In the 1960s, only a quarter of food spending was on food prepared and eaten outside the home;3 it’s been rising steadily since then, and in 2015 a landmark was reached: for the first time in their history, Americans spent more on food and drink consumed outside the home than on food and beverages purchased at grocery stores.4 In case you think Americans are unusual in that, the British passed that particular milestone more than a decade earlier.5
Even within the home, food is increasingly processed to save the cook time, effort, and skill. There are obvious examples in which an entire meal comes ready to cook—a frozen pizza or one of Betty Cronin’s one-tray creations. But there are less obvious cases, too—chopped salad in bags; meatballs or kebab sticks doused in sauce and ready to grill; pregrated cheese; jars of pasta sauce; tea that comes packaged in individual permeable bags; chicken that comes plucked, gutted, and full of sage and onion stuffing mix. There is even, of course, sliced bread. Each new innovation would seem bizarre to the older generation, but I’ve never plucked a chicken myself, and perhaps my children will never chop their own salads. Each new idea may save only a little time, but cumulatively, pre-prepared food saves many hours a week.
Such innovations didn’t begin with the TV dinner: they’ve been a long time in the making. Households were buying premilled flour in the early nineteenth century, rather than having to take their own grains to a mill or pound them into flour at home. In 1810 the French inventor Nicolas Appert patented a process for sealing and heat-treating food to preserve it. Condensed milk was patented in 1856; H. J. Heinz started to sell precooked canned macaroni in the 1880s.6
But such innovations didn’t, at first, have an impact on how much time women spend preparing food. When the economist Valerie Ramey compared time-use diaries in the United States between the 1920s and the 1960s, she found an astonishing stability. Whether women were uneducated and married to farmers or highly educated and married to urban professionals, they still spent a similar amount of time on housework, and that time did not change much for fifty years. It was only in the 1960s that the industrialization of food really started to have a noticeable impact on the amount of housework that women did.7
But surely the innovation responsible for emancipating women wasn’t the frozen pizza but the washing machine? The idea is widely believed, and it’s appealing. A frozen TV dinner doesn’t really feel like progress, compared with healthy home-cooked food. But a washing machine is neat and efficient and replaces work that was always drudgery. A washing machine is a robot washerwoman in cuboid form. It works. How could it not have been revolutionary?
It was, of course. But the revolution wasn’t in the lives of women. It was in how lemon-fresh we all started to smell. The data are clear that the washing machine didn’t save a lot of time, because before the washing machine we didn’t wash clothes very often. When it took all day to wash and dry a few shirts, people would use replaceable collars and cuffs or dark outer layers to hide the grime on their clothes. But we cannot skip many meals in the way that we can skip the laundry. When it took two or three hours to prepare a meal, that was a job someone had to take the time to do. The washing machine didn’t save much time, and the ready meal did, because we were willing to stink, but we weren’t willing to starve.8
The availability of ready meals has had some regrettable side effects. Obesity rates rose sharply in developed countries between the 1970s and the early twenty-first century, at much the same time as these culinary innovations were being developed and embraced. This is no coincidence, say health economists: the cost of eating a lot of calories has fallen dramatically, not just in financial terms but in terms of the cost of time.9
Consider the humble potato. It has long been a staple of the American diet, but before World War II, potatoes were usually baked, mashed, or boiled. There’s a reason for that: good roasted potatoes need to be peeled, chopped, parboiled, and then roasted; for french fries or chips, potatoes must be chopped or very finely sliced and then deep-fried. This is all time-consuming.
Over time, however, the production of fried sliced potato chips—both french fries and potato chips—moved out of the home and into large factory kitchens. Potatoes for french fries can be peeled, chopped, fried, and frozen at scale; they are then refried in a fast-food restaurant or microwaved at home. Between 1977 and 1995, American potato consumption increased by a third, and almost all of those extra potatoes were fried.
Even simpler, potato chips can be fried, salted, flavored, and packaged to last for many weeks on the shelf. But this convenience comes at a cost. In the United States, calorie intake among adults rose by about 10 percent between the 1970s and the 1990s, but none of that was due to more calorific regular meals. It was all from snacking—and that usually means processed convenience food.
Psychology and common sense suggest this shouldn’t be a surprise. Experiments conducted by behavioral scientists show that we make very different decisions about what to eat depending on how far away the meal is. A long-planned meal is likely to be nutritious, but when we make more impulsive decisions, our snacks are more likely to be junk food than something nourishing.
The industrialization of food—symbolized by the TV dinner—changed our economy in two important ways. It freed women from hours of domestic chores, removing a large obstacle to their adopting serious professional careers. But by making empty calories ever more convenient, it also freed our waistlines to expand. Six decades after the launch of the TV dinner, the challenge now—as with so many inventions—is to enjoy the benefit without also suffering the cost.