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

[green papaya]

do you think there are some foods from today that would taste exactly as they tasted back around the turn of the century? or a little later like the 1920's - 30's?

is regular milk from the grocery store the same as it was back in 1900? or is it less creamy or low fat?

if a person from 1900 was transported to today do you think they would notice the food tastes different than back in 1900 ?

I heard people used more lard and fatty cuts of meat, people didnt care if it was white meat or dark meat and they left the skin on the chicken

when I go to restaurants it seems they all use breast meat or white meat now? and every dish uses the same white meat with different sauces for different dishes

and they have brown rice on the menu instead of regular rice

 

[Stanley Doble]

Food today is much different and dare I say it, in many cases worse.

You might be able to duplicate a 1900 diet if you grew all your own food and used only heirloom seeds. Even the wheat used to make bread today is different from what they grew in 1900.

Offsetting that, pure food and drug laws were not enacted till about 1910. Before that, many manufactured food products were adulterated with poisonous chemicals, or made from spoiled or inferior quality raw materials.

Even eggs tasted different. If you are used to the modern eggs from battery hens you would be surprised how much better an old fashioned egg, from a hen who scratches around in the yard tastes.

 

[Stanley Doble]

I think a low point in food quality and nutrition was reached in the sixties or seventies. Think TV dinners, white bread, packaged cookies that resemble masonite, and a very limited selection of fruit and vegetables, usually frozen or canned.

Since then we have made some effort to get better fresher produce and cut down meat, fats, junk food and sugary soft drinks.

At least some of us have.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Milk back then might or might not be pasturized but would not be homogenized. It came from cows who ate fresh grass or hay and were not pumped full of hormones and antibiotics.

If you got good milk it would be tastier and creamier than anything you can (legally) buy today.

But there was the danger of tuberculosis from unpasteurized milk, and as I pointed out above, there were no laws to prevent adulterating or watering down the milk.

 

[Stanley Doble]

People from 1900 are on record as saying the food was different (worse) in the 1920s, 1930s, all the way down to the fifties and sixties. Then they all died.

Quote from a story by Joseph Mitchell, 1934. Two old men are talking. This was journalism not fiction so I take it the quote is accurate not made up.

"Times have changed Bill"

"You said it." (spits) "The bread you get today, it ain't fit to feed a dog".

 

[LizzieMaine]

The 1920s-40s diet was not highly seasoned -- recipes from the era tended to be very conservative on their use of spices, so you tended to taste the food itself more than what you put on it. The "American" style of food was noted for being bland, creamy, thoroughly-cooked, and not especially complicated.

 

[HudsonHawk]

The field peas and butter beans and cornbread I made today tastes a whole lot like I remembered back in the day!

 

[green papaya]

I wonder how good the beers were back then? they seem to have perfected beer making these days , much more refined and not as crude, they use to sell beer by the bucket back in the old days.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Modern "steam beer" made in big, sanitary factory type breweries was invented in the late 1800s and was available in most cities.

Bars and saloons sold draft beer same as today. But unlike today, you were allowed to buy draft beer and take it home by the pitcher or bucket if you wanted.

There were a lot more independent breweries and a lot more different kinds of beer and ale made across the country. Eventually the big brewers put most of them out of business leaving the most popular, bland, middle of the road type brews. Starting in the seventies and eighties small craft brewers and brew pubs bucked this trend and brought back some variety.

There were some great brewers and great beers. One thing about beer is, it was always sterile because it has to be boiled as part of the brewing process and afterward kept in sealed kegs barrels or bottles. If it got contaminated it quickly spoiled. So at least you wouldn't get cholera which wasn't always true of drinking water.

 

[Foxer55]

You have to remember even in the 1920s and 1930s, maybe up to the 1970s, most foods you ate were grown locally. Most vegetables were from local farms and used mostly natural products for growth and fertilization. Few chemicals were used. With the advent or mega-farms, local producers went out of business and local farms were sold-off to encroaching urban expansion. Growing centers began to concentrate on the mega-farms and mass production areas far from the urban centers. This meant the foods became more and more putrefied with chemicals and preservatives as well as having watered-down nutritional content to increase production profits. The foods had to spend long periods in transit from far off mega-production centers and then sit on store shelves before purchase. As some nutritionists have said, hard to understand how this food is good for humans if its made to kill and discourage pests. Add to that, some of these foods are also full of antibiotics.

I'd be willing to bet you wouldn't eat it again if you could eat more naturally grown foods. Take tomatoes for example. I have not seen in years from the grocery store, a large, not yet ripe tomato, that can be taken home and left on the window sill to turn deep red and then be full of a lot of juicy, meaty flesh. Tomatoes from the store these days never ripen well, are hard as golf balls, and have little or no flavor or content. Fresh meats are often covered with sodium nitrate/nitrite to bring out the red color not to mention full of antibiotics. None of this stuff improves the taste of the foods, on the contrary, it often adds objectionable flavor and is often not good for your own welfare.

There was a period in the early 1990s when dentists began noticing an increase in dental caries in their younger patients and patients who had never experienced the phenomenon. This was traced to the growing use of bottled water which had been stripped of all its natural constituencies including fluoride. Tap water has many trace elements in it that are needed, including fluoride in most ares, however, in today's urban centers, some of this tap water is becoming increasingly full of other undesirable chemicals.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Loss of fertility due to over farming was evident as early as the 1930s . "Health nuts" began warning of the loss of nutrients in vegetables about that time and the dangers of chemical fertilizers. Organic farming became a thing some time between the fifties and seventies, by the seventies it was definitely in vogue around the country.

 

[tonyb]

Great topic.

Sometimes I wonder if it's the food itself that has changed so much as all those other factors influencing my perception of it. I'm interested in hearing more perspectives.

 

[HudsonHawk]

You have to remember even in the 1920s and 1930s, maybe up to the 1970s, most foods you ate were grown locally. Most vegetables were from local farms and used mostly natural products for growth and fertilization. Few chemicals were used.

Actually, chemical pesticides were heavily used from the 1890's through the 1970's. Up until the late 30's, the pesticides of choice were forms of arsenic. Tens of millions of pounds of arsenic-based chemicals were used yearly on commercial farms and orchards, and even by small local growers. If you ate produce from 1900-1940, chances are it was loaded with lead and arsenic. The type of chemicals used changed radically in the late 30's with chlorine-based pesticides and insecticides (chlordane, lindane, endrin, DDT...etc), which were orginally developed for wartime. The 1940's through 1960's became known as the "Golden Age of Pesticides" due to their ubiquitous use. If you ate produce from 1936-1972, you can bet it was loaded with these.

 

[scotrace]

Given the rather marked taste differences between certain foods obtained in the USA vs what is available in Europe, then surely there would be a pretty serious difference between a 1900 cut of beef and one purchased at a market today. All meats, at least in my area, that are to be had at grocery stores are as bland as can be. Processed milk products don't resemble their farm originals. The vegetables I can get, even from reputable stores, are of poor quality. Some common meat staples are now gone: there is not a single source for genuine mutton for human diets in the entire United States.
I'd agree that there was a long period where the average Joe, dependent on the local A&P, had a really bad diet in terms of fresh ingredients. Maybe I'm relying on my own memory too much, but I grew up on canned (sometimes frozen) vegetables, soups, etc. No kid is going to eat his vegetables if they are dumped from a can and then cooked to a sludge.
I've begun writing a foodie column for a local paper that centers on the avoidance of packaged foods and relying on kitchen skills and trying to source what you can from sources as close to the earth as possible. A person today has far more choices (and a lot more bad choices to avoid) than a person in 1950, for sure. It's just that many of those choices, even under better conditions, are bland.
Beer is coming into its own in the US, but I think it'll take awhile to catch up to where we were in 1910, say, when every community of any size had a brewery or two. My own town had five or six, serving a population well under 5,000 at that time. Prohibition killed them, and the skill they housed.

 

[Huertecilla]

We grow/raise most of our food ourselves and ´ecological´.
Apart from the list of other differences, the taste is a world apart. A wórld.
There is simply no way to describe in words how far apart the tatse/texture of an old breed slow grown sun ripened tomato or strawberry is from the ones in big chain supermarkets. After a real one it is even wrong to call the fast versions by the same name.

This applies to the rest of veggies and the meat too. Meat that does not shrink in the pan and tástes like MEAT of the animal it came from, not inderterminate fibrous water.

 

[HudsonHawk]

We grow/raise most of our food ourselves and ´ecological´.

Congratulations to you for having the financial resources to be able to do so. But most people are not so fortunate and must rely on what's commercially available.

 

[tonyb]

Even this lifelong spudhead (I'll take 'em prepared pretty much any way you can) never knew just how good potatoes could taste until I had 'em straight from the garden. Good Lord, it's night and day, the difference between truly garden fresh and even the best store-bought spuds.

Alas, as HudsonHawk notes, for the huge majority, garden-fresh, "artisanal," organic, et cetera food is out of reach, both financially (for many of us, anyway) and in other practical ways. The large majority of us live in cities and suburbs and we toil away 40-plus hours per week at our many and varied increasingly specialized occupations. And too often we eat on the run.

Still, the demand for higher quality, healthier, better tasting food appears to be growing. There certainly is a far greater range of food products available now then there was in my early years.

 

[emigran]

Probably not much ... all I can think of is peanut butter, oatmeal and maybe grits...

 

[HoosierDaddy]

I remember a whole list of better tasting foods as a kid from the early/mid '50s..but here are a few that certainly are much different now. Opening a common loaf of bread had a bakery smell to it then and fresh more chewy taste..now all bread we've tried has a chemical odor(if any at all) with a flaky crumbly tendency to a slice. Meats..even cube steak was tender instead of full of gristle as much of it is now. Easy to buy a good hamburger and fries most anywhere in the '50s-'60s. However..what most things are now cooked in has also made the difference. Perhaps healthier..but on a taste scale 1 to 10..many foods today rate about a 3 in my view. Gimme a good crisp french fry cooked in real grease and salted..for cripes sake...not tasting baked till it's a dry bland facsimile of one. Oh well..ain't gonna happen. It's either healthy extreme no taste or chemically enhanced and generically rearranged as the wave of the future.*yucky*uke:

 

[HudsonHawk]

I remember a whole list of better tasting foods as a kid from the early/mid '50s..but here are a few that certainly are much different now. Opening a common loaf of bread had a bakery smell to it then and fresh more chewy taste..now all bread we've tried has a chemical odor(if any at all) with a flaky crumbly tendency to a slice.

Preservatives have no doubt dulled the flavor and texture of many foods. The other side of that coin is that foods last a lot longer now. A loaf of bread will last several weeks nowadays, where as 50 years ago, it wasn't edible after a few days. My wife and I had this discussion yesterday while setting the butter out to soften for my world famous cornbread to be made latter in the day. I mentioned how when I was a kid, we never refrigerated butter (or even eggs), I guess because they never lasted more than a day or two with the way people cooked then. I guess people, even families, don't go through butter and eggs at the same rate they did back in the day, and the presevatives do prevent a lot of food spoilage. It may not taste as good, but it's less suspectible to bacteria.

However..what most things are now cooked in has also made the difference. Perhaps healthier..but on a taste scale 1 to 10..many foods today rate about a 3 in my view. Gimme a good crisp french fry cooked in real grease and salted..for cripes sake...not tasting baked till it's a dry bland facsimile of one.

This is a big difference in many foods. Let's face it, someting fried in lard tastes a whole lot better than the same thing fried in anything else.