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I've been recently thinking about how much the obesity epidemic simply reflects that food is tastier than before. This would particularly affect a country like Finland, with stereotypically famously bland food (in this poll it's the second least popular in the world among polled, with only Peruvian cuisine scoring worse).
If I compare the selection in stores and restaurants to what we had in even the 90s, there's been an exposion of choice. I can easily go to a store that's 5 minutes from my home and find the ingredients for, say, this delectable meal of kimchi noodles (I actually have them waiting in my fridge already), whereas decades ago even knowing what "gochujang paste" would have required specialist knowledge.
As such, I have a considerable amount of options for cooking meals that taste actually good and have a great variety of them. Would it then be any wonder that I'd also eat more of it if it was just meat and potatoes with salt and pepper, day in day out? The whole idea behind, say, the potatoes diet was, exactly, less about the specific property of the potatoes and more just that it's so bland and samey-tasting it naturally would mean you would limit your food intake to an acceptable level (I haven't tried the potatoes diet myself and make no claims to its efficacy).
Another factor that comes up surprisingly rarely (it does come up sometimes but seems like an obvious thing to be mentioned even more often) is simply the car culture and the fact that people walk aroud less than usually. I would again, on the basis of my memories from the 90s, say that people currently are more prone to drive distances that they would have walked in the past, say parents driving kids to school for a 500m trip when they'd have walked it in the past, but don't have any real evidence.
It's sometimes very odd to have people simultaneously complaining about obesity making everything and everyone uglier and, at the same time, react very negatively to any idea that cities should be designed in a way to limit the use of the glorified four-seater fat scooter in their garage.
If you're researching recipes, cooking dishes that you can't cook from memory, seeking out particular ingredients that aren't the same 20 things you always buy and won't have a purpose in your cupboard if you deviate from your intended meal plan, etc., you've already specced several points into amateur chef.
Sure, cooking TV shows and YouTubers are successful, so there are a lot of people specced into amateur chef, but I don't think the typical person is. The average person flits between packaged breakfast foods, has a small repertoire of sandwiches or buys prepared meals at lunchtime, and rotates through a few different frozen dinners and takeout/delivery restaurants.
But I think you're right that even so the modern diet is way tastier than what was around 50 years ago.
The size of the average vegetable has become bigger and its cost has gone down, but the taste of the average vegetable has become much worse. If you can make food barely taste like anything (so it doesn't really feel like you're eating anything at all), you now have to fix that problem with stuff that's a lot more calorically dense and/or load the dish up with salt.
Also, 50 years ago, with respect to dinner the average person would have been either cooking it themselves or married to someone who was. Fast food was a lot more expensive, relatively speaking.
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I agree that the modern diet is tastier than it was in the fifties, but how much of the fattening is just ‘there’s tons of sugar in everything, even things which don’t seem like they should have sugar, so unless you’re at bake-your-own bread levels of from scratch you take in way more calories than it seems like your meal should have’. Add in that, as you note, fewer people bake their own bread.
The point was not necessarily tastiness as an abstract category but the variety in the diet. One can now easily sample cuisines in the world at the confines of one's home and even a small town (~50,000 people) will have a variety of ethnic restaurants.
The UN's official definition of "town" (roughly aligning with the common understanding of the word) extends from 10,000 people to 49,999 people. A municipality with "∼50,000 people" is either a large town or a small city, not a small town.
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Bread, literally, has just as many calories per ounce if you add sugar or don't. The infamous Wonder Bread has 5g of sugar to 29g of total carbohydrate for a 57g serving.
‘Bake-your-own-bread’ was a descriptor, not a literal designation, to refer to cooking tasks on that level of from-scratch preparedness. Making your own tomato sauce/baked beans might be a better descriptor from a literally mechanistic perspective than baking your own bread but it seems like homemade bread is more recognizable as symbolic of an almost entirely from scratch household kitchen. It’s certainly slightly more concise.
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