> The food was extremely good. . . . everything was fresh from the garden.

Was it this, or was it that your mother/grandmother was a great cook? I hear a lot of older people talk about how awful their food was, limited ingredients, everything was boiled...

Food also probably tastes better when you're actually hungry, and not able to Doordash whatever you want to eat at any time of day.

Yea, people tend to forget that even in the US we had long bread lines during the depression and that during WWII there were just a lot of items you couldn't get.

>everything was fresh from the garden

And this just goes to show that the writer doesn't understand how gardens work. For the vast majority of the year any particular plant in the garden ain't producing a damned thing. You can get some things like fresh tomatoes that produce from late spring through summer. And some herbs will produce all growing season. But fresh peas, well, they all pod out at around the same time. You better start canning them, oh and trying to freeze any amount of them in the past would cost you an absolute fortune in electricity.

Simply put, the amount and quality of vegetables you can get at your local store would stun most cooks of the early 1900s. They would walk in the store and be unable to move for a moment, stunned, at the vast selection of non-rotten, non ate up by bugs, large vegetables and ones they'd never seen before.

My mom's mother was so afraid of pork and trichinosis that, if you dropped a pork chop she had cooked onto the floor, it would shatter- that is how overcooked it would get (or so the family joke went).

Also, most of the chickens she cooked came from a can- that is, whole hen, pressure canned and sold that way. There weren't any chicken farmers for miles and that was the safest and most convenient way to get chicken to cook with.

Spices, fresh fruit and vegetables were all luxuries for most of the year. Most dishes were variations on stew, casserole or pot roast since everything was already soft already, and gravy was the most accessible seasoning / condiment.

Food was cooked fresh because the refrigerator was tiny and restaurants weren't cheap enough for anything other than special occasions, but "fresh" is definitely an optimistic interpretation of the ingredients.

Seasonal food also tasted a lot better when you spent half of the year waiting for the season, dreaming about fresh food of the next season.

Anecdotally vegetables I grow are wildly more flavorful than ones you can buy. Like think grape tomatoes as sweet as grapes. Green beans that a have complex flavor almost like green tea. The butternut squash that I accidentally grew this year from seeds that survived the winter in my compost tastes like a pumpkin pie. Corn that you can eat raw and that putting butter on feels like a waste.

That’s not to say you cannot get really good food that’s not “farm fresh” but food right out of the ground absolutely on average is better.

And if you were lucky enough to get dessert it was something like Jello with a bit of canned fruit inside. Of course that's also why obesity was less of a problem.

> The food was extremely good. . . . everything was fresh from the garden.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_sickness

> Milk sickness, also known as tremetol vomiting, is a kind of poisoning characterized by trembling, vomiting, and severe intestinal pain that affects individuals who ingest milk, other dairy products, or meat from a cow that has fed on white snakeroot plant, which contains the poison tremetol. In animals it is known as trembles.

> Although very rare today, milk sickness claimed thousands of lives among migrants to the Midwestern United States in the early 19th century, especially in frontier areas along the Ohio River Valley and its tributaries where white snakeroot was prevalent. New settlers were unfamiliar with the plant and its properties. Nancy Hanks Lincoln, the mother of Abraham Lincoln, is said to have been a victim of the poison. Nursing calves and lambs may have also died from their mothers' milk contaminated with snakeroot even when the adult cows and sheep showed no signs of poisoning. Cattle, horses, and sheep are the animals most often poisoned.

Nice, Fresh, Honest Milk.