I really do think that would be the worst thing about being trapped in the past, imagining the look on the face of a grocery clerk while I ask where the feta cheese or sushi bar is. Hell even finding the ingredients to make it yourself would be difficult or impossible, not even an internet to do so.
Forget Mexican food, if you want to go out for some exotic ethnic food there is this new Italian place that just opened that serves what tastes like canned Chef Boyardee spaghetti. The owner probably wouldn’t even know what cannoli is.
Not true. However, they have become globally available only in the past 500 years or so. Before 1492 there were no potatoes in Ireland or tomatoes in Italy or chili peppers in India.
Define the past, because what you typed sounds pretty much like my childhood. The grocery stores stocked basic foods and spices in the medium-sized city where I grew up.
I think ethnic restaurants in the past were operated by people of that ethnicity and the food would have been good, except sometimes limited by available ingredients. The variety of restaurants may not have been available outside of major metropolitan areas, but I’ve never seen any reason to believe the quality was lacking.
I’m remind of a panel in the Larry Gonick series The Cartoon History of the Universe*, where he’s looking at people in ancient Sumeria. The caption says that they lived on a diet of bread an onions.
“Don’t you get tired of Bread and Onions?” asks the man, eating Bread an Onions.
“Tired of FOOD??!” asks the woman
Your problem is that you know about alternatives.
Actually, Sumerians almost certainly are more than just bread and onions. Most people eat some sort of meat (even if they say they don’t, and excuse any meat put into the “sauce” sopped up by their bread as only “flavoring”). I think a diet of bread and onions is pretty deficient, and they must have supplemented it with something else.
So there’d be variety, but probably not with the things you know and love.
I’d have problem with food, too, but mainly because of food storage. Things tend to go bad, and we’ve grown used to both additives and preservation methods – freezing, freeze drying, canning with pressure-cooker sterilization – which wouldn’t be available if you go some distance into the past. Even storing things in colo chambers, you’d get milk, butter, and other things going rancid quickly. (One scene from fiction that stands out in my memory is in Frans Bengtsson’s The Long Ships/Red Orm where they praise a new Viking because he doesn’t have any qualms about eating the moldy, decaying hunk of meat they’re storing belowdecks.) Better get used to a lot of smoked and salted meat, and eating cheese.
That’s funny. I’m trapped in the present, and I would be going insane over food, if I didn’t have a way to cook virtually everything from scratch in my kitchen. Just a few shelves in the supermarket of anything that I can actually eat. No way I could ever depend on “eating out” for sustenance.
When I read the subject line I immediately thought of old sailing ships and having to eat biscuits filled with maggots and weevils. That’s the only food situation I can think of that would drive me insane.
On the one hand it’s true that our access to ethnic foods would be enormously decreased. Seasonal foods would actually be seasonal. We’d certainly lose out on some variety there. Making food took a lot more time, and you used a lot more of your money on it.
On the other hand, there’s something to be said for an era in which tomatoes tasted like tomatoes and bread couldn’t sit in a plastic bag for a month. Eating locally and seasonally is not a bad thing. Game meats and organ meats are highly under-appreciated by modern palates. If you had enough money that surviving the winter wasn’t a big concern, there was some really good eats to be had back in the day.
I think for people on the bottom of the totem pole (think “not a member of the one percent”) food was very limited in supply and very plain. I think millet, whatever it was, used to be the major grain in Europe. Most people lived on gruels, grains of various sort (wheat, millet, corn, etc.) mixed with water. Prior to the Irish potato famine the big staple in Ireland was potatoes mashed up in milk. It would have been very boring, but you would probably have spent a lot of your waking hours doing hard physical labor and hence would have been very hungry.
Yep. Some of the foods my late mother-in-law grew up eating - pokeweed, acorns, squirrel, rattlesnake - have been supplanted by domesticated items that don’t require nearly as much effort or prep time to make edible.