Fascinating Food History

July 2, 2010

Interview with Carolyn Wyman, author of the book Better Than Homemade: Amazing Food That Changed the Way We Eat

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Mike Carruthers:
Sanka was the first successful decaffeinated coffee.

Carolyn Wyman:
It was invented by this French food merchant named Ludwig Roselius because his dad had been a coffee taster and he blamed his job as a coffee taster for his dad's early death - he thought it was because of the caffeine.

Carolyn Wyman, author of the book Better Than Homemade, has researched the origins of some of the most popular food products of the last hundred years. She says TV dinners were invented by Swanson's, which was a turkey processor.

1951 - it was a particularly warm November so fewer people around the country had turkey dinners for Thanksgiving. As a result the company had a whole glut of turkeys they didn't know what to do with. So they decided to freeze some of this turkey and put it in these little trays and call them TV dinners to sort of link the idea of a miracle heat-and-eat meal with the miracle of television that just started.

Frozen food had been around for a while but wasn't very popular until Artic explorer Clarence Birdseye came on the scene.

He went to Labrador in 1912 and he noticed in those extreme low temperatures that fish and meat would freeze immediately and would taste and have almost the exact same texture as fresh when it was defrosted. So he had the idea that maybe it was the speed of the freezing that had been the problem before.