It was food. So, I was born in 1944, in the USA. I had an Irish mother who tried hard but was not a good cook. My first memory of food was when my mother let me mix the yellow coloring with the little bag of lard(?) to make "butter". I also remember the god awful blue color of powdered skim milk. There were a few years after the war when we still suffered slight shortages due to the war. Then, in my memory came Betty Crocker and the amazing everything came in a package times. I had a friend , Karlene Goode, who's mother made real things like pastries. I couldn't believe them.
Because Mom's ethnic background was least famous for cooking, because Mom was modern, because it was those times, coffee was instant, bread was supermarket, whipped cream was in a spray can. You get the picture. It was the fifties in middle America. I used to dream of being Italian or French and of what
their food would taste like.
Then, when I was 20, I went to Europe on a Grand Tour. I can still remember my first cup of Cappuccino in Italy. 'Oh my god! This is what coffee tastes like'. Swoon. Then tasting butter in France. "This is the best thing I have ever eaten." Butter is still one of my major food groups. Then the veggies! The fruit! So much different from canned veggies. You can't imagine. And how about sausage in Germany. I had only had hot dogs before that. And real whipped cream!!! Fresh octopus in Greece, yeee gods, frozen fish sticks didn't even compare. You get my drift. Every bite, every common food in Europe was a treat beyond treats.
The thing that brought on these memories today was going into a lovely food store in Seattle and seeing every possible great food from every country everywhere just available right now, right here. I know there are still parts of the world where this is not possible. I know that even in Betty Crocker cake mix world time you could find an ethnic neighborhood in a big city and buy the real thing. I know that there were even in those times there were wonderful cooks out on the farm making their own sausages from real meat. But I also know that it ws more than twenty years later in the ordinary parts of this country when real coffee and real ice cream and fifty varieties of salt (imagine that) started showing up everywhere. (Häagen-Dazs was bought by Pillsbury in 1983. General Mills bought Pillsbury in 2001. However, in the United States and Canada, Häagen-Dazs products are produced by Nestlé subsidiary Dreyer's, which acquired the rights as part of the General Mills Pillsbury deal. The brand name is still owned by General Mills but is licensed to Nestlé in the US and Canada.)
I wondered today why it took so long. Didn't everyone who tasted the really good stuff want more of it? I did. From that little bit of info about Haagen-Dazs, it looks like it wasn't until the big players got into the picture that the good stuff came to us. I hope the trend continues, although deciding among fifty kinds of olives can be taxing. But it is far better than just having pale green olives stuffed with pimientos as a choice of one. Although, truth be told, I sometimes get nostalgic for ice burg lettuce. Don't you?
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