In this post a week ago, Paul Krugman compares the 1950s to today. I'm not sure that I completely agree with his assessment, but one statement with which I wholeheartedly concur is the following:
Oh, and the food has improved a lot, too.
There is a lot of romantic idealism in food but I'm pleased to see that Krugman hasn't succumbed to that sort of thinking. If you find yourself wishing for 1950's era food, I offer the following quote from John Steinbeck's book Travels with Charley (written in the 1960s):
Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother's cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.