Dark Earth Food History
- Fast food has spread across America since WW2 on account of the motor car. This has emphasised the continued rise of portable foodstuffs, such as hamburgers and fried chicken, and the franchises that specialise in them.
- There has also been accompanying hot dog and sandwich specialist restaurants for the fast food market.
- However, in general, fast foods are yet to fully penetrate and take over the ‘zeitgeist’ and there is still quite the role for regional specialities, cuisines and diners. One of the factors contributing to that is Ray Kroc not being able to buy out the McDonald brothers in 1961; we’ll see some more development of that in 1969.
- The prewar situation is introduced in this book:
www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104659750 and as a general rule, that paradigm has yet to be fully extinguished by fast food and is still present.
- General American abundance can be found in the portion sizes and array of dishes offered in restaurants and diners.
- The overall feel is an amalgam of the older prewar situation with the advance of technology, without the drop in quality.
- There has not been the @ 1965 drop in marbling standards by the USDA for beef, which when combined with similar changes in 1975 lead to so-called “prime crime”, or the lowering of the standards of the highest category.
- Factory farming has not boomed as in @, nor has there been the same shift to corn-fed beef cattle.
- On corn, there won’t be the same shift to use of high fructose corn syrup, with the accompanying impact on obesity and health. There is some interesting discussion here:
www.scientificamerican.com/article/time-to-rethink-corn/ . On Dark Earth, there won’t be the same use for ethanol or HFCS, so where does it go? A mixture of animal feed for poultry and pigs, greater domestic consumption and big exports of food, both as aid and commercially.
- It is still common for city/suburb dwellers, where practicable, to have a garden and fruit trees, as a hangover from the wartime experience of emphasising home production.
- There will not be a shift of the 1950s/60s food pyramid/recommendations to the 1970s one, which contributed towards obesity increases. Sugar consumption, whilst higher in the US than the rest of the world, is still under @ levels.
- If you were to walk down the aisles of a DE US supermarket, you’d see less heavily processed foodstuffs.
- Californian regional cuisine is a bit developmentally different, without the same direct border with Mexico.
- Mexican food and Tex-Mex food hasn’t really made the jump from Texas and the South West to the rest of the United States.
- Nachos haven’t been invented yet.
- Across the Atlantic, in Britain, we see a tad more change from 1968 in @. The combination of Imperial/Commonwealth food politics and domestic agricultural policy means there is quite a lot of produce available at steady prices.
- The lack of the impact of postwar austerity and rationing has meant there wasn’t the same drop off in relative quality and standards of cuisine.
- In general, there is more and better fruits and vegetables available; and more meat is consumed on a per capital basis.
- Milk and dairy consumption is quite high.
- Changes in migration patterns have meant that Indian and Chinese restaurants are still confined to the largest cities, rather than starting to spread out. The historical British culinary interest in curry has just started to really take off at this point, but here is somewhat muted and comes in the form of more Anglo-Indian adaptions: rather than a butter chicken and rice, one would find a beef curry with vegetables, onions and curry powder served with mashed potatoes.
- When Indian restaurants start to spread, they will have a much more esteemed position/cultural cachet, as well as serving some of the more elaborate dishes.
- Persian restaurants have started to spread around the great international cities in a much heavier way and more distinctly.
- Likewise, a somewhat different style of West Indian/Caribbean cooking is diffusing internationally, combining the Caribbean elements of @ with the different Anglo-Cuban evolution of that cuisine.
- Some wartime nastiness with Italy did cause some damage to the number of Italian restaurants, cafes, ice cream sellers and so forth that began to increase from the 1950s in @. Pasta is largely unknown, saved for tinned spaghetti and macaroni and pizza is an alien foreign delicacy.
- No Berni Inns as of 1968, but other steakhouses, chophouses and carveries are a bit more common, with higher standard fare and larger portions. Their identity and style is deliberately very stereotypically British (read John Bull and The Roast Beef of Olde England) as a result of cultural differentiation and subtle government encouragement.
- Continued Ministry of Food run British Restaurants provide set menus cheaply, both as an aid to public nutrition and as a skeleton/cadre structure for expansion into wartime/crisis public feeding.
- Beyond some limited London restaurants and some places near larger US bases, the hamburger is yet to take off. There was no Wimpy’s franchise opening by Lyons in 1954.
- The major British ‘fast food’ is fish and chips, followed by meat pies and various types of roast/corned meat sandwiches.
- Pub opening and closing times were regulated to a slightly reduced degree during each world war and quickly reverted to the pre 1915 norm in 1919 and 1946 respectively, which allowed for opening between 0900 and midnight, with many city pubs and those near large factories/shipyards/armaments works having licences to open beyond and outside the norm.
- Off licences by and large don’t exist in the same broad fashion.
- No pubs are permitted to open on Sundays.
- Fish consumption is high, driven by supply and MoF encouragement, which in turn is motivated by the multiple uses/strategic value of the fishing fleet. Fish on Friday is a widely followed tradition on cultural grounds.
- There is no dearth of flavour, as some commentators have pejoratively ascribed to British food of the 1960s in @, which comes from the base quality and natural tastes of the foodstuffs, use of quite a lot of traditional herbs, no decline in the medieval/early modern English popularity of garlic and some rather special new inventions.
- These are a combination of @ spices, flavoured salts, MSG and equivalents and a bit of a fantastical Willy Wonka approach; think what Heston Blumenthal and his ilk could accomplish with real culinary magic.
- The other major food related areas where magic has played a role are storage/preservation (a subsection of which is military rations) and cooking devices. There are ovens that can roast a 25lb turkey to perfection in half an hour, cook 12 dishes differently and simultaneously and other such ‘marvels’. Frozen meals can be heated quickly with a fair bit better quality.
- More venison is generally available and mutton and veal retain their respective niches.
- Chip pans have been replaced by safer household deep fryers.
- Beer is served at 36 degrees Fahrenheit which, due to some magically assisted developments over the centuries, results in no loss of flavour profile, which is a bit richer, due to continued use of gruyt herbs as well as hops.
- Dwarven ale is stronger (16-25%), richer in taste and through some secret process, contains a fair whack of the necessary calories, vitamins and minerals needed for nominal survival, although not the lot.
- The halflings population is quite ‘food centric’ and provides many of the great cooks of England, as well as instructors at military culinary schools.
- French cuisine has less of a cachet/hold over the popular imagination as the epitome of food excellence. One of the unfortunate byproducts, from an external universe perspectives, of greater prosperity has been the lack of a breakthrough for Mediterranean cuisine as achieved by Elizabeth David in @
- School dinners/lunches are still provided in the majority of institutions, along with free orange juice and milk.
- More wine is made in southern England and Lyonesse, but perhaps half of it is grape wine and the rest is various forms of fruit wine.
- Abroad, there have also been changes. Due to the lack of an equivalent to the Gastarbeiter programme in Germany, doner kebabs have not begun to become popular.
- A more cohesive Austrian-Hungarian fusion cuisine has begun to develop over the 20th century with advances in transport and storage technology. Various forms of schnitzel are very popular and are starting to break out internationally.
- Given the lack of the same Greek-Turkish population exchanges of the 1920s in @, gyros/yiros haven’t made the jump, either to Greece or the Greek diaspora.
- French cooking hasn’t seen the emergence of nouvelle cuisine to supplant cuisine classique.
- Television chefs have made earlier inroads, with Julia Child, Graham Kerr, Fanny Craddock, Delia Smith (five years before @) and James Beard all making inroads. Keith Floyd will be joining their ranks sooner as one of my rare personal taste inserts, as I enjoy him a great deal.
- Martian and Venusian dishes are really out of this world.
- As a general rule, whether in the USA, Britain, Europe or the wider world, that golden moment of regional cuisines/styles combined with modern tech and capacity has extended a little longer.
