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Notes -
Consider the following thought experiment, courtesy of Scott Summer
I think this is a good counterpart to the AGI questions below. There is a massive conceptual gap in defining welfare across vastly different levels of technological mastery.
It also highlights that some of the analysis misses the largest factor here -- that AGI (if it happens, sadly not if it doesn't pan out) will greatly increase the quality and personalization of a large set of goods & services. If that does happen, it will dwarf the distributional aspects.
If you made that much money in 1959, you would live in mansion, have a butler, private chef, and maids, and ride in a Rolls Royce driven by a chauffeur. If you insisted on delivery instead of eating a personally prepared there were restaurants that did delivery at that time, or you could send a servant to pick something up.
Food was good in 1959 (though I haven't personally tried it). Consumerism was was well on its way to making Americans fat with a great selection of hyperpalatable foods. Sure, ethnic foods wouldn't be a thing at a time, but America isn't the place you would get bland and boring food. Of course poke bowls didn't exist on earth at that time but personally I don't think it's a huge loss.
Chinese restaurants were pretty widespread in the fifties, even in smaller cities (where else could Jews eat out on Christmas Day?). Of course it was thoroughly Americanized Chinese food.
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I think it's also worth noting that in 1959, there were 60 million cars in the US compared with 300 million today. Also, I'm pretty confident that lower class people had much less access to their own automobiles. Granted, more streets and highways have been built since then, but I'm pretty confident that back then, driving entailed much fewer of the annoyances inherent in driving in the US in 2025.
As far as dining/restaurants/bars go, earning $100,000 in 1959 would get you access to places where you can eat in peace and quiet without screaming children and such. Of course nowadays, it's hard to avoid people speaking loudly on their cell phones, watching videos out loud, and so on.
Obviously there are pluses and minuses, but I think it's important to appreciate that in both 1959 and 2025, money buys you experiences that are exclusive. And exclusivity is a huge factor in the enjoyability of an experience. The nicest beaches, parks, restaurants, bars, resorts, concert venues, and so on are not nice if they are overcrowded and/or have too many undesirable people present.
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Almost all modern gastronomy (I’m not just talking about Michelin starred fine dining, but like basic techniques) is downstream of French cooking, including the techniques a 21st century upper-middle tier restaurant in Indianapolis or Salt Lake City might use.
In 1959, what a normal PMC American today would consider “good [western] restaurant food” (again, with no pretensions to ‘fine dining’, just the kind of thing you get in the decent restaurant of a four star hotel), existed in maybe 20 restaurants in NYC and a dozen each in Los Angeles, DC and Chicago. A few others scattered around the country in various other cities, maybe a few in Boston, that kind of thing. The food that The Four Seasons in NYC, probably at that time the best restaurant in the country (and which itself only opened in 1959), was on a level below what you could find at thousands, probably tens of thousands, of restaurants across America today.
People vastly underestimate this.
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You say, "no good restaurants", I say, "Ray Kroc hasn't even bought McDonald's from the McDonalds yet". If you're someone from 2025 earning 100 grand in 1959, you should be able to shape the culinary landscape of the US.
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Granted, there was much less of what we nowadays consider seasoning, but I think (1) the French tradition as you say for fine dining, with the reaction against highly seasoned food that came in after mediaeval times and (2) how much of today's flavours are really "hot and spicy" as against a range of subtle, herbal, flavours? 'Nobody in 1959 was putting gochujang on their beans on toast!' Friend, I'm not doing that in 2025.
I see some American recipes online and it's just ingredient upon ingredient upon ingredient, to the point I go "but you can't taste the meat or the vegetable under all the flavouring!"
I have to refer to Tasting History and the origins of deep dish pizza. This is from the 1940s, is this fine dining by the standards of 1959? 😁
Airline food from 1954!
Yes, and? There's no law of nature that one thing ought to define the flavor of every dish. It's great to have dishes that highlight the flavor of one really great ingredient, like a seared ribeye or ahi tuna sashimi. It's also great that you can have dishes that layer many cheap ingredients into explosions of flavor, like Nashville style fried chicken, or chicken and sausage gumbo, or al pastor tacos.
Yeah, but do you really need cranberry-strawberry-lemon-acai flavor (natural and artificial) 44g of sugar per can glow-in-the-dark fluorescent colour drinks? At some point there's just too much going on to distinguish anything.
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What's this claim based on? Just curious.
It certainly matches my experience from as recently as the 1990s early 2000s. Small town restaurants were generally pretty bad, and the general quality of random suburban restaurants has increased pretty dramatically in the last fifteen-twenty years or so.
I don't totally understand why this would be the case. I think cooking is 90% knowing a recipe, so in theory all you should need is print technology to quickly spread quality cooking instruction, but in practice that didn't work. Even cooking TV shows couldn't do it. I've no idea why wide spread internet usage would be the game changer when those others failed, but it really matches the timeline based on my own experience. Maybe it was just Yelp.
It's not just knowing a recipe -- there is a bottleneck of skill (training of juniors can only really happen at a good restaurants, which requires skilled seniors, although culinary institutes cut some of that). There was also the lack of a nationwide supply chain of fresh ingredients. Heck, what like a third of the produce today is trucked from California's Central Valley, which wasn't even fully developed until after WWII. And even then there wasn't an interstate system to carry those trucks. There was also a lack of affluent customers until the automobile.
But yeah, the median gastro-pub burger is probably > 90th percentile in 1960. Even 95th.
Michelin (and later Yelp) did also help too, that's an important factor.
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That's one thing. Perhaps the level of the average restaurant has gone up. Probably has. But the claim that the best restaurant in the country in the late 1950s would be surpassed by tens of thousands of restaurant today? I don't believe that can be true. I think the very best chefs knew what they were doing back then, and further back in time too. People have always been obsessed with food and tried to do skillful preparation, even if the highest knowledge didn't necessarily pass on down to the lower classes.
Culinary fashions have changed, at least. I've been to a few semi-fancy restaurants (usually catering to an older clientele) and felt "blast from the past" about some of the menu choices: tortilla chips weren't standard at Tex-Mex places in the 60s, relying on demi glace or hollandaise on an otherwise-bland entree, or tossing some steamed vegetables on the side. On the cheaper side, I've been to small-town diners that, while IMO fine, seem to be someone's home cooking scaled up and offered for guests without formal chef training. I get the sense from movies (not a great historical source) that this was pretty common in the past, but that the bar has mostly shifted upwards or gotten more specialized.
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I think it's all bullshit.
It's basically saying people were too stupid to figure out cooking in the 19th century?
I don't believe that e.g. beef stew I might like to buy today in Prague is worse than a similar meal bought in 1885.
It's a lot.
Food culture is driven with real history.
Cantonese Chinese food has perilously declined, in my opinion. Mostly because the Cantonese tradition and kitchen skills are extremely difficult/timeconsuming to pick up and require both broad and deep knowledge. Entire skills and dishes are being lost at an alarming rate.
Northern Chinese is doing okay, there's more appreciation for it worldwide now. And sichuan spices have proliferated worldwide with interesting results.
Japanese food has continued to improve but suffers a little bit from the increasing (global?) demand not being correlated with availability of core ingredients. Also comparable is italian food, which has responded to going global by a vastly lower floor everywhere, although the ceiling has risen.
French food culture changes in waves every 20 or 30 years, usually as a response to the last wave.
American food culture is driven by immigrants. The "classic" American foods have relatively short histories and Americans are constantly looking to reinvent them for higher profit motive or success. They also get incredibly defensive and regional about the same foods, so there tends to be a lot of variation of what is technically the same food; there is much looser "canon" than there is with say, cuisines that adhere strongly to their history and culture and consider deviation to be near blasphemy.
A changing movement I've seen in my city is that shifting dining habits are driving food evolution - or devolution. Food that travels well and doesn't deteriorate in taste significantly after a delivery time of an hour is getting more popular, as is the quality of batch food that can be made in cafeteria quantities.
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America in the fifties really was at a historically low ebb for good restaurant food, and good food in general- that much is true.
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I can't speak to Prague in 1885, I can say that the food anywhere outside Philly and Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania was significantly less varied and flavorful and lower effort in 2002 than it is today. I know this because I was there the whole time, and because restaurants are still open that haven't changed cooks or recipes in that time.
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