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No, street food and restaurants were very common historically, (at least) going back to Ancient Greece and Egypt.[1] In those times the poor often did not own
by nickff 10y ago
No, street food and restaurants were very common historically, (at least) going back to Ancient Greece and Egypt.[1] In those times the poor often did not own kitchens or cooking implements, and spent so much time working that they did not have time to cook.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermopolium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermopolium
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_food#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_food#History
- tatterdemalion 10y agoBoth of these narratives are incomplete - in other contexts (e.g. any primarily pastoral society) the poor did not eat meals prepared by people outside of their kinship group almost ever. The reality is that the relationship between food preparation and class have been very different in different food cultures; you can perform a comparative analysis to critique our food culture, but a narrative of a "historical shift" from "how it used to be" is misleading.
- nickff 10y agoI am referring to the history of the cultural antecedents of the western world, which have also had a dominant effect on the vast majority of the human race. I am not trying to address the history of Rapa Nui.
- tatterdemalion 10y agoYou're going to have to tell me how much street food was eaten by the manorial serf of Europe, or the American homesteader, or a native person under the encomienda. Don't be smug, western history is full of food cultures in which the poor prepared their own food. If your scope is restricted to the food culture of the urban poor, its worth pointing out that the American urban poor today largely do not prepare their own food, for much the same reason as in historical examples, with seriously deleterious health outcomes.