food for thought
Went to the supermarket the other day and bought an avocado, a bag of tricolor quinoa, a tub of Mediterranean hummus, Greek yogurt (2 percent fat), baby carrots and a container of almond milk. Excuse me, almond beverage.
And I realized, going home with my purchases, that I wouldn’t have been able to buy any of these standard items, these now common supermarket foods, back when I was first married.
Of course, some of these foods, like the avocado, existed back then, to be sure, but they were sort of weird and exotic and maybe only available in fancy, weirdly exotic specialty stores. Yogurt, also reasonably weird then, was thin, heavily sweetened and Dannon. It was a “health food,” which immediately made it suspicious. Baby carrots — conveniently peeled and bite-sized! — actually hadn’t been invented.
Meanwhile, as young marrieds, the most exotic food we knew was the packet of dehydrated Lipton’s beef stroganoff.
A decade or so later, when we moved to our mid-size town, the most ethnic restaurant in town was … Italian. Today, this mid-sized community has a number of Thai, Indian, Nepalese, Burmese, Greek, Japanese and, of course, Mexican, places to eat where you can get reasonably authentic food from any of those countries.
Everyone knows we continue to live through a period of vast technologic change — we now have access to the entirety of human knowledge stuck in our pockets! But the evolution of how we eat is so pervasive, so commonplace, we may not have fully grasped the full extent of our culinary changes.
In just a few decades, middle-class American households have given up, for the most part, Jell-O molds, something called Velveeta cheese and frozen Salisbury steaks, whatever they were. We’ve tossed away white bread (my kids used to call it “gull bread,” because it was only good for feeding the gulls when we went to the beach). We’ve gone from iceberg lettuce if we wanted something green in our American cheese sandwich to a dazzling array of romaine, Bibb, Boston, red leaf and green leaf, arugula and spring mix. Not to mention baby spinach.
We’ve gone from cans of foreign-sounding Franco-American spaghetti to really foreign but readily available kimchi, kombucha, sushi, naan, pita, sriracha.
We had strawberries and blueberries, of course, but now we have added mangos and papayas and kiwis, persimmons and pomegranates, all available at your local Food Lion or corner bodega. Eating an apple back when we were kids meant red delicious, which indeed was red but wasn’t particularly delicious. Now it means a choice of Granny Smith, Fuji, Gala, Honeycrisp or Pink Lady.
Globalization — with its improvements in refrigeration, shipping and air freight — meant all these new and different foods became available to us year-round. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 allowed much higher immigration from Latin America, Asia and the Middle East and the immigrants brought with them curries, hummus, pho, fajitas. Cooking shows and celebrity chefs made cooking and eating fun and entertainment.
And because of it all, our tastes have changed dramatically. Yes, we still eat hamburgers and buy boxes of mac and cheese and love our tuna melts. But how lucky we are that the food universe has expanded so significantly.
Which reminds me: I think, for lunch, I’m going to chomp on some baby carrots dipped in hummus. Then maybe make a quinoa bake — with baby spinach and lots of feta — for dinner.
So, yeah, pretty standard stuff.