In the 1990s, my childhood frozen-food dinners seemed precision-engineered for disappointment: gloppy Salisbury steak with a side of grainy mashed potatoes, a pile of limp fish sticks, a cardboardy personal pizza. Well into adulthood, I assumed that the most satisfying meal I could scrounge from the colder side of the fridge was a pint of Häagen-Dazs. People who cared about flavor weren’t supposed to eat frozen meals; in 2009, the chef Gordon Ramsay, who frequently disparaged frozen fare on TV, said it was the only type of food he would never eat.
But sometime over the past decade or so, the freezer’s reputation started to change. No longer simply a tool for convenient, mediocre eating, it transformed into a second pantry, stocked with cooking shortcuts and premade foods that satisfy more discerning tastes. Frozen aisles began featuring a wider range of options: protein-packed rice bowls, Salvadoran pupusas, Indian curries. The widely adopted air fryer, whose selling point is making anything crispy, pairs better with frozen foods than the microwave does. Home cooks with a passion for creating every element of a meal from scratch use the freezer to preserve tamarind chutney, sliced sourdough bread, and cubes of summer-bright pesto. Food magazines and influencers regularly offer tips on unique freezing techniques and recommend ready-made options from Trader Joe’s or Costco. More celebrity chefs have become comfortable attaching their name to frozen products; in 2023, even Ramsay started a line.
Like so many shifts in American eating habits, this newfound appreciation for freezing was in part influenced by the coronavirus pandemic’s early lockdowns, when food shortages and fears of shopping in stores led people to stockpile ingredients. For the many Americans who’d previously loved to dine out, the slog of cooking every meal underscored the advantages of premade freezer meals. Frozen-food sales rose 21 percent in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, according to the American Frozen Food Institute, an industry advocacy group. Although some of that growth fell away when restaurants reopened their dining rooms, Alison Boder, the president of AFFI, told me that people had become more familiar with the frozen-food aisle’s offerings, and some of the shifts in habit toward using them remained.
The freezer also helps uphold the seemingly competing values of many older Millennials, who are now in their late 30s or early 40s and have been driving a lot of the sales: They may be obsessed with food yet lack time to cook every meal themselves. They’re eager to try a 15-ingredient viral recipe but care about sustainability and don’t want to waste any unused ingredients. They want to eat healthily, but, as members of the generation that celebrated the Doritos Locos Taco, they’re not averse to convenience foods. Freezing speaks to all of these desires: Frozen vegetables don’t rot in the fridge. A double batch of a recipe uses up fresh ingredients and freezes well for later. And a wide variety of ready-made frozen options have been developed to address nearly every health goal and snack craving. For people who love to eat, the freezer has become not a crutch but an arsenal of taste.
Frozen food’s reputation for tasting bad dates back to the inception of its mass production. Nicola Twilley, whose book Frostbite traces the history of refrigeration and its impact on the way we eat, told me that freezers’ “killer app”—the product that encouraged the appliance’s mass adoption, which in this case was actually a killer drink—was frozen concentrated orange juice, a classic postwar processed food product that saved a lot of hand-squeezing, even if took a serious hit on taste. “Maybe you have a nostalgic feeling about it, but it’s not anywhere close to Tropicana, let alone fresh orange juice,” Twilley said. Other early innovations, such as fish sticks, were created not to delight the palate but to sell food that many people considered inferior. In his paper on the fish stick, “The Ocean’s Hot Dog,” the historian Paul Josephson writes that the product became popular in the 1950s in part because the fishing industry needed an easier way to sell damaged goods. The processing and freezing gave a futuristic sheen to chopped-up fish fillets gussied up with breading; sold on the convenience, Americans began packing their freezers.
By the late ’80s and early ’90s, frozen food had met the microwave, and the category was stuffed with meals and snacks for every bland American need, from diet-conscious Lean Cuisine to mindless carb-and-cheese-delivery vehicles such as Totino’s pizza rolls. Whenever my mom or I was dieting in the mid-’90s, meals from brands such as Healthy Choice became commonplace at the dinner table. They were utility food, good enough.
As an adult, I also had the vague impression that food in the freezer was less “good for me” than a freshly made meal. The frozen aisle can be packed with the kind of processed foods that nutrition experts have warned against for decades—made with excess amounts of salt, sugar, preservatives, and stabilizers—and that have led many people to associate the freezer with poor health. But freezing itself isn’t a form of food processing; a frozen pea is made of the same stuff as it was when it was picked.
Such misconceptions about frozen food have been debunked in recent years. Studies have shown that frozen vegetables are just as nutritious as fresh ones. Carrots and broccoli that are frozen at peak freshness may taste bland when warmed on their own, but more recipes now encourage stirring them into fried rice and Sunday stews, where they are indistinguishable from their fresh counterparts. “Frozen food is often actually fresher than refrigerated food,” Twilley told me. People “literally seem to picture it coming from the farm to the grocery store to them in about a week, and that is not how it happens,” she said. “That green bean has sat in a refrigerated warehouse for weeks, longer than you can possibly imagine.” And when a fruit or vegetable is picked and stashed in a refrigerated warehouse, Twilley explained, it consumes its own natural sugars and vitamins to stay alive, which can reduce both its nutrition and its taste. Frozen vegetables and fruits, though, are arrested in the moment soon after they are picked. As a result, they’re better preserved.
Americans’ new enthusiasm for the freezer is perhaps a natural development following an era, starting in the early 2000s, when a growing interest in artisanal food pushed many home cooks to reassess the contents of their pantries. Some jumped into the homemade-pickles-in-mason-jars craze. More recently, people have been choosing higher-quality options—or at least fancier words—for what they’re eating. See: canned sardines becoming “tinned fish.” For the type of person who will spend $50 on a sampler of Portuguese sardines despite having never previously touched the domestic cans, the next logical step may be to fill the freezer with $10 pints of craft ice cream or $22 sourdough pizza. And it makes sense that the frozen section would experience an upscaling later—it’s sleepier than other parts of the grocery. Lindsay Kunkle, the head of U.S. Consultancy for Foresight Factory, a consumer-predictions firm, told me that retailers reallocate space there once a year, versus the near-constant change of, say, a beverage case: “It’s the area of the grocery-store landscape that’s not even most appealing to most shoppers, because it’s cold.”
These days, brands such as the direct-to-consumer smoothie purveyor Daily Harvest chase the health-conscious consumer who has burned out on meal prep. Other brands forgo nutrition claims and lean into variety. Trader Joe’s stocks its freezer aisle with a staggering array of indulgent meals, including orange chicken and chile rellenos. Americans’ appetite for snacks has translated to lots of frozen bite-size chicken, bite-size seafood, and bite-size cheese. By offering options that follow trends closely, and whose flavors go bigger than the plain ’90s baseline, frozen prepared foods are competing with restaurant delivery as much as they are with home cooking.
Convenience is still the big draw: Full meals make up the bulk of what people are buying in the freezer section, accounting for 32 percent of overall frozen-food sales, according to a report from Conagra Brands, which owns common names such as Marie Callender’s. But the increased attention to the freezer has translated to how savvy home cooks prepare meals too. It’s easy to freeze all kinds of scraps and extras that might boost the flavor of a dish—and might otherwise be thrown out—without all of the extra work and equipment other types of preservation entail. Popular freezer hacks include saving Parmesan rinds to deepen the flavor of soups, cutting up loaves of bread for toast, and even storing homemade jam without all the mess of canning.
The thing that’s remarkable, really, is that frozen food had a bad reputation in the United States for as long as it did. Over the past few decades, American food reporters and bloggers have often written about the French frozen-food emporium Picard with an air of scandal. In 2002, The New York Times cheekily emphasized the way French women elided or even hid that their deer roasts and stuffed eggplants came from the chain, painting a picture of a grande cuisine eroded by modern convenience, one premade canapé at a time. Since then, Americans expats in France have confessed to an embarrassing love of the brand; one said she “would never have imagined” that she’d grow attached to the company, which also sells shortcuts such as peeled fava beans and chopped onions.
But this long tail of coverage agrees on one thing: The food tastes good. The guilt and secrecy no longer seem necessary, with regard to either eating frozen food in France or taking advantage of the higher-quality options now available stateside. Most people would still prefer to eat fresh over frozen food, but no one is going to get more time to cook anytime soon. What may be emerging instead is a new skill set, where cooks focus on what’s worth making from scratch, what can be saved well, and what can quickly satisfy a genuine hunger or an idle craving—all accomplished by putting something good on ice.
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