Paul Freedman

the security of knowing that if you were having Yankee pot roast and potatoes, your neighbors were having Yankee pot roast and potatoes, probably a kind of limited dossier of dishes. People started to want to shape themselves, to make themselves a kind of different story from that of other people. And that individualism, remember the 1970s at the time was dubbed the me decade. And so the me part

means nonconformity or finding your own path.

It was just horrible. Well, you know, people actually cooked in those days. You may not like what they cooked, but compare it to now where more money is spent on meals taken outside of the home than in the home. Another thing is that certain kinds of products, particularly meat, is now inferior to what was available in the 1950s. Fish as well, partly because of overfishing.

partly because of breeding meat to have low fat, hence not very much flavor or kind of more industrialized product. So the chicken of the 1950s was better than most, except the kind of high-end chickens available now. But having said all that, yeah, the food was pretty dreadful. And you have the sense that people forgot what basic things were supposed to taste like.

They certainly forgot what fruit was supposed to taste like,

what produce generally and um special effects we're supposed to make up for that special effects like you know putting it in jello or adding ketchup uh or you know some kind of weird new processed thing like you know whipped cheese or cheese from a a dispenser or flavor straws you know with chocolate flavor built into the straw even though these things are horrible um

I don't know, people sort of fell for them.

I think the world has rejected a lot of our exports. like breakfast cereal. So in Britain, they eat American breakfast cereal, but a few other countries have embraced this. Sometimes countries embrace things just, you know, like Tang, this artificial orange beverage made from a powder, was a big item in the 60s because the astronauts drank Tang and it was promoted on that basis.

Apparently, it's very big in Taiwan still, but certainly it's not big in the United States. I think the US is more a kind of transit point. So we didn't invent pizza, but we exported it to the world, not Italy. We didn't invent sushi, but the fact, you know, I do a lot of work as a medieval historian, which is my day job in Barcelona.

So I remember when sushi arrived in Barcelona and it didn't arrive directly from Japan. It arrived, you know, around the same time that tacos did. So these things are like it gets the American seal of approval as a hit.

Maybe it's perceived as tastier. Some of these, there's more local adaptations. So, you know, you can get beer with a McDonald's hamburger in much of Europe. It's the same thing with music, I'd say, or probably with movies as well. There's certain kinds that really export well. And in fact, many movies are made that are not so popular in the US, but become wildly popular in Europe.

And then there's some things you can't explain. You know, sure, soccer is more popular than it used to be. But, you know, it still is the leading game of the world by far, except in the United States.

Or where you'd find it if you decided you had a lust for it. You know, what restaurant, even a so-called, it'd have to be a very serious comfort food restaurant to feature it. Yeah, I think some of it is that it is, it's not that it's a trouble to make. But you've got to know something about cooking. You've got to be willing to use the oven.

Every Thanksgiving, there's some kind of feature I know on NPR about, you know, we're here for you if you're having trouble putting together your Thanksgiving meal. And the reason people are having trouble putting it together is, first of all, they don't cook all that much. And they particularly don't cook old-fashioned dishes that require lots of time in the oven.

So a lot of these things that require roasting or baking are just things that people gave up. If they cook at home, they're grilling, they're frying, they're pressure cooking or, you know, slow cooking. But, you know, if you asked people when was the last time you actually put something in the oven at 350 degrees, there'd be a lot of people who hadn't done it in months.

I do, too. Definitely.

It would seem logical that they would have learned that if you cook at home, you have more control over what you're eating. Both quantity, since restaurant portion size is huge, amount of salt, amount of fat. Restaurants, as Anthony Bourdain pointed out in Kitchen Confidential, the reason you like restaurant food is because we don't show any restraint about salt or butter or other fats.

So if people are so concerned with their health,

To me too. I think some of it is the perception that we don't have time. And some of it is the way we live so that it is not hard to cook. What's a little hard is to have the right food without shopping every day.

If you lived in Paris and, you know, on your way home from the metro are all sorts of food vendors and you can just decide what's in the market or what the butcher recommends and then make it, that's different from the way most of us don't live very close to where we buy food. And so we shop once a week. And if you do that, then you're going to have to freeze some stuff.