In the 20th century, the rise of packaged foods brought drastic changes to the way many of us eat, and not for the better. A huge percentage of our food is now awful-tasting, nutritionally bankrupt and environmentally damaging.I can't agree. I think most of our food is appealing (in another article in the Times magazine, a Brit cook acknowledges a 15-pound hamburger from a WV restaurant is good). That's a complaint of some--the sneaky nutritionists at the big companies trick us by using lots of salt, sugar, fat, and other tasty things. If a fast place really sold "awful-tasting" food, it wouldn't survive.
More seriously, I remember tasting frozen peas for the first time. There's no comparison between the mush from canned peas and frozen peas. (In upstate NY, fresh peas were as fleeting as a hummingbird.) And the canned soups of today are much tastier than the Campbell soups of my youth. And even though my mother cooked, she wasn't good at it--didn't have the time or money or interest to do it well. (Her baking, on the other hand, as one might expect of the child of German parents was often great.)
No comments:
Post a Comment