Practical - Ready Meals: an introduction

The ready meal industry is worth almost £2.6 bn in the UK alone.

Ready meals came about after extra turkey was leftover after Thanksgiving in the USA in 1953. A company called Swansons took this extra turkey and packaged it up into foil dishes with all other elements of a thanksgiving dinner to sell it onwards. These were a big hit as the foil dishes meant the food could be quickly cooked/heated from frozen in the dish as well as serving as a plate/dish on which to eat the meal from.

The packaged meal sold over 10 million in its first year partly due to the rise of television in American households - the meal was marketed as a 'TV dinner', as it was easy to prepare and eat whilst not having to abandon the program you were watching.

The rise in popularity of ready meals is also due to the changes in modern society - as women began to work more hours and spend less time at home, the appeal of convenient, quick to cook meals to feed the family grew and grew.
Ready meals were also marketed at men. Divorce rates had started to increase and this meant a lot of men now had to cook and fend for themselves. Ready meals were advertised towards newly single men, but this had problems as this was seen as a sign of social neglect. 

Around this time people began to question the quality of the ready meals they were consuming, as they were frozen and not fresh. However after Marks and Spencer released a chilled chicken kiev, people were all for ready meals again, preferring the fresher meal over the frozen ones.

"This met consumer demand for freshness and made people feel a step closer to the idea that they had made it themselves." - Alan Warde, professor of sociology at the University of Manchester and author of Consumption, Food and Taste.

The change from frozen to chilled meals came about at a time when people were beginning to become more concerned with health. This prompted a push towards premium ranges of ready meals with more expensive ingredients, as people were willing to pay more for a 'healthier' meal. Supermarkets adjusted their packaging to look more luxury with good quality photography which enticed you in. As a recession hit too, people preferred to stay in instead of dining out at a restaurant, saving a few pounds on a luxury meal to have a "luxury" ready meal as opposed to cooking.

However ready meals are still not nutritionally beneficial, with 0/100 supermarket ready meals meeting nutritional guidelines according to a study by the British Medical Journal.