SPEAKER_01: Amazing, fascinating stories of inventions, ideas and innovations. Yes, this is the podcast about the things that have helped to shape our lives. Podcasts from the BBC World Service are supported by advertising. 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy with Tim Harford
SPEAKER_00: It's a typical November Tuesday for Mary, who lives in the north-east of the United States. She's 44, has a degree and her family is prosperous. So how's she been spending her day? Is she a lawyer pleading a case, a teacher in front of a class of kids, a management consultant surfing a spreadsheet? Well known. Mary spent an hour knitting and sewing, two hours setting the table and doing the dishes and well over two hours preparing and cooking food. And in this she isn't unusual. This is because it's 1965 and in 1965 many married American women, even those with an excellent education, spent large chunks of their day catering for their families. For these women, putting food on the table wasn't a metaphor. It was something that they did quite literally and it took many hours each week. We know about Mary's day and the days of many other people because of time-use surveys conducted around the world. These are diaries of exactly how different sorts of people use their time. And for educated women, the way time is spent in the United States and other rich countries has changed radically over the past half a century. Women in the US now spend around 45 minutes per day on cooking and cleaning up. That's still much more than men who spend just 15 minutes a day, but it's a vast shift from Mary's four hours a day. The reason for this shift is because of a radical change in the way the food we eat is prepared. If you want a symbol of this change, it's the introduction in 1954 of the TV dinner. Presented in a space-age aluminium tray and prepared so that the meat and the vegetables would all require the same cooking time, the frozen turkey tray TV dinner was developed by a bacteriologist called Betty Cronin. She worked for the Swanson Food Processing Company, which was looking for ways to keep busy after the business of supplying rations to US troops had dried up. But of course the TV dinner was just part of a panoply of changes wrought by the availability of freezers, microwaves, preservatives and production lines. Food had been perhaps the last cottage industry. It was something that would overwhelmingly be produced in the home. But food preparation has been industrialised. It's been outsourced to restaurants and takeaways, to sandwich shops and to factories that prepare ready to eat or ready to cook meals. And the invention of the industrial meal in all its forms has led to a profound shift in the modern economy. The most obvious symptom is that spending on food is changing. American families spend more and more outside the home, on fast food, restaurant meals, sandwiches and snacks. Only a quarter of food spending was outside the home in the 1960s. It's been rising steadily over time and in 2015 a landmark was reached. For the first time in their history, Americans spent more on food and drink outside the home than at grocery stores. Even within the home, food is increasingly processed to save the chef time and effort. There are obvious examples such as that TV dinner. But there are less obvious cases too. Chopped salad in bags, meatballs or kebab sticks doused in sauce and ready to grill, pre-grated cheese, jars of pasta sauce, tea that comes packaged in an individual permeable bag, chicken that comes plucked, gutted and full of sage and onion stuffing mix. Each new innovation would seem bizarre to the older generation. I've never plucked a chicken myself and perhaps my children will never chop their own salads. All this saves time, serious amounts of time. These innovations are a modern phenomenon. When the economist Valerie Ramey compared time-use diaries in the United States between the 1920s and the 1960s, she found that surprisingly little had changed. Whether women were uneducated and married to farmers or highly educated and married to urban professionals, they still spent a similar amount of time on housework across those 50 years. It was only in the 1960s that this pattern began to shift. But surely the innovation responsible for emancipating women wasn't the TV dinner but the washing machine. The idea is widely believed and it's appealing. A frozen TV dinner doesn't really feel like progress compared to healthy home-cooked food but a washing machine is clean and efficient and replaces work that was always drudgery. How could it not have been revolutionary? Well it was of course. But the revolution wasn't in the lives of women. It was in how lemon fresh we all started to smell. The data are clear that the washing machine didn't save a lot of time because before the washing machine we didn't wash clothes very often. When it took all day to wash and dry a few shirts, people would use replaceable collars and cuffs or dark outer layers to hide the grime. In contrast when it took two or three hours to prepare a meal, someone had to take that time. There wasn't an alternative. The washing machine didn't save much time and the ready meal did because we weren't willing to starve but we were willing to stink. The availability of ready meals has had some regrettable side effects. Obesity rates rose sharply in developed countries between the 1970s and the early 21st century at much the same time as these culinary innovations were being developed. This is no coincidence, say health economists. The cost of eating a lot of calories has fallen dramatically, not just in financial terms but in terms of the cost of time. Consider the humble potato. It's long been a staple of the American diet but before the second world war potatoes were usually baked, mashed or boiled. There's a reason for that. Roast potatoes need to be peeled, chopped, parboiled and then roasted. French fries or chips must be finely chopped then deep fried. This is all time consuming. But then the production of fried sliced potato chips, both french fries and crisps, were centralized. French fries can be peeled, chopped, fried and frozen in a factory. They're then refried in a fast food restaurant or microwaved at home. Between 1977 and 1995 American potato consumption increased by a third and that increase was almost entirely explained by the rise of fried potatoes. Even simpler, crisps can be fried, salted, flavored and packaged to last for many weeks on the shelf. But this convenience comes at a cost. In the USA calorie intake by adults rose by about 10% between the 1970s and the 1990s. But none of that was as a result of more calorific regular meals. It was all snacking and that usually means processed convenience food. Psychology and common sense suggest this shouldn't be a surprise. Experiments conducted by behavioral scientists show that we make very different decisions about what to eat depending on how far away the meal is. A long planned meal is likely to be nutritious but when we make more impulsive decisions our snacks are more likely to be junk food than something nourishing. The industrialization of food symbolized by the TV dinner changed our economy in two important ways. It freed women from hours of domestic chores, removing a large obstacle to them adopting serious professional careers. But by making empty calories ever more convenient to acquire it also freed our waistlines to expand. The challenge now as with so many inventions is to enjoy the benefit without also suffering the cost. Our introduction to ready
SPEAKER_01: meals and time use diaries came from Alison Wolf's book The XX Factor. For a full list of our sources please see bbcworldservice.com slash 50 things. If you like what we've been doing on 50 things
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