On 2016-02-05 2:27 PM, Gary wrote:

>> Any thoughts about dinner?
>
> I saw the funniest commercial in a long time last night.
> It was for the frozen "Banquet" dinners. They're the cheapest ones.
> Showed a mom heating up 4 frozen meals, then showed
> the family of 4 sitting at the table smiling and enjoying them.

I can relate. I have a faint recollection of the introduction of TV
dinners back in the 1950s and we were all keen to try them. Bear in
mind that I lived in an average sized family ... 6, and refrigerators
back then had only the internal freezer compartment that would holes one
or two ice cubes and a couple cans of frozen orange juice. There was no
room to store 6 TV dinners until people started getting chest freezers
or there were larger freezer compartments.

As it turned out, I only had two or three TV dinners. They weren't very
good. Other people must have eaten more of them than we did because
every class room seemed to have a stack of them for paints for art
class. I have never bought one myself. I pay only enough attention to
the frozen prepared foods section of the grocery store to know that it
looks like they still sell things like that.


Come to think of it.... I remember seeing people eating them at my
summer job while I was at university. I had a job in an alloy smelting
plant and the guys used to bring in frozen dinners or leftovers wrapped
in foil and we would heat them up on the hot metal from our pours. The
molten metal was poured into cast iron "pans" that were about 6feet
square and 2 feet deep. After pouring the metal developed a crust of
slag that was strong enough to set the dishes on.