People keep emailing me articles about the “good ole days,” meaning roughly that time period from 1950 to 1964, somewhere between “I like Ike” and the Civil Rights Act. These articles always extol the virtues of a so-called simple life, a time when everything cost less, women were supposed to be virgins when they married, and white Christian men ruled the western world. But do these people really remember what it was like back then? I do. Thank God that time is over!

I was born in 1951, which means I grew up in the 1950’s and came of age in the late 1960’s. I remember lots of trivial things from that era, like manual typewriters, rotary-dial phones, ugly poodle skirts and even uglier hairdos (beehives and cast-iron curls); uncomfortable girdles and stockings; really cool cars and some terrific movies; a few great black-and-white TV shows like “The Dick Van Dyke Show” as well as some dumb-as-dirt TV fodder (remember the Beav?). If you only watched old reruns, and never read a book or talked to people who lived through that era, you’d think America in those days was a bucolic Eden mostly filled with docile Christian white people. It wasn’t like that at all.

When I look at old TV commercials and magazine ads, and when I hear people talking about 29-cent hamburgers, I am reminded of the woefully bad food in America during the “good ole days.” Coming from New Orleans, where great food has always been the norm, I never knew there was bad food in the world until we left town. We moved around some in my childhood, and we traveled a great deal, so I had a chance to see what was out there in the American hinterlands, and way too much of it was not only inedible but downright unhealthy. Remember diets loaded with saturated fat and corn syrup? Remember when the apex of good “cuisine” was a t-bone steak smothered in thick brown sauce or a lobster drenched in butter? The only “foreign” cooking you ever heard about was French, and the only Italian cuisine most Americans had ever sampled was pizza and spaghetti. If you look at a popular cookbook from the 1950’s, you’ll find it loaded with stuff like green bean casserole, tuna noodle casserole, fruit cocktail cake and green jello with marshmallows, all of which were considered fit for human consumption in those days.