The White Stuff-Weird Al
That was true until just a couple of years ago. Now diet drinks have sucralose, and are better than they’ve ever been. YMMV, of course. I think artificial sweeteners are one of the most subjective tastes there is.
BETTER NOW: Kosher for Passover dessert food. Until about 10 years ago, KFP dessert food was not worth it. You just did without for a week. Maybe homemade spongecake was OK, but it really was just sort of a tease.
About 10 (or maybe it was 15-- time starts to go fast when you hit 35) someone concocted something the passed rabbinical muster and made really nice coffee cake and brownie mixes, and decent chocolate chip cookies too. Elite candy is Israel started making good stuff, and everyone started importing it. It’s so good, that if you have any left after Passover, you eat it anyway, you don’t throw it out.
I had some mint-chocolate matzo crackers a few months ago, and they were fabu!
But the reverse is largely true, too. People think today’s artisanal breads and cheeses are better than what American groceries used to be limited to? Where do you think those artisans’ methods came from? Most of them were invented long before 1960.
Try any Chicago Delicatessen.
Very, very good, in the 60s.
Also, my Grandmother’s kitchen. Don’t miss the apple strudel, & say hello to my Great-Grandparents for me. I miss them.
That’s not true. The internal temp of pork only needs to be 140 for 1 minute to kill off trichinosis, and once it’s 144, it’s instant, according to USDA food safety guidelines. Pork was cooked to much, much higher temps than this.
I remember Chinese food of the '50s. First, you had to go to Chinatown, as there were no local Chinese restaurants. There was plenty of variety and everything was homemade, including eggrolls and wontons, which were incomparably delicious.
I also remember “smorgasbord” restaurants, which were the forerunners of today’s buffets . . . except the food was excellent. Quality and quantity!
And nothing today can compare with farm-fresh food of the '50s. We had a local farmer come by once a week, with fresh eggs and dairy foods. He also had live chickens in his truck. My mother would go out and pick one, and the farmer would kill it and pluck the feathers. We had to do the rest. Today’s chickens, even the kosher ones, are tasteless in comparison.
In the sixties there were few choices in apples. Most markets would carry Red Delicious, Golden Delicious and perhaps Rome Beauty (for those who wanted to bake). That started to change when the Granny Smith was introduced. Now even mainstream supermarkets like Safeway carry several varieties, like Fuji, Honeycrisp, Gala and Pink Lady (my favorite). While Red Delicious apples may have been better in the sixties, the quality and variety of apples are superior today.
Some people would say that corn on the cob was better in the sixties. Today’s corn is bred to be sweeter and more tender, and to stay sweet longer once it’s been harvested. The older varieties had more corn flavor, though. They taste great if you can cook them while they’re very fresh.
The Gallery of Regrettable Food has lots of fun reviews of “great” food from back then.
Things better then:
- milk shakes made with a blender instead of being extruded from a machine
- strawberries when you could get them
- peaches (when you could get them), by the lug, always “freestone” style
- chicken; today chickens are grown to be huge; a breast is more than one serving. Also you could buy a cut-up chicken that was all part of the same chicken instead of coming from an assembly line
Worse:
- frozen meal options: back then it was the thin Swanson dinner in foil; some of today’s frozen dinners are pretty good
- margarine, at least in the upper Midwest, was intentionally waxy looking white stuff
- sugar-based sodas
- and of course the size of candy bars
Oh, yes! Smorgasbords were wonderful. So were plain old cafeterias.
I think a lot of things that used real sugar (not just soda) instead of corn syrups would taste better. M&Ms haven’t tasted right for years to me, for example. I do a lot of baking and most of my stuff tastes better than comparable things I get out because of the sweeteners and preservatives. I don’t make my own candy, so I just get the nicer stuff unless I have a particular craving.
Exactly. Today we can pay Whole Foods $20/lb for an artisinal Cheddar made by Vermont hipsters on their organic dairy farm that’s pretty much indistinguishable from a slab of rat cheese cut from the wheel in any Maine grocery store in 1960.
One thing that is better, although it’s not really a single food, but if you go to a middle-grade restaurant-- something above a diner, but not a place on the reviewers’ lists-- the salads are way, way better. They used to be iceberg lettuce, grated carrots, and a single slice of tomato, which granted, was better tomato, but the dressing was usually oil and vinegar, period. Now they come with a mix of greens, cucumbers, onions, sometimes peppers and olives, and several choices of dressing. Or even small restaurants have salad bars.
Also, I’m glad I wasn’t a vegetarian in 1960. I remember TVP from just 1990, and soy fake meats are so much better now. I actually don’t like meat, but I like soy hot dogs, Tofurky, and soforth.
OTOH, sometimes a salad should be lettuce, some carrot, maybe a couple of mushrooms and French dressing. Try to get a salad at any upscale place these days. 90% of them are lawn clippings from the line cooks backyard, served with a microdollop of “hand-crafted” dressing. For this you will pay $12.
No opinion, I just think it funny that this thread has more replies than the TV show that inspired it.
My dad traveled a lot on business, so when I was with him we often ate at Holiday Inns, HoJos, and so forth. We always had a variety of dressings to choose from for our salads; my favorite was always blue cheese. Yum! :o
Harold McGee would disagree. WW II ruined European cheese markets and American manufacturers were more interested in quantity than quality. It wasn’t until the 80’s that Europe finally had the excess economic and agricultural capacity to get back to focusing on artisanal cheese and this has spread to the US.
Most Americans drink light beer nowadays. There was no light beer in 1960. Ergo beer tasted better in 1960.
But seriously, comparing like to like I find it difficult to believe that Budweiser, Schlitz, or Miller High Life would not taste at least somewhat better in 1960 than now, let alone all the regional beers of that era that would surely taste better than their contract-brewed counterparts of today. The story of the big American brewers looks to me like a long, steady trend of economizing on the methods of production. Always make it cheaper, never mind flavor seems to be the rule. Schlitz, America’s most popular beer in 1960, cheapened their process so blatantly in the 1970s that people noticed it at the time and sales plummeted. (Apparently, they’ve gone back to a retro recipe; I can’t attest to how good that is).
“Craft Brewers” still represent only 11% of the US market by volume (19% by dollar value), so make of that what you will.
I remember red delicious being better, today’s RDs are mealy and the skin is so thick it’s like eating a vinyl tablecloth.
I noticed around the early-mid 70’s everything got sweeter. Too sweet in most cases. Milk shakes got cloying sweet, chocolate milk (ready made from the dairy case) got waaay too sweet, jelly, jams, some cereals, bread, anything that they could dump a bunch of corn syrup into. I’ve read that most taste testers vote for the sweeter version, so once sweeter got cheap, manufacturers loaded it up in almost everything. I guess I’m the oddball that prefers things less sweet, thank you.
There is one other thing about beer in 2016 that’s better than 1960: variety. Back in 1960 even while there were still some regional or local brewers that may have actually produced better beer than the majors, they were nearly all light lagers. In fact, for over a century most Americans believed that the was only type of beer there was. There’s nothing inherently wrong light lagers but it was like having hundreds of companies making ice cream but vanilla being the only flavor. Outside of a few European expats, nobody in the US knew anything about stouts like Guinness, porters, IPAs, brown ales, or any of the dozens of beer styles that are available today.