I can still feel the film, peeling back the condensation-soaked plastic to reveal the partitioned morsels of my dinner. The rubbery fried chicken leg that tastes of salt and “Growing Pains” reruns. Watery kernels of corn hiding inevitabilities, like we will grow older and nothing will ever again taste like this. And best of all, the molten-hot chocolate brownie, whose edges crisp like printed Kodak.
I’ve been a food journalist for almost 20 years, writing about fanciful luxuries like caviar-topped tater tots, Iberico ham that costs more than my first car and sorbets made of both arugula and foraged pine needles. Somehow, though, in the thousands of articles I’ve penned, I have never written a word — nor, now that I think about it, read a word — about microwave food.
This is strange, because for the first 17 years of my life, frozen TV dinners made up the vast majority of what I ate. I was born to a single, teenage mom, who didn’t have the time to spend hours roasting a chicken, the money to buy the good cheese or the energy to chop and stir in accordance to handed-down recipes. What she had was a buck or two a meal and a microwave, which meant I grew up craving that soggy Kid Cuisine fried chicken and Michelina’s lasagna that stained the tray with its caramelized tomato sauce.
Surely there are others like me, those with exhausted parents and budgets to keep. Without backyard gardens or Le Creuset Dutch ovens or maybe even, like at the beginning of my own life, without full-on kitchens. Parents with just a frosty, brittle-shelved freezer, a plugged-in microwave and the love for a child that could be shown in ways other than baking bread from scratch.
It could be a class thing or an ethnicity thing or maybe a geographic thing, I don’t really know. Maybe we want to keep quiet about our frozen Michelina’s and marrow-deep love for those Kid Cuisine brownies because it conveys something shameful, something less-than. It paints our own parents in a negative light because no, not everything was “made with love.” It reveals that we did not have the money to eat sushi, takeout or even Taco Bell unless it was a special occasion.
I’ve read a lot about how other kids’ meals were served with ritual and legacy, the stories of those simmering Sunday sauces and family recipes passed down through generations every nostalgic word making my nuked dinners feel more and more like embarrassing pragmatism. Because what I ate was never about mastery or tradition; it was about filling a stomach with whatever was affordable and fast. I can’t possibly be alone in that experience.
Food journalism, with its endless praise of artisanal everything and hand-churned truffle butters, makes this gap feel absurd. Even moreso now that grocery bills rival flat-screen TVs and monthly health insurance premiums cost what a mortgage once did. Entire pages, entire magazines, are devoted to food that most people will never taste, let alone prepare at home. Meanwhile, the meals that sustained me and countless others — the Banquets, the Healthy Choices, the hum of a microwave as it counted down — exist invisibly uncelebrated.
And maybe thatap the point. These meals don’t come with Instagram-ready aesthetics or aspirational narratives. They come with necessity, memory and, if you pay attention, in the knowledge that someone cared enough to make sure you ate.
Maybe my experience eating the same roster of fried chicken or lasagna TV dinners — I had a fleeting beef stroganoff phase, but that gave way to mac and cheese pretty quickly — made me more curious about food as an adult and primed me for my work in restaurant journalism. There was so much I didn’t eat as a kid, so many flavors, cuisines and cooking techniques that felt completely out of reach. As an adult, the food world suddenly seemed enormous, full of possibilities, and I wanted to know it all. That curiosity became the foundation for my career, and I devoted myself to exploring every corner of it, from hole-in-the-wall diners to fine dining, from my first taste of pho to $200 tasting menus, forgetting, I now realize, my own food roots.
I’m a mother myself, and I carry a weird sense of pride that my kids don’t eat those microwave meals, probably don’t even know what they are. And why is that? Do I think myself a better mother for throwing together a stir-fry with closeout sale Kroger veggies? For boiling water for pasta and opening a jar of Rao’s? (But only when my own mother, the one who pressed the glowing, beeping buttons that made my dinners before I could reach them, brings me some from a Costco sale.)
I decided that my kids needed a taste of what I grew up with. That they needed the experience of peeling back the film on a partitioned, nuked dinner. So I wandered the frozen aisle, hunting for microwavable bridges between my childhood and theirs.
As it turns out, Kid Cuisines have evolved over the past 35 years. My bone-in chicken legs have given way to dinosaur-shaped nuggets, the corn advancing to crinkle cut fries and the brownie being replaced by far inferior white chocolate-coated pretzels to dip in lame chocolate sauce. The kids were not impressed.
But food doesn’t have to be perfect to matter. Or to be worthy of words in magazines, newspapers and blogs. Love, like food, comes in many forms, and sometimes it arrives in plastic trays, heated until it steams under microwaved film.
Allyson Reedy is a Denver-area freelance writer and author, and a former Denver Post food writer.
