Fresh or Frozen

I am continually amazed with the ever-expanding selection of frozen dinners available at my grocery store. Gone are the much-anticipated TV dinners in the silver foil trays with individual compartments, having long ago been replaced by ‘gourmet’ offerings with ‘real cheese’ and ‘from scratch’ flavors. Frozen dinners might taste better these days but it’s not because the quality of ingredients has dramatically improved. Instead, it’s the science behind food additives that has improved.

Consider the Joy of Cooking line of frozen foods. This brand is particularly irksome to me because I’ve had the Joy of Cooking cookbook for years and consider the tome a valuable resource for any kitchen. This book was once declared, “the greatest teaching cookbook ever written.” (Back in 1931 when Irma Rombauer and her daughter Marion self-published Joy, they started with the very basic instruction: “Stand facing the stove.”) Marion’s son Ethan is now at the helm and is obviously taking the company in a new direction. Has Ethan thrown in the towel and given up trying to teach people how to cook? Perhaps he is just being pragmatic (and capitalistic) by assuming that people don’t want to learn. If that’s the case, he should consider re-naming the company “The Joy of Not Cooking.”

I digress. Consider Joy’s frozen Bite Size Carrots with Brown Sugar Glaze. The recipe for Glazed Carrots on foodell.com has 3 ingredients (5 if you include salt and pepper): carrots, butter and sugar. This recipe was a staple in the original Joy cookbook and is ever popular with kids and grown-ups alike. The frozen variety of Joy’s glazed carrots includes the same 5 ingredients plus 17 more, including such things as maltodextrin (to sweeten), xanthan gum (to thicken), soy lecithin (to emulsify) and yeast extract (to add flavor). The food scientists have worked hard to adjust the quantities of these processed additives to make Joy’s frozen glazed carrots taste more like homemade.

And to what end? It takes about 10 minutes to cook the frozen carrots and about 20 minutes to make the dish from scratch. The frozen glazed carrots cost roughly $3 more than the homemade dish. Is there joy in paying $3 more to save 10 minutes and ingest chemical compounds? I think Ms. Rombauer would say something like, “Turn and stand facing the stove.”