On Sep 9, 2006, at 11:24 PM, utopia1 at attglobal.net wrote:
> As to your remark that food in the US is "a million times better
> than it was
> 30-35 years ago": unqualified and uncomplex, this remark falls apart
> immediately. (It didn't make it here through cyberspace, so I had
> to use a
> secret technique to resonstruct it.) We all know the ample evidence
> of the
> improvement in American tastes, "slow food," New Paltz, Union Square,
> etc. But we also know about the collapse of the American diet, the
> quality
> of fast food, the corruption of the food supply, etc. It's hardly a
> conservative longing for some past golden age to point these things
> out.
> (Where do you manage to buy edible chicken?) I leave you to
> quantify all
> this, and to figure out how it all adds up to a million-fold
> improvement.
Ever read old American cookbooks? Repulsive stuff. The old editions of the Joy of Cooking, aside from having those interesting entries on how to prepare muskrat, range from the dull to the appalling. Now you can get really good food in small cities across the US. During my first marriage, I used to visit my mother-in-law in southwestern Virginia. When I first visited in the late 1970s, the A&P in Abingdon didn't have garlic. On my last visit in 1999, you could get baby eggplant and kimchee. Yeah, sure there are lots of fatties, and lots of crappy food, but nothing in capitalist life is ever without contradiction. But the average is so much better than before that it's barely in the same universe.
Doug