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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 24, 2025

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At $100,000 a year in 1959, one could hire either a personal assistant to go to the restaurant and pick up the food for you, or a cook to make the stuff.

Yeah but the conception of 'good food' is probably a bit different before modern internet, cooking education etcetera. Then again if you had 100k as a 1959 person you'd unlikely recognize the difference having not sufficiently punctured the leaky pot of your desires and could go buy half of New York City for the proverbial 500 beads.

And indeed, there were still people poor enough to want to be full time retainers. Poke, specifically, wasn't available at any price(if you wanted any sushi you would have had to fly in a chef from Japan, and suffer the judgement of your class peers for indulging in oriental savagery by eating raw fish). But you could have nice European cuisine of your choice cooked right in your mansion at that price point- albeit with considerably more seasonality in ingredients than we're used to today, produce wasn't available year round yet.

It’s not just the produce wasn’t available year-round, this was before they engineered the bitterness out of many of them