does Food still taste the same as back in 1900 - 1920? or 1930's?

[Feraud]

Sometimes I find a six pack of Mexican produced Coke at the market. It has 6 12oz bottles and sweetened with sugar. As for larger bottles it is all all HFCS and Coke would have to pay me to swill that poison. Dehydration tastes better than that garbage.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Mexican Coke is very easy to find here -- supermarkets, corner stores, even Wal Mart carry it. We have no Mexican population to speak of, but somebody's gotten wise to the stuff. My big gripe is that it's not available here as fountain syrup, so we're stuck with the HFCS stuff at work. We do, however, sell a locally-made sugar cola called "Maine Root Mexicane" in bottles, which tastes rather like RC.

 

[Feraud]

It is only been in the last few years that I've been able to get Mexican Coke. Before that we were stuck with some fancy pants "small batch" hipster brewed version of cola. That ran a couple of bucks for a small bottle. I'm thrilled to have the real thing when I need a cola fix.

 

[3fingers]

My mom used peppermint, from grocery store. An old remedy. I mean for colicky babies.

When I was younger I used to try to use peppermint mixed with schnapps to cure my colic. Didn't work.:eusa_doh:

 

[green papaya]

fresh caught wild fish from the ocean like Salmon , Tuna, Stripped Sea Bass, Flounder, etc

probably still tastes just as good as back in 1900? unless they contain mercury or other contamination from modern times?

 

[HudsonHawk]

My mom used peppermint, from grocery store. An old remedy. I mean for colicky babies.

My mom used Jack Daniel's.

 

[HudsonHawk]

fresh caught wild fish from the ocean like Salmon , Tuna, Stripped Sea Bass, Flounder, etc

probably still tastes just as good as back in 1900? unless they contain mercury or other contamination from modern times?

You probably can't taste the mercury.

 

[Gregg Axley]

You probably can't taste the mercury.

Especially after the Jack Daniels.

I think using old recipes come close to making a cake, pie, etc taste like "grandma" used to make.
But then again, if you use a modern crust for the pie, or if you use something with preservatives, then most likely it's going to be a bit off.
I still have some of my grandmother's recipes, and for the most part things have come out tasting pretty close to the way she made them.
As for cakes, I just don't have the time/energy to do one, not the old way.
Well I do, but that's at 5am each morning, so I guess I could make one on a Saturday at 5am.
Cake for breakfast? Why not, we actually have 2 grown kids at our house instead of 2 adults.

 

[Tomasso]

As we age, our sense of taste/smell declines so even if we were to eat grandma's pie today it wouldn't taste as good as when we were young. Generally speaking of course.

 

[Stanley Doble]

There are people who study old recipes. Sometimes they have to make adjustments, for example, eggs today are much larger than they were in the 19th century and this can affect a cake recipe. Some things just aren't used anymore like saleratus which is what they used before baking powder.

 

[tommyK]

Given the choice between lard (a simple, unprocessed rendered pork fat product) and Crisco (a processed, partially-hyrogenated soybean and palm oil product) choose lard every time. Seriously. It tastes better, it cooks better, and it's better for you.

The only thing I ever found Crisco to be good for is that it made a nice emergency wheel-bearing grease for my bicycle.

+1 we make our Christmas cookies and fruit cakes with lard. They seem better to me. Lard is getting hard to find though. We only have one local supermarket that stocks it now, if they drop it too we're in trouble.

 

[scotrace]

Terrapin was once standard fare, and has also disappeared from our diets.

 

[Dragon Soldier]

I would have thought that provided one actually cooked food, rather than heated it from pre-packaged containers and avoided the obvious temptations of dirty fast food, that today's diet would, by every metric, be superior to that of fifty/sixty years ago.

Certainly those who eat a well balanced diet today are physically larger and better developed than appears to have been the norm in the golden era.

 

[LizzieMaine]

How much of that is the food, though, and how much of it is the growth hormones pumped into the food?

 

[Dragon Soldier]

How much of that is the food, though, and how much of it is the growth hormones pumped into the food?

Now? Honestly, probably not a lot. Provided, again, that you don't buy from the junk end of the market.

The last twenty years have put paid to a lot of that.

BTW. By "junk end" I don't necessarily mean cheap end, although it often is the case, it need not be.


I wonder to what extent there is a difference between our countries? I know that the general opinion in the US is that us "West European Islanders" eat terrible food but I think sometimes, in terms of nutritional quality if not necessarily flavour, attractiveness or whatever... We have some advantages.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Those of us who grew up in the 60s, 70s, and 80s were dosed pretty good on whatever they were feeding the cattle. I know our milk here didn't go hormone-free until the early '90s or so. I ended up seven inches taller than my grandmother, while eating a diet that wasn't, on the surface, all that much different than the one she'd always eaten -- fried meat and fish, boiled and soggy vegetables, lots of potatoes, milk, butter, lard, and cheese -- which makes me suspect it was something in the food itself that changed rather than the types of food itself.

Around here, Irish food is New England Irish -- corned beef and cabbage, things like that -- and British food is mostly considered a comedy punchline. Unfairly, I think -- I haven't eaten a lot of it, but I actually like what I've had. If anything it's a lot less pretentious than what you get stateside these days.

 

[Stanley Doble]

There are a lot of hormones, additives and GMO foods in the United States that would not be allowed in Great Britain or Europe. Even high fructose corn syrup is considered bad by some experts, and it is widely used in the US only because of America's import duties on sugar.

I think France has the strictest food laws. But all over Europe the big food companies do not have the strangle hold on the government regulators that they do in the US

 

[Ernest P Shackleton]

Even high fructose corn syrup is considered bad by some experts, and it is widely used in the US only because of America's import duties on sugar.

And because of corn subsidies that make HFCS about 25% the cost of sugar. But fortunately, HFCS is used less and less, and there are more options all the time without it. The next question is whether food makers are honest on their ingredient list on the packaging. When there are a couple dozen inspectors for the entire country, and with good warnings when they're coming to your factory, the temptation to mask your true operation has to be too great for some.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Look around just about every large-scale frozen-meat processing plant and you'll find a big box of soy powder under a sink. Got to squeeze every nickel out of that hamburger. If the burger bows up when you put it on the grill, you've been conned.

 

[lareine]

I grew up in Ireland, but I spent a year in the late 1990s living in Massachusetts. The taste of the food there was a horrible shock for me. Restaurant food meant huge portions of fatty/salty/sugary stuff, but home cooking wasn't much better. Fresh fruit and vegetables looked amazing but tasted of... nothing. Dairy foods were fake and unpleasant. Meat was questionable. Even the bread was sugary and repulsive. I lost an awful lot of weight in the first few months, until my taste adapted enough to be able to feed myself properly. My cooking skills probably weren't good enough to make the most of whatever good food was available (I assume there must have been some, somewhere!) so my diet for the rest of the year was mostly based on bagels and pasta. Not healthy at all.

On the topic of growing your own fruit/vegetables/herbs, I don't think anybody has mentioned Square Foot Gardening yet. This is a popular technique of cramming many plants into a small area, in a raised bed so not reliant on having good soil underneath or doing lots of labour-intensive digging. It is a great way of growing a few fresh ingredients for people who have even a tiny bit of outdoor space that gets sunshine at least part of the day. I highly recommend it.