Remember those TV trays? They might have sent us down the path to technological domination
Many symbols might best epitomize the mid-20th century, but for me it’s the TV table, which represented everything that was right and wrong with the electronic era. Mostly wrong.
First, if you are under 60, forget everything you think you know about TV tables. They were not bespoke, hand-crafted Amish creations, they were not made of mahogany, they were not impromptu laptop desks or minimalist Ikea productions that fold up to the size of a National Park pamphlet.
They did fold up, of course, but they were always made of metal. And not the good metal either, but the really cheap kind, painted in kind of creepy colors and designs — if sunflowers on tin was your thing, you were in high cotton.
Contrary to popular opinion (to the degree anyone thinks about it anymore, which is not much) TV tables were not designed to accommodate TV dinners. In fact, it was the other way around.
But TV tables were indeed designed for food — exclusively for food. They had a raised rim around the edge, so when the kids inevitably spilled their Hawaiian Punch it would be contained, sort of like a cesspool for sugar.
The combination of cheap metal and acidic foodstuffs led to rust of course, which 1960s-era dads would contain with one apathetically applied brushstroke of some corrosion-inhibiting paint the color of an airline fuselage.
This rim made it impossible to write on the table, or do much of anything else except eat. These portable dinner tables were necessary, because in the ’50s and ’60s the living room in many American homes became the dining room — the reason being television.
Kids, next time your grandparents tell you to “get your nose out of your phone,” remind them that 60 years ago they were parking their own noses in a semi-circle around the glowing set, deemed too magical, too important to leave, even for the time it took to eat.
TV tables were widely introduced in 1952, and a year later the Swanson corporation came out with the first frozen TV dinner, which nested neatly within the raised metal rim and even divided the food up for you in separate shallow compartments so you could more or less eat by feel instead of having to take your eyes off the television.
TV dinners, which couldn’t have been good for you, actually became a middle class status symbol proudly served by mothers who couldn’t be bothered by the time away from the TV it would take to whip up a wholesome meal.
Not my family, though, where Mom had the audacity to cook real food. It killed me. I would watch ubiquitous advertisements for Swanson frozen dinners with a combination of shame and drool, knowing that at this exact moment all the coolest kids were sitting down to a frozen dinner so perfectly uniform that you couldn't have told the difference from one corn kernel to another with an electron microscope.
I thought of TV tables the other day when listening to some politician enumerating the benefits of keeping technology away from our youth: TikTok, AI, cell phones. And I wondered if we might have become a better nation had we banned television.
But maybe it’s not too late! Consider this reasoning from my new favorite blogger, Danah Boyd, arguing that we should take TV away from the elderly:
“Television is a serious problem! Their brains are wasting away. Their health is suffering. Their ability to maintain friends is declining. They’re unable to recognize disinformation. Elders’ brains are not fully baked anymore; they can’t handle television. This foolish medium is making fools out of our elders, making them unable to participate responsibly in a democratic society. We must put a stop to this. We must stop TV! And if we can’t stop TV, we must prevent them from watching it!”
I know she’s being facetious. But I wish she weren’t.
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Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: TV trays symbolize everything right and wrong with the electronic era
