text: Friday Food Post: The Economics Behind Grandma's Tuna Casseroles - Bloomberg
  Friday Food Post: The Economics Behind Grandma's Tuna Casseroles
  Don't judge yesteryear's cooking by today's standards.
  October 30, 2015, 3:32 PM EDT
  Spam and pineapples, anyone?
  We were the sort of people who did our grocery shopping like a trade caravan moving from oasis to oasis. You started, perhaps, at Fairway Market in the 70s, for produce, and then you moved methodically up Broadway from point to point: Bruno's for fresh pasta, Citarella for meat, Zabar's for cheese and deli sundries, H&H for bagels, the Korean vegetable market on the corner for staples you might have forgotten to grab at some earlier stop. Then you cooked. Unless it was her busy season (my mother sold real estate when she was not simmering blanquette de veau), we had a fresh cooked meal from scratch every night.
  So I'm always a bit bemused when I read articles pondering why our grandparents cooked such dreadful food. True, reading about your grandmother's idea of what constituted a nice Asian meal is a bit lip-puckering. But why are people forced into flights of fancy to explain why our near ancestors ate like this? All too often, cooking is explained in terms of social norms about femininity, or immigrants, or, in one recent New York Times column, the Cold War. This is all very well for sophomore sociology classes, but why does no one ever offer simple theories such as "they liked it"; "they thought it looked pretty like that"; or "that was what they could afford"? Having read quite a lot of the era's cookbooks and food writing, I find these the most likely reasons for the endless parade of things molded, jellied, bemayonnaised and enbechameled.
  And yet, I assume they were thinking something, and it probably wasn't, "This will show those Reds what the Good Life looks like." In fact, when I try to come up for explanations for their tastes, none of the fashionably political theories even make the top ten.
  Most people are not that adventurous; they like what's familiar. American adults ate what they did in the 1950s because of what their parents had served them in the 1920s: bland, and heavy on preserved foods like canned pineapple and mayonnaise.