Re: bagels/ethnicity
On Sep 9, 2006, at 11:24 PM, utopia1@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