| Summary: | Offers a look at the culinary habits of modern society. Incongruence between the popularity of cookbooks and the prevalence of convenience foods in society; Importance of food as a marker of social class and cultural capital; Categories of convenience foods, including ambient, frozen and chilled; Introduction of the first "TV dinners" by Swanson; Report that frozen dinners in Great Britain are meant for poorer shoppers looking for bargains; Popularity of chilled ready meals in Great Britain among the middle class; Claim that convenience food has been associated with the poor diet and general indolence of the lower classes; Marketing of chilled ready meals to "cash-rich, time-poor" professionals; Reference to the book "Consumption, Food and Taste," by Alan Warde; Discussion of the apparent paradox of rising sales in ready meals and the enhanced status of complicated recipes cooked with fresh ingredients.
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