Linda Hall: Change brings food for thought

Linda Hall.

No matter what I am doing or where I am, food is never far from my mind.

We can't live without it - well, I certainly can't - and it seems you can't really get away from it.

Everywhere I look there's food - in magazines, newspapers and let's not forget Facebook, which seems to be overrun with food advice and recipes.

Not surprising, really, because I'm not the only one who thinks about food a lot.

Two emails I received recently made me think just how much our food and eating habits have changed in the past 50 years or so.

Eating in the 50s and 60s

• Pasta was not eaten in this country.
• Curry was a surname.
• A takeaway was a mathematical problem.
• A pizza was something to do with a leaning tower.
• All potato chips were plain; the only choice we had was whether to put salt on.
• Sugar enjoyed good press and was regarded as "white gold". Cubed sugar was regarded as posh.
• Rice was eaten only as a milk pudding.
• Calamari was called squid and we used it as fish bait.
• A Big Mac was what we wore when it was raining.
• Brown bread was something only poor people ate.
• Oil was for lubricating, fat was for cooking.
• Tea was made in a teapot, using tea leaves and never green.
• Fish didn't have fingers.
• Eating raw fish was called poverty, not sushi.
• None of us had heard of yoghurt.
• Healthy food was anything edible.
• People who didn't peel potatoes were regarded as lazy.
• Cooking outside was called camping.
• Seaweed was not a recognised food.
• Kebab was not even a word, never mind a food.
• Prunes were medicinal.
• Surprisingly, muesli was readily available, it was called cattle feed.
• Water came out of the tap. If someone had suggested bottling it and charging more than petrol for it, they would have become a laughing stock!

A couple of things we never ever had on our table back then were elbows and phones.

How times have changed. No doubt in another 50 years there will be another list like this about the food we eat today - that's progress.

The second email was survey results from Menulog.co.nz. The main points of its findings from a survey of 436 adults were:

• Nearly 1 in 2 don't have enough food in the fridge to prepare dinner once a week.
• More than half skip meals once or twice a week because they're time poor.
• Three-quarters spend up to $50 a week on home-delivered meals.
• One in three Kiwis are cooking from scratch fewer than three times a week.

Those two little words, "time poor", are the reason people like Nadia Lim with My Food Bag are doing so well. She recognised a need in the market and catered for it.

You don't have to even think about what's for dinner, you don't have to shop, you just have to pay.

Way out of reach for many but a great idea if you really are time poor, although I wonder about letting someone else do all that thinking for you.

We use our brains less and less as we become more reliant on computers and other people to do our thinking.

I can remember when I knew about 40 phone numbers off by heart. I don't have to remember them these days because they are all in my contacts in my phone.

Anything mathematical, use the calculator. Want to know something, don't think about it, just Google it.

In 50 years' time there might be a list about the things we used to do for ourselves. At the top of that list might be "thinking".

Food for thought.

- Linda Hall is assistant editor of Hawke's Bay Today.