EERILY PRESCIENT?

In October 2015, economics writer Megan "Jane Galt" McArdle paid a tribute to seven-layer salads and tuna casseroles and all the other stuff the foodies disdain.  "Don’t judge yesteryear’s cooking by today’s standards."

The modern foodie cannot imagine a world in which he or she would enjoy sitting down to a meal of poached eggs on toast points drowned in floury white sauce, followed perhaps by a dainty frozen salad. And after looking at food pictures of the era, you can sort of understand why.

Check your privilege, modern foodie.

A lot of the ingredients we take for granted were expensive and hard to get. Off-season, fresh produce was elusive: The much-maligned iceberg lettuce was easy to ship, and kept for a long time, making it one of the few things you could reliably get year round. Spices were more expensive, especially relative to household incomes. You have a refrigerator full of good-looking fresh ingredients, and a cabinet overflowing with spices, not because you’re a better person with a more refined palate; you have those things because you live in 2015, when they are cheaply and ubiquitously available. Your average housewife in 1950 did not have the food budget to have 40 spices in her cabinets, or fresh green beans in the crisper drawer all winter.

That lettuce really wasn't so easy to ship. I recall advertisements placed by the Southern Pacific Railroad of the day touting the cushion-underframe refrigerator cars and other packing practices to get that stuff from the Imperial Valley to New York. Then that statement about spices relative to household incomes summarizes in one sentence just how much improvement in real well-being has taken place in the three score and fifteen years since Victory -- and why the adjustment to the pandemic is both disorienting and likely to be manageable.

Here's how she summarizes that real income.  "If you understand why folks ate Trippa alla Romana, you should not be confused about the tuna casserole or the creamed chipped beef on toast."  Precisely.  In addition, the cooks of that era were either Depression babies or the children of Depression babies.

These days, people who don’t like to cook, or aren’t good at it, mostly don’t. They can serve a rich variety of prepared foods, and enjoy takeout and restaurants. Why would you labor over something you hate, when someone else will sell you something better for only slightly more than it would cost you to make something bad?

In 1950, the answer was “because we’re not made of money.” A restaurant meal was a special treat, not a nightly event, and prepared foods were not so widely available, in part because women tended not to work, but also because food processing technology was so advanced. So women had to cook whether they liked it or not. Many of them didn’t like it, so they looked for ways to reduce the labor involved. And it’s far from obvious that what they did with those shortcuts was worse than what they would have done without them. Think of the kind of casserole a bad cook might have made without canned soup and frozen vegetables. She’d probably have boiled the vegetables, because that’s the easiest way to prepare them, and boiled them to death, because she wasn’t too fussy about timing. (Out of season, those vegetables would have been limited to a few hearty root vegetables.) If there was a sauce, it probably would have been horrible. Let’s not even start on what she might have done with the meat. Canned soup and frozen vegetables start sounding pretty good.

That was the baseline most people were working off. They were not comparing what they ate to what they might have gotten at a good restaurant; they were comparing it to what they would have gotten without the shortcuts, because, to reiterate, most of them rarely ate at a good restaurant.

I just pointed a search engine at "tuna casserole recipes" and found about 22 million entries, and several of them up in the last few days.