In Praise of Frozen Food

If you really loved me," I remember hearing my mother say to my father when I was just learning to eavesdrop, "you'd buy me a house that has no kitchen."

My father was asleep in his Barcalounger at the time and didn't respond, so my mother returned to the kitchen to fix dinner. She hated cooking more than anything else in the world. More than cockroaches. More than my terrible habit of leaving Kleenex in my dirty clothes to ruin her nice clean wash. More than the fact that my father slept through at least half their conversations.

She kept cooking, of course--that seemed to be some unwritten law of the paleolithic Fifties--but she had her short cuts. I remember the one time she came home from the market without her usual grumbling. She had discovered something in the freezer department that looked too good to be true, something called boil-in-the-pouch: one plastic bag of turkey slices and one bag containing a frozen glob of gravy. You could cook this stuff right in the bag, she told us as she put a pan of water on the stove to boil. My younger brother and I stood by like two junior mad scientists, watching our experiment boil and bounce. My mother, showing a certain enthusiasm that was out of character for the kitchen, plucked the bags from the boiling water with tongs, cut them open and served up the contents on two pieces of white bread, open-faced, just like a hot-turkey sandwich in a coffee shop.

Unfortunately, it didn't taste very good. It wasn't even enough of an occasion to wake up Dad. But that hardly mattered. I had entered into the 20th Century of food, and I had no intention of turning back.

Some mothers encouraged their kids to try new foods; my brother and I were urged on in the direction of new food technologies. Mother had a special affinity for the word (continued on page 180)Frozen Food(continued from page 131) instant. We drank instant hot chocolate. We ate instant mashed potatoes. We were the first on our block to drink Carnation Instant Breakfast every morning, starting the moment my mother saw the TV commercial that claimed that one glass of Instant Breakfast contained the same amount of protein as an egg and two strips of bacon.

Being ahead of her time and not in the least apologetic about her kitchen phobia, my mother found herself castigated. America in general and my grandmothers in particular frowned at her disdain for cooking. "She actually feeds you Instant Breakfast in the morning?" one grandmother asked accusingly.

"And toast," I added quickly. My mother is a sensitive woman. I didn't want to see her suffer too much.

In a sense, I've come to understand her suffering. Her cause has become my cause. By comparison, I've had it easy, of course, since the world never seems so disapproving of men who can't cook, and technology has taken us light-years beyond that anemic boil-in-the-pouch turkey meal my mother bought. But the path to this victory is littered with bodies just like my mother's.

You see, I like frozen food. In fact, I love it. Not only that but I am convinced that Stouffer's is far and away the most important, forward-thinking, thoroughly modern company in America today. You can say what you will about personal computers, cellular telephones, automatic-teller machines and music videos, but when we're talking about Stouffer's, we're talking about progress, a kind of progress so influential and beneficial that Gary Hart might have won if he had dropped the timeworn image of Atari Democrat and become a Stouffer's one instead.

What is it that Stouffer's has done? By perfecting the frozen meal, it has liberated all of us who can't or don't want to cook from a lifetime of cheesy coffee shops and lousy TV dinners. Single people, senior citizens, working couples, single parents, tired parents, just plain lazy people can now enjoy a dinner of better-than-average lasagna without even owning proper kitchen utensils.

What's even better is that Stouffer's has started a trend. There's Le Menu, Dinner Classics from Armour, Green Giant Entrees and Stouffer's own little sister, Lean Cuisine. Edible instant meals are no longer a novelty, they're an industry. This development is so significant that if my mother were raising a family today, she'd be a happy woman. Unless you know my mother, you have no idea what a bold statement that is.

•

You're probably snickering right now. A lot of my friends snicker when I talk about frozen food. I am cursed with friends who either like to cook (cook seriously, that is, making things from scratch, using fresh vegetables, whipping up soufflés, serving it all on real china) or know the good restaurants (where they order cartoon animals, like ducks and bunnies, wax ecstatic about such things as anchovy butter and shiitake mushrooms and spend hours with the wine list). I even know a very nice couple who work so hard during the day that they barely have the energy to pour themselves a cold cereal each for dinner. And even they make fun of me for liking frozen food.

"You have absolutely no soul," one friend told me.

Another demanded, "Unless you really appreciate good food, how can you consider yourself a sensuous person?" Often, I've discovered that people who say these things to me have either spare tires suitable for a Checker cab or thighs the size of pier pilings, neither of which strikes me as sensuous.

Still, with gourmets running amuck, I realize I've taken the minority position. "You know," another friend said of my favorite foods, "they're really nothing more than TV dinners." Even respectable newspapers echo that charge. The Washington Post called Stouffer's Lean Cuisine and products like it "the HBO of TV dinners."

I find it difficult to believe that any of these people have actually eaten a TV dinner lately. R. Gordon McGovern, the president of the Campbell Soup Company, which owns Swanson TV dinners, told reporters last year that some of his products were "junk food." I'm no masochist when it comes to frozen dinners, but comparing Swanson to Stouffer's is like comparing a Plymouth Champ to the Concorde. TV dinners are generally so bad that even my mother wouldn't serve them.

My love for Stouffer's goes beyond taste and convenience. It's become a matter of trust. Like many other totally urbanized people, I'm far more comfortable eating a meal that has been supervised by experts than one prepared by amateurs. One of my co-workers, Leigh, is a nice enough person, but she has a few Sixties-style quirks that I had hoped had died with love beads, bell bottoms and Lee Michaels albums. She lives in rustic splendor deep in Topanga Canyon--an enclave for both unreconstructed hippies and Manson-type mass murderers--where she raises chickens. Her chickens, she claims, lay eggs. Leigh talks about her chickens and their eggs around the office. Even worse, she once brought me half a dozen free samples.

"These are your Easter present," she told me, putting six home-grown white things on my desk. "My hens laid them this morning."

I began to feel faint. "Certainly there's someone here in the building more deserving," I countered, mopping beads of sweat from my forehead. "You know, someone who appreciates those subtleties of the organic lifestyle."

"No," she said sternly (Leigh is never more stern than when talking about her eggs). "You eat shit all the time. You virtually live on frozen food and chili dogs. I want you to taste how good something truly fresh can be."

"How do I know your chickens aren't sick?" I asked. Those fresh eggs were giving off the sickliest vibes I'd ever felt.

"What do you mean, sick? I take great care of my birds. I love them." Hell hath no fury like an organic nutritionist scorned. "Take these home," she ordered. "Crack one open and crack open one of your store-bought eggs. Look at the color of the yolks. If that doesn't convince you, nothing will."

I thought it would only make matters worse to mention that I didn't have any eggs at home. I had some Scramblers, a frozen egg substitute, in the freezer, but I didn't think that was the comparison she had in mind.

"Leigh, there are certain things you do well and that I trust you on implicitly. Office gossip, for one. You're never wrong, and I admire and respect you for that. But chickens and eggs are part of the world of science. You don't have a veterinarian at your house. You wouldn't know if your hens had some exotic and fatal disease with hardly any symptoms. The eggs I buy at the store have been supervised by experts with years of training and a lot at stake. If they slip up and send out one batch of diseased eggs, it's curtains for them. Safeway will blackball them; thousands of customers will file a class-action lawsuit; they'll be ruined. They have thousands of chickens; you have only a few. If one of theirs looks the least bit questionable, they just throw it into the chicken shredder and forget about it. You give yours names and talk to them. I know you like some of them better than you do me."

She didn't dispute that last point, but she did parry with a bunch of clichés about professional egg ranches. "They pump their birds full of hormones. Is that what you want? They pack them in like sardines so that they can barely move. And you should see what they feed them." Her face was red.

"You're too cynical," I said. "Those egg people know what they're doing. We all need a few hormones now and then; and as for overcrowding, no one is squeezed in any tighter than the Japanese, and they're doing fine." I was fighting a lost cause. I knew I would have to take the eggs home. I knew I would crack one open. I knew it would turn my stomach.

"OK, I'll put these in the refrigerator until I go home," I said, relenting.

"You don't have to refrigerate them," she said. "They're fresh. Just leave them here in your office." My knees felt weak. I even refrigerate unopened canned goods.

"Whatever you say," I said.

Call it fate, call it luck; somehow, those eggs never made it home with me.

•

I am even more leery of meat and vegetables than I am of eggs. Eggs come in their own package, which makes me feel slightly more secure, but vegetables grow in the dirt, which I distinctly remember from my childhood as being an unappetizing subject. Worse yet, meat comes from animals. I saw a cow once, and it had flies around it. Flies don't do much for my appetite, either.

I figure that if you grow your own vegetables and eat them, there is no one to save you from some mysterious fungus that they might pick up from the dirt. If you buy fresh produce from a store, you're a little better off. At least a couple of trained eyes have looked at it. But if you get a total meal from Stouffer's or the Green Giant or Le Menu, you're getting food that has been carefully scrutinized by people with advanced degrees and handled according to the latest scientific techniques.

Despite the fact that frozen foods are obviously the best, safest, least diseased, cleanest, most closely examined foods you can buy, people seem locked into a heaping amount of distrust, as if something terrible were going on behind those closed factory gates. I decided that perhaps it was something I should check out personally.

When you start researching the frozen-food game, certain stories pop up again and again. How Clarence Birdseye, on a U.S. Geological Service expedition to Labrador, discovered that fish and caribou meat frozen by the severe Arctic chill tasted perfectly normal when thawed and cooked months later. And how Mahala Stouffer's lunches at her family's restaurant were so popular as take-out items that her sons Vernon and Gordon experimented with freezing them so that they could be eaten weeks later.

If you live in Los Angeles, as I do, you hear about a company named Kold Kist. Kold Kist was founded in 1937 by the Jarvis brothers, Edwin, a salesman, and Hy, a refrigeration expert. The meals were concocted by a New York chef and sold by Edwin door to door from the insulated trunk of his Packard. Instant meals--in this case, at least--meant instant failure. A few years later, Edwin hired his wife, Virginia, to prepare some home-style cooking and persuaded a few grocers to let him sell his wares out of the ice-cream freezer--the only freezer any market had at the time. The company has been humming along ever since and is now owned by Edwin and Virginia's daughter Merrie Ann.

Even though Kold Kist is a speck in Stouffer's shadow, doing about $5,500,000 a year while Stouffer's does more than $300,000,000 on Lean Cuisine alone, I decided to make a pilgrimage there. Besides, I had been eating Kold Kist sirloin tips in mushroom sauce for as long as I could remember, and everyone who really cares about such things knows that Kold Kist, under the brand name of Jimi's, was the first to perfect the frozen burrito.

Merrie Ann, obviously moved both by my dedication to her sirloin tips and by my tales of my childhood ("You tell your mother that I love her. You hear me? She's my type of woman"), volunteered to lead me on a tour of the plant. She even picked the day when they were making sirloin tips. "You know," she said, giving me a paper hat in case we ran into the resident Federal inspector, "this may cure you of your love for frozen food."

Our first stop was the meat locker, which I had feared would look like an animal-carnage scene out of Conan the Barbarian. Fortunately for me, the meat arrives at Kold Kist in bulk form: big, solid, cinder-block-sized chunks of red meat (with just the right amount--or so they say--of fat and other stuff). A predetermined mixture of this is thrown into a big grinder, then cubed, seasoned and cooked, ending up as the sirloin tips I've come to know and love. It waits around in large stainless-steel vats, looking, to tell you the truth, like gigantic bowls of dog food. However, the smell is terrific. Even better are the vats of mushroom sauce, simmering away while long metal blades slowly stir the mixture.

Machines transport a measured amount of sirloin tips to the assembly line and dump them into a boil-in-the-pouch bag, which then slides down the line for a healthy shot of mushroom sauce. At its next stop, the bag is sealed, then boxed and carted over to the blast freezer.

The entire process--from raw meat to cooking to assembly line--involves space age-looking equipment and lots of self-assured people wearing hospital whites and gloves. It made me feel confident.

I tried to stall in the cooking room by asking questions. Actually, I just liked the smell. Instead of being turned off, I was ravenously hungry from seeing my favorite sirloin tips go from cradle to bag. I was about to ask for a sample fresh from the vat when I was ushered into the blast freezer.

There are several ways of freezing food, Merrie Ann told me, but the important thing is that it be done fast. Sometimes chemicals are used, but not at Kold Kist. Here it's just the good old-fashioned cold that Clarence Birdseye felt in Labrador--a big room that's 35 degrees below zero, with the air whipping around like a Chicago wind. Package after package of sirloin tips sat nobly on racks.

"Other companies use preservatives, but we don't," Merrie Ann mentioned as my teeth started to chatter. "Freezing is what preserves the food."

As Merrie Ann and I made our way to the storage freezer (where the temperature is kept at zero degrees, the perfect temperature for storing frozen food anywhere at any time), I realized that no one had asked me to put on my paper hat. Where was the Federal inspector in charge of keeping my hair from falling into someone's boil-in-the-pouch sauce?

Merrie Ann wasn't sure. She explained that Kold Kist, like all food-processing companies, has its very own full-time resident Federal inspector. A new one is assigned every six months, partially to keep a company from bribing him and also because each inspector has his own special interest--sanitation, for example, or weights and measures. After a few inspectors, each company has been pretty well covered. I make a mental note to mention this to Leigh back at the office. How many Federal inspectors have seen her chickens lately?

•

When I got married, several years back, my friends thought the more civilizing aspects of marriage would take me out of my frozen-food phase and put me on the restaurant circuit, where I belonged. They didn't know my wife, Gail.

The one time, while we were dating, that she attempted to cook me a meal was not under the best of circumstances. It happened the week I lost my job, my psychotherapist disappeared to undergo triple-bypass surgery, my dog was attacked by a coyote and I totaled my car. I called Gail from the scene of the car accident, and she dutifully came to get me, taking me to a local emergency room for X rays and pain pills and then back to her parents' house, where she was then living. She cooked me some chicken, but I, distracted by my misfortune, had only enough energy to pick at it. As I was part way through one chicken breast, Gail's mother came home, took one look at my plate and shrieked, "My God, you're feeding him raw chicken!" She grabbed the food away and ran off to the kitchen to recook it.

"I'm sorry," Gail said. "I was worried about your accident." She was, too. Despite my misery and pain, I had a fleeting thought: How many meals have been ruined by a cook whose mind was legitimately elsewhere? I thought of the staff at Stouffer's, who were probably so dedicated to their jobs, like doctors or the people who run nuclear power plants, that their personal lives would never interfere with their work. It seemed that in our moment of stress, I would have been better served if Gail had popped a Stouffer's into the oven. Thank God, I had my pain pills.

As Gail and I got to know each other better, conventional eating paled when compared with the wonders of frozen food. A friend at one point described us as a perfect couple: "She doesn't enjoy cooking and he doesn't enjoy eating." But that wasn't entirely accurate. I liked to eat frozen food. Gail liked to cook it.

In fact, Gail branched out farther than I ever would have gone on my own. She started patronizing the local charcuteries, bringing home elaborate French meals--albeit frozen ones--for special occasions. Better yet, she fully understands and can recognize dreaded freezer burn. I haven't even fully grasped the concept yet, and God knows how many tainted meals I ate before she was there to save me.

Those same friends who were sure that marriage would tame my taste in food were positive that what marriage couldn't accomplish, the arrival of my son, Nicholas, certainly would.

"What are you going to do, Randall, put Stouffer's in a blender for Nicholas?" asked my friend Susan. Susan's reaction was moderate compared with others'. Many people--almost all of them nonparents, ironically--redirected their venom from Stouffer's to Gerber.

"Don't you know there's corn syrup in baby food?" demanded Julie accusingly. Yes, corn syrup, the deadliest substance this side of dioxin. Entire towns in Iowa have been quarantined by the Government for detoxification.

I haven't had the nerve to mention it to any of my friends, but Nicholas has alternated successfully between real food and Gerber (with a decided preference for Gerber), and now, as he approaches his first birthday, he has a complete menu that includes not only home cooking and baby food but--please don't call the social workers just yet--a handful of his very own frozen favorites as well. He seems unusually fond, for instance, of Stouffer's spinach soufflé, and this is a kid who has an inherited hatred of all green vegetables that goes back four generations. He also eats a lot of Morton macaroni and cheese. I think Nick is taking the low road here, to be perfectly honest. I've always found the more expensive Stouffer's to taste better, but Nick has an even more pedestrian palate than I do. As soon as he learns to talk, I intend to argue him out of Morton and into the good stuff.

The Morton-Stouffer's disagreement notwithstanding, it's nice to think that you can share something like this with your son, giving him bites of a cheese soufflé straight from the aluminum tray, slipping him a little bit of broccoli and cream sauce. Apparently, if you watch enough TV, you'll realize I'm not alone on this. Aunt Jemima, maker of frozen waffles and frozen French toast, has adopted an ad campaign that I can relate to. It's a bit of a rip-off from Kramer vs. Kramer, and it shows a harried dad trying to make a waffle--a real waffle--for his son while his wife is away. He spills the batter on his suit, burns the waffle and generally does all the inept fatherly things while his savvy son secretly pops an Aunt Jemima frozen waffle into the toaster.

As it happens, I'm a fairly regular user of Aunt Jemima products myself. I'm partial to the French toast, which has as its directions, "Place Aunt Jemima French toast in the toaster; heat until it pops up. If it is not quite hot, toast a little longer." Life should be simple, especially before noon.

Aunt Jemima even exploits the father-son theme on the box, which shows a picture of a happy dad, in his tie and vest, digging into his stack of French toast next to his son, in a rugby shirt, attacking his fresh-from-the-toaster breakfast. It's touching, in a sappy sort of way, and for a company so obviously in the forefront of the new food technology, it includes a heart-tugging tribute to basic family values. The caption says, Just Like Mommy Makes.

I'm looking forward to re-enacting that scene with Nicholas when he gets older. We'll sit around the glow of a warm toaster, or maybe a humming microwave, and I'll tell him about the bad old days when all I had to eat was a glass of Instant Breakfast and toast. Or how primitive the early boil-in-the-pouch turkey was. Then, when the waffle or the French toast pops up, we'll grab the syrup and settle in for breakfast.

"Is it good?" I'll ask him.

"Sure is," he'll say. "Just like Mommy makes."

Of course, he won't be paying me a compliment. He'll just be stating a fact.

" 'Unless you really appreciate good food, how can you consider yourself a sensuous person?' "