Progress and old cookbooks
On post-war America, living standards in Argentina, and the lessons of yesterday's strange entrees
For years, Minnesota newspaper columnist James Lileks has maintained a website dedicated to the loonier recipes of post-war America. What people were out to convince themselves and others to eat in that era often looks downright bizarre to modern Americans. Others occasionally find themselves going down similar rabbit holes. The Internet Archive has a massive collection of cookbooks for just such a meandering investigation.
■ Spend enough time looking through these recipes, and it’s hard to escape the realization that the United States was still very much an emerging economy well into the 1960s. GDP per capita was about one-third of what it is today -- roughly about the standard of living in Mexico or Argentina today -- so a whole lot of what’s found in artifacts like those cookbooks is basically “How to impress others and look rich on a tight budget”.
■ It’s good to be conscious of these effects, not to make fun of the past, but to become aware that we live in a continuum. What looked like wealth then may look like poverty now, and that should offer us some sense of context about what looks like wealth today.
■ Real progress is mainly additive. It acts more like a long chain of compounded interest than a lucky pull of a slot machine. Yes, some progress is transformative. But even those moments that seem like tectonic shifts usually result from rules, habits, and investments that build up over time.
■ From time to time, sensible people ought to take in little reminders (like exposure to old-but-not-quite-ancient cookbooks) that we build most progress patiently over time, that we should be humble about our own displays of wealth and success (lest they look ridiculous in future retrospect), and that truly amazing progress is possible over time. Perhaps above all, we need to be reminded that just like the number one rule of making money is to not lose money, the number one rule about making progress is not to undermine progress that has already been made.
