Would you spend £30 on a Charlie Bigham’s ready meal?

Ready meals: the after-work time-saver, the dinner-party cheat – or a poor imitation of proper, cooked food?

The proto-ready meal – an entire meal that can be cooked in its packaging, with little or no preparation – was invented in 1945 and called the Strato-Plate, but used only in aviation and military settings. The first mainstream ready meal was the TV dinner.

The story goes that in 1953, an American company, Swanson, who produced frozen, oven-ready poultry and pies, had 260 tons of turkey left over after lacklustre Thanksgiving sales. It was being held in railway cars, but the refrigeration for these only worked when the train moved, so Swanson ordered the train to run back and forth between the company’s Nebraska headquarters and the East Coast until a solution could be found.

Swan