Twenty years ago I was hanging around a friend's kitchen as dinnertime approached. “Let me cook for you,” he offered. “I don't want to put you to any trouble,” I said. “No trouble at all,” he replied, and in one graceful movement he leaned back in his chair, lifted a tin of baked beans from the shelf above his head, emptied them into a saucepan and turned on the gas. That was dinner.
To grasp how daily life in most western countries has improved in recent decades, food is the perfect case study. True, we have all got fatter. True, we eat too much processed stuff. True, with food prices rising and incomes falling since 2007, poor people can barely afford enough to eat. And yet for most westerners, tastier food now provides everyday happiness to a degree unimaginable when I was growing up.
Back then, most Europeans and North Americans ate bland food daily. Going to a restaurant was a rare treat. There was little ethnic food around - certainly no sushi in the supermarket. A friend of mine raised in a small Dutch town in the 1970s recalls that whereas all their neighbours ate meat and potatoes every evening, his family were considered snobs because they ate meat and rice.