I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. It seems like we have a really short sense of history when it comes to food. I don’t mean not knowing what food was like when I grew up, but to be honest, I only started buying food for myself about 5 years ago. Before I lived with my family and she did the grocery shopping. No biggie, I’d just ask for something.
But I’ve been wondering…How much has food changed? I’m thinking of essentially everything. I got to thinking about this the other day when I had the idea that food was probably worse in the 70’s than it is today. But then again, I’m probably wrong.
Hell, just thinking about things really makes me wonder. I can’t really even remember specifically how things changed as I was growing up. I remember how the two-liter coke bottles changed so there was no black base on the bottom of it. Other than that it’s really difficult. I never had a frozen meal until I was about 12 though. Maybe that’s why I prefer to cook so much myself?
But I’ll give an example. My mom cooked southern food that was essentially the American/US farmer kind of food. We ate fried chicken, pot roast, chicken pot pie, chicken and dumplings, and the ocassional “foreign food” thrown in for good measure, although foreign usually meant italian. My parents told me that they never had a pizza until they went to college!
So what am I to make of this? Are there ways in which we eat better now? I imagine the resurgence of the farmers markets and fresh produce are a good thing after we all got rid of the gardens we supposedly had.
You touched on a major point: food in the USA has gotten much more “global.” Even in WideSpotInTheRoad, Arkansas you can find a couple of pizza places, Chinese food, and a half-dozen Mexican places. They may not be authentic, but it’s better than nothing. As the cities get larger, you can find more and more national and regional restaurants. In a place like LA, if they cook it on the planet, there is somewhere within the county you can find it.
Many more options, including international ones. When I was a kid in the 50s, you never heard of “cilantro,” for instance. Meals were pretty basic: cook the meat, and serve with potatoes and frozen or canned veggies. My mothers top recipes of the time were Corn Flake Chicken (rolled in crushed corn flakes and fried) and Chicken Kiev (which was pretty exotic for the time). We’d grill steak and hamburgers in the summer, and ate a good deal of seafood (we lived on the eastern end of Long Island, so it was easy to get).
No crockpots or microwaves, or course. About the only spices used were salt and pepper. It’s easier to get fresh vegetables and fruits; and they’re available year-round.
An illustration: last Thanksgiving, my mother bought fresh Brussels sprouts. She took out a cookbook from that time and asked, “I wonder what recipes are here?” Without looking, I said, “Probably boil them.” I was right – back then you boiled all vegetables. I went online and looked up recipes: we picked one that baked the sprouts in a little olive oil and spices; they were delicious.
It was worse even earlier. I have a guide to New York city written in 1939 that has to carefully explain ravioli, minestrone, tortillas, tacos, smörgåsbord, saki, pilaf, borscht, and shish kebab.
Well, the past hundred years have seen major changes in what we eat, and they have all been fast changes. What we eat now is very different than what there was in the 70’s, which was very different than what we had in the 50’s, which was really, really different than what people ate before WWII, which was different again from WWI-era food. We’ve gone very quickly from eating all local foods, processed by the cooks themselves through hours of hard labor, to a global market of convenient, delicious, fresh, easy-to-prepare foods. The intermediate stages may have been gauche and tasteless by our current standards, but they were all marvels of ease and modernity and wild new flavors for the cooks living through them.
It’s really a very interesting history and fascinating to read about; there are several books on various aspects of it. If you were in the US, I’d give you some titles to get from the library. As it is, you might like to do some searching or something, I don’t know.
Pizza was relatively unknown to middle America in the 1950s - it was a new thing “Hey, you gotta try this, it’s really good.” This is according to my parents, who were probably not on the cutting edge of anything at that time.
Read James Lileks’ book The Gallery of Regrettable Food (or go to his website at www.lileks.com). Not only is it hilarious, it also highlights the changes in cuisine since the 1950s, which he calls “an era deeply distrustful of flavor”
I’m not sure I’d put it that way (although they apparently didn’t much like hot and spicy foods, or foreign foods that we now take pretty much for granted). What surprises me are some of the intentional food choices – people ate a lot more things like aspics, gelatine salads, gelatine with vegetables in them, Pineapple-carrot-vinegar salad.
I love vintage cookbooks and own a small selection. As noted upthread, the 50s in particular seemed to focus on meat as main dish, with potatoes and other veggies as the sides. Seasoning is salt, pepper, sometimes mustard, and very occasionally other herbs. Most meat recipes also assume that you know how to dress meat and are in regular contact with your butcher.
The storyline from the Brady Bunch movie from about twelve years ago had the Bradys living in the present (i.e., mid 90s) but dressing and acting as if they were still in the late 60s. As I remember the movie, one gag had Mrs. Brady in the butcher shop buying ten or twenty pounds of meat for dinner, which astonished the other women in the shop. The gag illustrated how much less meat people eat today than they did a few decades ago. (Even the beef industry ads show portions of about three ounces per person.)
How did food change? It became flavouful, and went beyond the basics.
When I was a kid in the 1960s, we’d typically have meat (hot on Sunday, cold leftovers the rest of the week), two veg (always boiled), and potatoes (boiled, baked, or mashed) for every meal. By Friday, all the remaining leftover meat, veg, and potatoes were made into a stew. I well remember my mother often telling my sister and I how lucky we were to be able to eat meat every day, since not all of the world’s children could (Mom was fond of talking of starving children in Biafra). How true this was, I had no idea (well, I knew Biafra was in deep trouble), but it meant that we ate the same bland meals every day. Like many housewives in those June Cleaver days, Mom never got comfortable with using spices or sauces beyond the basics of salt, pepper, and ketchup. She would add some Worcestershire sauce to the weekly stew for a little added zip. Very little, it always seemed.
But I’d guess that different kinds of immigrants who brought their foods and spices in the 1970s helped change that a lot. Gradually, things like Indian curries and real Chinese food and Caribbean spices and whatnot started to appear in supermarkets, and restaurants featuring these and other formerly-foreign foods opened. North Americans realized there was more than just the bland basics they’d been used to–lamb didn’t have to be just roasted and served with mint sauce; it could be made into Greek souvlaki. Rice could be more than just Minute Rice boiled; it could be any of a variety of rices, and seasoned too. With a wide variety of fresh fruit and vegetables, all kinds of things were possible. At any rate, there was lots of choice beyond the basics, and lots of flavour.
Just my WAG anyway. Mom never did get comfortable with anything beyond the bland basics, but I certainly put on a few pounds when I moved out and could eat as I pleased.
But you know, don’t you think it’s odd how it’s not ingrained in my subconscious? I know what life was like before cellphones (well I lived through that) but I also know what life was like before computers, and even before cars to an extent. I have a general idea (maybe from movies and books of a certain time?) but you never seem to see much info about food. It’s crazy though about how fatteningly we ate, yet didn’t get obese! I grew up eating my mom’s food which is about as fatty as you can get in the south, and I’ll cook them here from time to time, but not on a regular basis! I just don’t have the desire to eat all of that grease. But on the other hand, I probably drink a lot more soda too.
My mom was probably a bit more creative, since I grew up in the 80’s and 90’s. We had some italian kinds of things, but she cooked dinner, EVERY NIGHT. It was a rare event that we didn’t eat a meal together. Usually breakfast and dinner, actually. My dad cooked the breakfast. But she also did the staples too (fried chicken and roast). We would usually substitute any kind of starch though we’d have rice (rice pilaf or spanish rice) and maybe rolls or mashed potatoes or some kind of potatoes. The veggies were limited, usually peas or string beans or black eyed peas or butter beans. That was basically it there.
Pretty simple I guess. Living in the rural south, it hasn’t changed a whole lot really.
However, in Denmark, one gets the feeling that the Danes are very much like our parents used to be. Obviously there was pizza before, but some things are quite new here. Most “exotic” food is pretty new here. I use quotation marks there, because don’t really consider indian food exotic. Going to a supermarket will result in you seeing foods that are meant primarily for Danes to cook danish food with.
People did eat fatty foods back in the day, but I don’t think they ate the quantity of food we eat today, and most people probably got more exercise. People walked more before it became normal for every driver in a household to have their own car. I know my grandmother walked to the drugstore and other nearby shops because my grandfather took the car to work. In fact, I’m not sure she ever had a driver’s license.
Things have not only become spicier and more international, they’ve become more sophisticated as well. In the 70s, had you even heard of salsa? Picante? Pita? Hummus? Kung pau?
Funny thing is, there is absolutely an American cuisine, and it’s more than just cheeseburgers. We have an absolutely stellar cuisine worthy of the best 5-star restaurants. In fact, we have at least 4 distinct quisines, and ironically, they all have their genesis in the long past. I count these as yankee, southern, cajun, and tex-mex. Reasonable arguments could be made for Californian, Hawaiian, and mid-Atlantic. An entire sub-cuisine exists every year in late November. One could even argue that Chinese food is yet another American genre.
I remember Chinese food in the 70s. What a freakin’ joke. Canned La Choy chow mein with those crispy little noodles, topped with watery soy sauce. I often wondered why the Chinese were so averse to flavor.
Americans eating habits have changed a lot, and not all for the better. “Going out to eat” was a fairly rare event for an awful lot of people well into the 1970s. For kids, it was a two-edged sword, since it involved (probably) taking a bath as well as getting dressed up. But it also meant at least day away from less than stellar favorites e.g. tuna casserole, but the point was that many families just could not afford to spend money in restaurants on a regular basis. They probably still can’t, but now it is not uncommon for “fast food” to make up a daily part of the diet, and there are lots of folks who would burn water if they actually tried to cook anything from scratch.
Well, I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s, but maybe my family being relatively recent immigrants in an area full of them made a difference. We ate a lot of Ukranian dishes, since that’s what we were, a lot of Italian stuff_since there were plenty of them in the area_ and my mother cooked the “Pennsylvania Dutch” foods that were her heritage. One thing we all, especially my grandmother, disdained is what we called “American food” …the kind of bland, overcooked stuff others in this thread have described.
I’m not up on food history, but it’s quite possible you weren’t eating prepared foods packed with soy and corn byproducts, or beef fed with growth hormones.
And, it’s likely you ate much smaller portions than people do today.
