Horse meat scandal: The ready meal is not past its sell-by date yet Many accept that cheap convenience food is a necessary evil, when the average adult in Britain spends twice as much time commuting as they do cooking, according to the Office for National Statistics. However, there is a school of thought that says the cellophane-wrapped, microwaveable dish is Britain's greatest gift to the culinary world. A bold claim, certainly, and one that deserves examination. It is true that the "TV dinner"," as it was first called, originated in the States in 1953, packaged in jet-age aluminium trays. But it was Britain that made the dish its own and, crucially, converted it from a cheap, frozen commodity into an aspirational product. The credit, as with so many food revolutions, lies with Marks & Spencer. In 1979, Cathy Chapman, a young food developer, persuaded the company's board of directors that they should put aside their reservations about continental food and back her idea for a new product. It was the chicken kiev. The head of food said: "It's got garlic in. I don't like garlic, people don't like garlic," a common sentiment in Seventies Britain. But Chapman won her battle and this dish - the first ready meal to be sold in the chiller cabinet, rather than in the freezer or on a shelf with all the tinned pies - caught the imagination of a generation of women who were going out to work in numbers their mothers never did. They lacked time and skill but had the money and the desire to recreate the dishes they had eaten at their local bistro. Within a month this one dish was bringing £50,000 a week into M&S's tills, as the middle classes tried to pass off the kiev at dinner parties as their own. Other supermarkets followed suit, and now they all have their own ranges of ready meals sold in anything from ceramic ramekins to plastic dishes. None of this would have been possible without the supermarkets investing large sums in centralised, chilled warehouses, in effect hanger-sized fridges. Bill Grimsey, a former boss of Iceland and the author of Sold Out, says: "We should be proud of the food industry. They made it possible for shoppers to buy seasonal products all year round, and these exciting chilled ready meals. The product never changed temperature between leaving the production line and going into the shopper's basket. Consumers lapped it up. The figures bear this out: the chilled ready-meal industry is worth £2.6 billion a year. Ready meals also added variety to our diet, says Alan Warde, professor of sociology at the University of Manchester. "There is a bit of romanticism that home cooking in the Fifties and Sixties was always good," he says, pointing out that it was often bland and depressingly predictable. The ready meal introduced British consumers to the cuisines of Thailand, Italy, India and Morocco long before they could dream of travelling there in person. And it did so for a pittance. The average household spends a mere £53.40 a week on food and non-alcoholic drinks, according to the Office for National Statistics, which is only possible thanks to supermarket processed food. David Clarke, who runs the Red Tractor Assurance scheme for British food, says: "There have been a lot of disingenuous comments about how value food is full of cheap off-cuts. Of course it is. That is the purpose of pies, and sausages and the like. We need to eat the non-prime cuts and it helps keep the price of prime cuts down. The horse meat scandal has quite rightly shone a spotlight on the cheaper end of the ready meals industry. But to tar all ready meals with the same brush would be a mistake. The food and drink industry is now Britain's biggest manufacturing sector. We may not like the idea of cheap, processed food but it feeds millions of people every day as well as keeping hundreds of thousands in work. As Prof Warde says: "My prediction is that the scandal will not have an impact in the medium or long term. It may do damage to particular brands, but I can't see people altering how they organise their daily lives so that they avoid part-prepared foods altogether.