no-love dinners

By Todd Stadler · Friday, July 13, 2001 5:59pm

I walked through the frozen food section of Safeway today, trying to find some frozen soybeans. Sadly, such an item is too exotic for li'l ol' Portland.

So I perused the frozen dinners that were available, and I have to say I felt mildly insulted.

Maybe it was the fact that every meal seemed either targeted to the healthy working person on-the-go or the poor bachelor slob. You could practically see a picture of either one of those stereotypes on the packaging.

Maybe it's that I just spent time cooking quality meals with my girlfriend, and I was expecting better foods than what they offered. I mean, with minimal preparation and skill, we made spaetzle with cheese sauce and garlic dill scallops. So I'd expect something more, I don't know, professional from frozen dinners.

Perhaps I'm out of my head. I mean, my meal with Julia took, like, half an hour to prepare, which is something close to an eternity in food preparation time. Even the chefs down at McDonald's can cook a whole meal in a tenth of that time, if that!

But why must every frozen meal offer so much from the brown spectrum? Breaded, fried meat with rice or pasta. Rice with carrots. Macaroni and cheese. I mean, really, do people have so little skill that they have to reheat prepared mac 'n' cheese, rather than exercise the culinary mastery that is required when cooking from a box?

Of course, I'm expecting a lot from the same industry that brought us "bakery stix" and the improbably more repulsive "breakfast sticks", which according to the specs are "pork and vegetable protein skinless links" lovingly encased in "fine grind blueberry flavored pancake batter formulated to resist cracking". Mmm!