Food in the Fifties

My memories are mostly of the Sixties rather than the Fifties, but this list still looks mostly right.

We did have curry, or something we called curry. It was an awful thing you did to leftover meat to make it seem edible. You can also get curry in Korea, or Japan. But you cannot find it in India.

We could get pizza in Montreal, but there was no such thing as pizza in my hometown, population 5,000. Pizza was still a rarity in Korea when I first moved there. It is everywhere in the Philippines—but just try to get one without pineapple.

I remember a great uncle used to order a crate of oranges shipped from Florida for Christmas. But I think we always had bananas. Bananas are not a seasonal crop. Banana trees produce year-round.

Cubed sugar was posh, and you dropped it in your cup using special little tongs. Ideally silver plated.

I still remember the first time I saw “chicken fingers” on a menu. I laughed. What could that be? But actually, chicken fingers have always been popular in the Philippines. Real. Chicken. Fingers. With the nails on.

I remember yoghurt being discussed on some fifties TV show. A teenaged girl was trying it to be sophisticated, to impress her friends, and get to hang out with the college crowd. It was supposed to look like an absurd affectation. Of course, she hated it.

We certainly did have kebab, and called it that. “Shish-kebab.”

There is still no such thing as a real pineapple in Canada. They do not travel well. To discover what they are supposed to taste like, you have to go to the tropics. The canned stuff probably tastes more like the real thing than the whole ones that make it to Montreal—soft and sweet!

I certainly do remember laughing at the idea that anyone would actually pay money for something, like water, that you could get free by turning on the tap. Surely nobody could be that stupid. I resisted for years. But when you move to Asia….

I also remember how we used to laugh at how crazy the Japanese were to pay a few dollars for a cup of coffee. I mean, coffee was coffee, right?

I remember buying a cookbook of Southeast Asian food, which advised that there was really no chance Thai food could ever be popular back in North America. Too much fish sauce.

I also remember thinking Loblaws was pretty foolish to start marketing a special line of “organic” produce. Really, do people have money to throw away? Are they really going to fall for that “organic=healthy” stuff? As if “organic” really meant something?

Yup. People have money to throw away.