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.

> large vegetables

I'm not sure why, but I've noticed that smaller vegetables taste better. Small cucumbers are tastier and sweeter than the big ones (that taste like water), cherry tomatoes are more flavorful than large ones.