THE EVOLVING DEATH OF FACE-TO-FACE DINING

Betty Cronin should have found her way into a Dan Quayle speech. In her singular, inventive and entrepreneurial way, she did more to waylay family values than Murphy Brown ever could.

Retired now, Cronin did not set out to revolutionize American culture. Forty years ago, at age 25, she was just looking to make a name for herself with her bosses at C.A. Swanson and Sons.

It's 1954, and what's a young woman in Omaha to do when she wants to impress the suits?

She became the mother of the TV dinner.

Modern lexicon no longer makes room for the phrase "TV dinner." Frozen meals these days have packaging that promotes the product by manipulating the word "microwave" into an adjective. But people of my generation know what a TV dinner was.

It was enveloped in aluminum, withdrawn from a freezer, popped into the oven and served on its own metallic plate. The menu offered turkey, fried chicken and beef, with peas and carrots in one separate compartment and very limp mashed potatoes in another.

For mothers in the changing 1950s, adjusting in large numbers to new experiences in the work force, TV dinners were a mixed blessing.

On one hand, they were easy: no preparation, no dirty pans, no dirty plates, no muss, no fuss. On the other hand, the kids kept asking for them, even when the offer was made to serve a meticulously prepared meal.

The attraction for children was not the taste but the novelty. Fast-food places that are plentiful today were fledglings at the time and certainly had not expanded to smaller communities. That an affinity could develop for food wrapped in foil seems odd now.

Cronin's creation, of which 1 million were sold the first year and 85 million were sold last year, came to be associated with television because the two came of age at the same time and the meals were easily transported to spots in front of the tube.

They even gave rise to an ancillary product, the TV tray. Just as TV dinners are destined to be footnotes in culinary history, TV trays are slight blips in the evolution of home furnishings. With legs that unfold into an "X" and a small metal top that attached with plastic clips, the trays were ideal as portable tables in front of a sofa or easy chair.

Purposeful, the viewer could then stare across his meal to some fascinating program. The tray served dual purposes. One, it allowed diners access to a television; before the TV became portable, the meals became so. Two, it helped take diners' minds off the fact what they were eating was hardly first-rate cuisine, not mention that 45 minutes earlier it had been hard as a rock.

My mother and father were early investors in TV trays, perhaps feeling on the cutting edge of a cultural movement. I can't remember the trays being used for much except snacks and resting the soup bowl on occasions when one of us was camped on the couch sick.

In fact, my parents and siblings adhered to an enduring routine where meals were concerned. When my family dined as a group, the television was turned off. My mother abhorred the racket, the distraction. The attitude seemed rigid to me at the time. Now, I appreciate it. In fact, I have adopted it as my own.

With my family today, a television is in view of our dinner table but it remains off during meals. With the peculiar schedules kept by those in my house, a sit-down supper is one of the few times we have when a family conversation can be held.

And in those moments when I feel myself becoming an old fogy, caught in a friendly nostalgia that recalls warm moments of my youth, I get the sense my children don't really mind this stable bit of give-and-take. Amid the dirty dishes and for the long moments after the remains of food have disappeared, we discuss the day and the days to come, and no one seems in a hurry to depart.

The suggestion here, admittedly self-centered, may seem to be that all families should be like mine, a prospect that would frighten even those who care for us. That's not what I advocate.

Nor is this a coy slam of feminism. Until a generation ago, and perhaps even now in slowly evolving contexts, women were held solely responsible for keeping together families. Why should they be blamed for wanting for fulfill themselves outside the home and use packaged foods to help lessen the load?

What was never built in (and men are more to blame than women) was a substitute of family time that slowly disintegrated. There remains something missing.

TV dinners, if not encouraging a move away from the face-to-face meals that bred togetherness in many homes, are at least a symbol of our cultural erosion of family. While Betty Cronin probably never intended it, her foil-encased creation implies a relationship with an appliance instead of a person. For this, the 40th anniversary of the TV dinner last week hardly seemed worth celebrating.

Ken Newton is editor of the Southeast Missourian.