Is food better than it used to be?

[Sandra Levine]

Baguettes are better, bagels are worse.

[Shiva]

It can be, if you're lucky enough to be living in the right place and have enough money to afford it. I can drive to Wegmans and load up on all sorts of great food that was simply not available in North American supermarkets 25 years ago. Also, I can afford it.

Do the majority of humans on this planet eat healthier, safer, more available food (maybe not great food) than they did 25 years ago? Yes.

Does the average schlub in an industrialized country eat better food than they did 25 years ago? I'd venture a 'No'.

Big agriculture and global markets have caused a major reduction in the number of people actually starving. They've also made crappy factory made junk food and factory farmed meats available world-wide.

Insert shrugging smiley here.

[Fat Guy]

Does the average schlub in an industrialized country eat better food than they did 25 years ago?  I'd venture a 'No'.

Do you think that's a question of availability, or of lack of knowledge/education? I mean, there is of course a level of poverty below which your food choices are not your own. But the "average schlub in an industrialized country" spends just as much (or more) on unhealthy, nasty food as he or she could spend on an equivalent amount of wholesome, delicious food, don't you think? I know I sound hopelessly middle class and white when I say this, but I see people on line at the grocery store paying with food stamps and the shit they buy is just incredible -- it's like a who's who of the most unhealthy and overpriced garbage in the store.

[oraklet]

most of you guys are americans, and i don't really know how things are over there. BUT:

the aspect of seasonal foods was introduced. being able to get, say, strawberries all year round was supposed to be an improvement. i'm sure, though, that it isn't. lets look at strawberries:

1) imported strawb. will have to be robust. so they're grown with that in sight instead of taste.

2) local farmers will tend to compete on price, and will grow the robust strawberries, too.

3) in ten years, everybody will have forgotten how strawberries used to taste.

and this is true for apples as well. pears. plums. etc.

and i know it's not just my sense of taste that's changed, 'cause my grandma's apples are as good as they were 40 years ago.

as for availability, the choice today is enormous if compared to my childhood. a small town supermarket in northern scania is more raffiné than any in copenhagen 20 years ago. i can get very good coffee, pasta, curry pastes, olive oils, provence sausissons secs - but the local produce is poorer (except tomatoes). and i've noticed one thing: the local people are fat. even most kids. i wonder how they eat.

oh, and one last thing:

when was the last time any of you had a really good apple? strawberry?

[Fat Guy]

I suppose that if you live in New York the six kinds of fruit that grow in New York are no longer as good at the supermarket level as they were, at the three-hour peak of their seasons, way back when. But I can still get as-good-or-better fruit at the Greenmarket in season, and I can get the worse fruit year-round in great variety. The last time I had an apple was last fall, and I expect I'll have good apples again this fall. Strawberries, I had some greenhouse-grown ones in Montreal at Toque! in June that were fabulous.

Oraklet, how would you answer the overall question?

[Steve Plotnicki]

This is such a hard question to answer because it isn't uniform across all aspects of food.

Gourmet food shopping has dramatically improved. We used to have Balducci's and Zabars. Now we have Dean & Deluca, Citarella, Gourmet Garage and Eli's/Vinegar Factory.

Artisinal products are significantly better in this country. Meats, cheeses, day boat fish, heirloom tomatoes, in every category there has been improvement. But in France there has been some detrioration on the artisinal level because of EU regulation.

The general level of cooking knowledge and the general culinary awareness of the public is way higher than it used to be. I remember when coming into the city from Queens to go to La Crepe on 55th Street was a big deal. These days cassoulet is a household word. Not to mention that people eat all sorts of ethnic foods. If 25 years ago someone told me that housewives in Great Neck would prefer raw fish as there number one meal, you could have knocked me over with a feather. To see the best proof of this, go over to the "Club Food" thread and see Nick's menu for the club. It isn't the old meat and potatoes cuisine of yours. Much of it could be on the menu at a place like Gotham.

So all in all I would say it's much better.

Where it has suffered is in the middle. Food for the masses has went the way of the plaster wall only to be replaced by sheetrock. And like any other mass market item, in order to reach a wider audience they compromised quality. When the need to distribute millions of chickens of similar quality across the country is the main issue at hand, something in the production process in going to have to give in facor of making it be efficient enough to accomplish the goal. This is true in the entire supermarket range of food where in my lifetime the need to ship great quantity has in my opinion destroyed quality.

[Fat Guy]

Have you been to a supermarket lately?

[Steve Plotnicki]

Not in Manhattan. I make my wife go . But I go to King Kullen in the Hamptons (possibly the world's greatest supermarket) and Publix in Miami Beach. Why do you ask?

[Liza]

And let's not forget our great and good friend the Internet who makes it possible to order from Dean & Deluca, Faraway Foods, Igourmet et al. If the local Stop & Shop doesn't carry sweet Hungarian paprika, order it.

Personally, I eat much better today than I did a few years ago: at home, we use only organically raised meats and fowls and nearly all locally-grown produce, season permitting.

Another possibly controversial side issue to bring up is cost. Personally, I think food is incredibly cheap - considering the amount of time and effort that goes into raising the foods I like to eat.

[Fat Guy]

Plotnicki: I ask because I was recently at several massive supermarkets in New Jersey and I couldn't believe the utter fabulousness of the stuff on offer there. The large chain supermarkets are rapidly closing in on what we Manhattanites think only we have. Yes there were the aisles and aisles of dreck but you had every kind of meat and fruit and vegetable from the crappiest all the way up to the level right below what you'd get at the top gourmet markets. I can't imagine finding anything in a supermarket in 1960 that could compete. There were even free-range organic commie chickens and branded beef and live lobster and fresh organic herbs and a pretty damn good seafood section and overall it was just amazing. My earliest supermarket memories are from the 1970s and I don't recall seeing anything good there. Do you think the King Kullen you go to has worse produce than the supermarkets of old?

[Liza]

There were even free-range organic commie chickens

The famous red chicken? You got something against free-range organic chickens, FG?

[Fat Guy]

Only when they get in my way.

[oraklet]

fat guy

i tend to agree with steve p., but then, even at my level, which is lower middle class, i'm able to pick the most exotic and strange things. 20 years ago, i'd never heard of avocados, or balsamico, or patak's curries or sushi or...

today, there's so much to try and investigate, but i miss some of the things that are lost with mass production. and though all in all i personally eat better than i could have 20 years ago, i can see many who don't. it has become so much easier and cheaper to get a lazy meal. just as it has become easier to be isolated, cause people are not forced to interact socially by solving common problems. life is so easy for us westerners.

[Fat Guy]

just as it has become easier to be isolated, cause people are not forced to interact socially by solving common problems

I believe the phenomenon to which you refer is known as "eGullet."

[Steve Plotnicki]

The King Kullen in the Hamptons is an odd duck. Because there is such a proliferation of farm stands out here, they sell lots of locally grown produce. But it isn't up to the same quality as the stands. But better than what they have at Food Emporium in the city. But the dynamic that really makes the store unique is that over the last 5 years or so the Latino community out here has grown disproportionately. Especially Mexicans and Colombians who have moved here to work on the farms, build houses, gardeners etc. So they have a huge selection of Latino food products, both in fresh foods and packaged. The Latino community out here is an amazing thing. Already there are three small grocery shops/prepared food shops. Just a few weeks ago we were riding in Southampton and noticed a takeaway food shop just outside the village. I ended up having a lunch of a sweet arepa (bland) and a papusa (pretty good.) I even noticed that in the main parking lot in Easthampton something called Latin Express. When I went to get a closer look it turned out to be one of those telephone places you see on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens.

While I'm glad to hear that N.J. has found a way to improve the supermarket, I'm sorry to hear it as well. We would all eat better if the people who supplied our food were more involved in the process. The quality at Citarella is what it is because Joe and the guys who work for him like Charlie G. watch the place like hawks. I have doubts that the same thing can work in an environment that is 10X the size. But I am always hungy so that means you can convince me. But I think Oraklet makes the point well. The range might have imporved but the quality deteriorated. Kraft Macaroni & Cheese today is worse than it was years ago because the scientists at Kraft have screwed with it so many times to get the cost down.

[John Whiting]

I think there's no question but that those who are moderately prosperous and care about what they eat can, with a bit of effort, obtain a variety of foodstuffs that even the rich would have had to travel the world for only a generation ago.

The mass of the population eat badly because the food industry knows how to appeal to their weaknesses -- and how, indeed, to encourage those weaknesses and make the punters complacent about them. The "guilt" for junk food must be shared between the producers and the consumers. Its cheapness has already been mentioned. The prosperous *want* cheap food, the poor *must have* it. It is achieved by driving the small farmers out of business and farming on a mass-produced scale. Neither the Left nor the Right is innocent -- one listens to the people, the other to big business, and cheap food is what they *both* want. Of course it could be obtained even more cheaply from Third World countries where farmer laborers are even worse off; but there are tarrif barriers on many foods and those that do come in are overpriced relative to their cost, the "added value" having been accumulated along the distribution chain.

In summary, although many peasants world-wide are worse off because they have lost their water supplies or have been driven off their land, most Westerners have much more than ever before of whatever food they want, and at a lower cost. I know my wife and I do, and we're living mostly on a couple of modest pensions.

[Steve Plotnicki]

John was that a yes?

[Jinmyo]

In terms of supermarkets, here in Canada the Loblaws chain has a huge number of in-house brand stuff called President's Choice that is of very high quality for the kinds of products they are. These include rice vinegar, EVOO, different kinds of rice, pastas, organic meats and cereals and so on. Well, they're not good enough for me to actually buy after an intial few tests but you know what I mean.

The meat department has butchers behind a counter and they'll cut you a chop or roast as thick as you want. Even the cling-flimed meat in the little styrofoam trays is: beef, pork, chicken, turkey, veal, rabbit. In the frozen section there is duck, pheasant, quail, partridge...

[Steve Plotnicki]

I have to add that in the U.S., the vocation of being a chef earns much more respect these days than it did when I was growing up. And I think the same is true for artisinal farmers although they are much less in the spotlight. But people like Bruce Aidell, Laura Chenille and others have made themselves household names among gourmet households. I think that's a good thing.

[Fat Guy]

Plotnicki, you mention France and EU regulations. I think there are also cultural forces at work: It is arguable that France (and Italy) already had their golden ages of food. Those would be the only two Western countries where I might argue that food is overall not as good as it used to be. I'm not sure I would argue it, but I'd only even try the argument with those two countries. Everywhere else, it seems to me, any potential golden age is in the future and the trend is up.

[Jonathan Day]

I think that quality and selection -- in some countries at least -- have travelled a "U" shaped curve. Having grown up in the US in the 1960s my sense is that I started toward the bottom of the "U", so things have improved greatly since then.

For the most part the eating back then was grim. Meat came from the local "Kroger's" or "National" and was mostly frozen. Fruit and vegetables were wrapped in plastic. Olive oil, if you could find it, came in tiny bottles ("Pompeiian", if I recall the brand) and was usually rancid. Garlic was sometimes available, but most people used "garlic salt".

There were exceptions. We always had a large vegetable garden, and we picked all sorts of great things there including, for a few years running, delicious sweetcorn. There was a farmer's market in our area, and we could sometimes get very good produce there. I remember an afternoon spent sitting under a tree, eating an enormous quantity of sweet black cherries that had come from this market. Bliss.

Things in the US got better, perhaps because they could not get worse. The UK travelled a similar curve, going faster in some areas, slower in others. Quality, selection and general awareness of food have improved a lot even since I moved here in 1990. "Gourmet" food no longer implies falsified versions of French recipes, with heavy, starch-laden sauces, as it did when John and Karen Hess first skewered The Taste of America or Elizabeth David wrote about English "gourmet" cooking (see An Omelette and A Glass of Wine). It is now possible to talk about food and wine with enthusiasm here, where it was once a bit embarrassing. Elizabeth David, the River Café, even Jamie Oliver have done their work. We are better off for it.

Some things have become worse. There is more hype around food, and more restaurants that recall that scene in Brazil (Terry Gilliam) where the diners sit eating plates of identical green sludge while looking at pictures of different fancy dishes. A lot of the trickery around GM foods is worrying. Tasteless vegetables (e.g. peppers grown hydroponically in Holland) circulate through the system, and sometimes they are hard to screen out.

What I don't have as clear a picture of is how deeply or how quickly things have changed in France or Italy or Spain. The EU regulations around cheeses, sausages and the like are problematic (though the USDA put through similar regulations years ago). Life is definitely harder for small farmers, artisanal butchers and small winemakers...bakers (in France, in my area at least) seem to be doing better, and indeed there seems to be something of an uptick in good bread, widely available. The supermarkets seem to be on the increase. My sense is that Italy is still in better shape, although I don't know it as well as France.

All this talk about decline and fall seems a bit passive, as though we are observing the Titanic from a helicopter, watching it plow through the seas toward the iceberg.

To me there is a more interesting set of questions: what could be done about this decline in France and Italy (if it exists) and what could be done to continue to improve things in other countries and to keep the ground already taken?

I would argue that a very small number of people "turned things around" in the UK -- I would start with Elizabeth David, but she wasn't the only actor. A fairly small number of people had a disproportionately large impact in the US: we can argue about Alice Waters or Julia Child, but most would agree that they had a serious impact on national awareness of good ingredients and good cookery. The Slow Food movement started in Italy but its spread to France has been limited. Should we think about establishing a European version of "Copia", that centre for food and wine in the US?

Robert Brown wrote an eloquent post in another thread, on "the old dining". John Whiting has made similar pleas for simple cooking. Steve Plotnicki has described what sounds like a golden age of high-end dining. We seem to agree that there's a problem. But I wonder what we could collectively do about it.

[Fat Guy]

I think that quality and selection -- in some countries at least -- have travelled a "U" shaped curve. Having grown up in the US in the 1960s my sense is that I started toward the bottom of the "U", so things have improved greatly since then.

Quality and selection.

Selection I can't see. It seems straight up to me, no dip in a "U." What's the theory behind a selection "U"?

Quality I can see, with regard to some specific products, a "U" curve. Some of the items we now consider artisanal -- like good tomatoes -- were the norm in the earlier part of the 20th Century. I think the present-day artisanal versions are as good or better (this is a supposition) than what we once had, but clearly there was that dip. But I think the products on the "U" curve are in a minority. Most things -- especially non-produce items -- have steadily improved.

[Gavin Jones]

Steven - on the selection front the number of different apple varieties grown at the scale of an orchard in the uk has been hugely reduced from the early part of this century. So the diversity has been strongly reduced.

Brogdale carries the flame.

Likewise many other species till recently. e.g. cattle, pigs, potatoes...

[John Whiting]

SteveP wrote

John was that a yes?

Maybe.

Steve, I'm afraid this is another of those questions that doesn't have a definite answer unless you make it up.

Re fruits [sic] such as tomatoes: The inherent quality of those commonly available used to be better before they were bred into anonymity, but storage and transportation problems meant that it many areas of the US (and elsewhere) they arrived and went on sale in terrible condition. I can remember my father picking through specimens on sale at full price which today would be thrown away even by the greediest merchant.

[Steve Plotnicki]

"I'm afraid this is another of those questions that doesn't have a definite answer unless you make it up."

Especially if you append a question about the morality and ethics of what we eat onto the original question. But the second part about the tomatoes is a perfect outline of how the quality of food was diluted in favor of being able to deliver similar quantity all over the country. Not surprisingly, those areas of the country who could afford better quality tomatoes, and who lived withing reasonable shipping distance opted out of the mainstream and went back to a more artisinal approach.