Is Food Getting Better?
Congrats! You are probably about to eat the very best Thanksgiving meal of your life.
Maybe your turkey is drier than a World Cup fan in Qatar, or maybe you overcommitted and nothing is ready by 8 p.m. Maybe you’re making the same exact menu as last year. But if you round up every single Thanksgiving dinner in the United States—all the birds and pies and mac and cheeses and green-bean casseroles—on average, the meal will be just marginally, imperceptibly tastier than last year. On average, it will be noticeably better than a decade ago, substantially better than two decades ago, and night-and-day better than 40 years ago. Expand that out until, let’s say, the ’50s, and the average Thanksgiving dinner then versus now is like comparing Little Caesars to Eleven Madison Park. If the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, the arc of home cooking bends toward yumminess.
In the simplest sense, the modern Thanksgiving dinner is just far less defined by the “traditional” foods—and for the better. There are now endless recipes for vegan Thanksgiving, keto Thanksgiving, Peking-duck Thanksgiving, and (regrettably) turducken Thanksgiving. This year, I’m making roasted honeynut squash with homemade mole and mango pie for dessert—a menu that I would not have been able to whip up several decades ago. Americans have changed what Thanksgiving looks like, and in turn the modern grocery store has made it easier for Americans to change what Thanksgiving looks like: In the early 20th century, the average store stocked about 500 items. Now it’s 40,000 to 50,000 items. Or let’s just focus on produce: In 1975, the average grocery stocked 65 kinds of fruits and veggies. By 1998, that number had reached 345.
All of these changes make the most difference. I just checked, and my own grocery store has 20 kinds of apples in stock! And remember when brussels sprouts were America’s most hated vegetable? Well, in the ’90s, breeders that made sprouts bitter, and chefs simultaneously figured out that was far superior to boiling them to death. Cooking techniques, abetted by a bonanza of appliances, have just drastically improved over the years. People:
