Brian Eckert

Bjornson sat at the folding metal table on an office chair that he’d wheeled over from his desk. He smoothed his white smock, picked up the fork, and took an exploratory poke at the beef medallions.

His assistant, Kyle, stood by nervously, waiting for Bjornson to take the first bite.

The team was tasked with creating a frozen beef medallion dinner with mashed potatoes, mixed vegetables, and gravy that came in at under 300 calories and less than 30 net carbohydrates, but no more than 500 mg of sodium.

“It cannot be done,” said Kyle upon learning about the orders, which came from Bayersanto-Dupont-Tyson Foods Co.

But Bjornson was confident and steadfast.

“Kyle, when I was your age, TV dinners tasted like frozen, reheated dog shit. You take it for granted that you can stroll up and down the frozen food aisles, full of delicious, nutritious meals. Do you realize—evolutionarily speaking—what an accomplishment this is? If a Cro-Magnon came upon a Hungry-Man dinner it’d be like the chimpanzees screeching around that damn obelisk! A perfect object from the future, sent by God!”

Kyle let Bjornson rant. Nutritious, delicious frozen food was his passion, and he was damn good at what he did. But the sodium restriction…they were scientists, not magicians.

They shared a vision of bringing fresh, delicious meals to the lonely people of the world.

Bjornson forked the medallion and rolled it around in gravy. He lifted the drizzling meat and sniffed it. He licked the gravy-covered medallion and smacked his lips. Then, slowly, he bit into the beef. He masticated it carefully and added a bite of potatoes to his mouth. Kyle looked on breathlessly. Bjornson swallowed. It looked like a snake swallowing a toad.

“Well?” said Kyle, getting his hopes up.

“Well,” said Bjornson. “Well it tastes like a skunk’s asshole!” he said, raising the end of the sentence to a scream and knocking the medallions to the floor with a backhand.

Bjornson came to frozen food fame with his invention of a microwaveable soufflé so good that restaurant goers at Gordon Ramsay’s Savoy Grill could not tell the difference from fresh made.

From there, Bjornson went on to claim several firsts in the field, including the first frozen Fair Trade indigenous aboriginal stews; his series of laboratory grown meat dishes; and a 1,000-year shelf life crygogenically frozen lasagna with meat sauce meant for deep space astronauts, an invention that earned him a Nobel Prize nomination.

Building on these successes, he was able to command enormous fees for custom work. Clients gave him the specs, and he created the meal. They got more difficult as the work went on, but Bjornson always found a way. He had teams of Ivy League graduate mathematicians calculating microwave times using quantum theory. His $100 million laboratory was among the finest in the world, full of the latest in flavor injection technology, supercomputers, and high resolution displays.

Kyle graduated at the top of his class at Harvard for chemical engineering. He turned down several lucrative offers working for fossil fuel companies to join Bjornson because they shared a vision of bringing fresh, delicious meals to the lonely people of the world, who ate alone in front of their laptops, a microwaved miracle the only thing standing between them and total despair.

“Imagine,” said Bjornson. “You come home after a long day at work to your empty apartment. You open the freezer and take out your beef medallions, you set the timer and change your clothes, freshen up. The beeper sounds. You smell the food. You need—no, you deserve—something to enjoy after a hard, thankless day. You peel back the plastic and stir the food. You sit down at a tray and turn on the TV. You blow on the hot food. You take a bite. And it tastes like the goddamned stomach contents of a sewer rat! Think of that poor bastard, Kyle! That is who we work for. They deserve a good, hot meal, man, and we can give it to them!”

Kyle understood well, for he himself was a consumer of microwaveable fare. Bjornson, at least, had a wife to cook for him. Yet he was a man of integrity. He would not let others eat what he himself would not eat.

“The flavor crystal profile is off the charts!”

“Hand me the paprika injector.”

Kyle handed the tool to Bjornson, who carefully placed the tip of the instrument into the medallion and said, “Ready?”

“Ready,” said Kyle. He measured out 10 ccs and pressed “enter” on the computer.

“Good,” said Bjornson. “No, wait. Shit. We need dextrose, and fast. It’s destabilizing! Hurry, man, hurry!”

Kyle pushed a button on the computer and the flavor machine beeped.

“Thank fuck,” said Bjornson. “Flavor levels stabilized. Give it a shot of the liquid-carbon meat tenderizer. Easy…steady. Good. Now hit those potatoes with the butter flavor.”

“Butter levels optimizing, sir.”

“A touch of smoke flavor—just a touch, now. That’s good. I don’t like these potassium levels, though. Five units of hydrogenated oils…that’s it. Ah, goddammit! That puts us past the acceptable trans-fat levels. Shut it down. We’ll try again tomorrow.”

Kyle arrived at home and heated up a frozen lamb shank stew with Mediterranean spices, whole new potatoes, and garden fresh asparagus. Sipping an after-dinner cognac, he worked on some calculations for the beef medallions.

“Impossible,” he thought. But then he hit on something. Yes, of course—why hadn’t he thought of it before? The medallions required the slightest bit of alcohol to acidize the gravy particles and increase flavor-molecular bonding.

The next day at the lab he presented his idea to Bjornson, who appeared incredulous.

“We might as well try,” said Bjornson. “I’m beginning to think this really is impossible.”

They tweaked the formula with a microdose of cooking sherry. On the screen, they watched in rapture as the gravy molecules bonded so tightly that their breaking apart would be more powerful than the atomic bomb used on Hiroshima.

“My God,” said Bjornson. “That might’ve done it. Look at that flavor crystal profile. It’s off the charts!”

Kyle beamed silently. But the real test was still to come.

Bjornson sat at the folding metal table and Kyle set the completed prototype in front of him. Like an oenophile he went through the motions of swirling, smelling, and tasting. He swallowed the medallions and set his fork down.

“Congratulations. You’ve done it,” he said.

“We’ve done it,” said Kyle.

“This is not about us,” said Bjornson. “Remember that always.”