The foods that are available to us today in no way resemble the foods of my youth. Here are the startling facts that will make that obvious: I never saw or tasted pizza, the most ingested food for the under ten set, until I was in my twenties; not one fast food joint served breakfast food of any kind; and in my family spaghetti was considered a glamorous ethnic dish.
What we ate would seem strange by today’s standards. Take Jello, not the plain cherry flavored Jello that kids still eat, but the gelatin that encased salads, entrees, and whatever the cook could dream up. Molded salads were a staple, not only of the home dining table, but any family reunion or church potluck. There they would sit on a picnic table, holding in their quivering mass, unknown, and often to young taste buds, horrible bits in their depths. Then there were baked beans, a staple at my grandmother’s table, but not the kind that came from a can. They spent the day on the stove getting ready to be put on the dinner table along with coleslaw and brown bread. Ah yes, brown bread. One can still find that brown bread in the grocery store today if one looks hard enough, residing unobtrusively on the grocery shelf in a B and M can. I remember recently asking a young grocery store worker if her store carried that item. “Bread in a can?” she asked, skepticism oozing from every pore. When we at last found it, she gave me a side long glance and quietly slipped away.
Today, I am surrounded by restaurants that offer cuisine not only unserved, but totally unknown, in my childhood. There is Thai, Mexican, Japanese, Vietnamese, Middle Eastern and Greek to name just a few. This was brought home to me recently on a trip to the Rockies. We came around a corner in a small western town which boasted a tired looking gas station, a closed gift store, and a rundown, log motel. But there on one dusty corner sat a restaurant with a huge sign offering, of all things, Asian fusion food. I had a whimsical moment imagining a hatted, gun toting cowboy leaning up against a bar, one booted foot on the railing, asking for Beef Negimaki.
But one thing I do share with today’s young eating public is THAT food that we found unbearable as children, whatever that food might have been. For me, it was spinach, the bane of my dinner table existence as a child. The rest of my family seemed to love the slimy green leaves, and I was faced with it often at dinner. In my day there was no choice as to what I would or would not eat, so I was forced to choke down enough bites of the vegetable to satisfy the adult arbiters of the dinner table. I feel somewhat vindicated by my young aversion these seventy years later. That horrifying vegetable was cooked on the stove in boiling water, and we now know that most of the benefits of what is today called a superfood were left in the water on the stove after the vegetable was placed on my plate. I would have been better off choking down the brown water left in the sauce pan, rather than the green mound on my plate. So there, says my six-year-old-self. Pizza would have been much better… if only I had known it existed.