Prof. Peabody's Wayback Machine: 1997

In a desperate effort to get out from under a large, growing mound of cookbooks and cooking magazines, I started going through a stack of ten-year-old Eating Well magazines that had been taking up valuable closet space.

This is like having a time machine! Here is what was in the forefront of healthy food back in 1997:

Fat dominates! Everything has to be low-fat or fat-free. Nearly every ad for every product including those lovely fat-free cheeses that we all had to try. It is interesting how many of those products did not survive in the market. Healthy Choice soups debuted in 1997 and are still around. But a lot of the Kraft fat-free products are gone.

Deborah Madison’s legendary “Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone” had just been released. While the book is warmly welcomed in the little review blurb, there is no indication that the book would become the revered masterpiece it seems to be now, at its ten year anniversary.

Women’s clothes look soooo modest! There is no cleavage, no tight clothing. The cute women look almost matronly by today’s standards. Have we “come a long way baby” in just ten years to get to where we are today?

Milk had just been renamed: Skim had just become “fat-free.” But puzzlingly, the “new name” for 2% milk is supposedly “reduced fat” and the new name for 1% is “low-fat or light”. That’s not what prevailed over time, is it? While the name skim has disappeared, I think we still call 2% and 1% by those names. Did the magazine article get it wrong or did the renaming effort fail and get abandoned?

Power lines are still suspects in causing cancers from electromagnetic radiation. The article does yeoman’s work debunking this theory.

Avocados are absolved of their bad reputation of being high in saturated fat. Eggs are beginning to be rehabilitated.

It’s fun to see ingredients that are commonplace today in their exotic debuts: lemongrass, curries, a question about the difference between coriander and cilantro (one is a seed and the other a fresh herb; no, they can’t substitute for each other), veggie burgers, tomatillo salsa, sun-dried tomato tapenade, coconut milk. Then again, venison does not seem to have caught on.

Wow! Martha Stewart looks soooo young, hugging a cow in a milk ad! Funny, the milk mustache is there but the line “Got Milk?” had not yet been tagged onto this campaign. The text says: “Three words. Just add milk. It’s a good thing.” And the tagline is “Milk. Where’s your mustache?”

But as much as things have changed, some things remain the same:

There is deep concern about the mono-crop culture. An article talks about the fragility of the food supply: four kinds of potatoes and six varieties of sweet corn (out of more than 352 planted 100 years ago) make up the bulk of the plantings in 1997. I think the concern continues but I think the situation has improved a lot with the movement towards local food, heirloom varieties of produce, CSAs and farmers’ markets, don’t you?

Then as now, grilling was THE summer activity. Ten years later, we are still sticking unhusked corn in water, then steaming on the grill, still slapping those boneless chicken breasts on. The difference is that the grilling articles are very detailed in terms of how much charcoal to use, how to light it, how to bank it. I don’t see as much of that anymore.

But the thing that struck me is how imaginative Eating Well was. An article showed how to pack homemade dry mixes for backpacking camping: pancakes, of course but also jambalaya, muffins and more. Another article about Vietnamese soups could have been written today. And a step-by-step article on making tamales really lays down the basics with great pictures and how-tos.

I miss the old Eating Well. I think these magazines have such value. I am readily able to toss out the old Cooking Light, Gourmet, Bon Appetit, Living and Real Simple. But I can’t seem to part with the Eating Wells.
--Joy

It is always a surprise to look at old magazines, isn't it? I have many issues of a cooking magazine called Sphere that came out in the late '60s and early '70s (so about 30 years older than those Eating Wells). I loved the magazine because it was exotic before exotic became ubiquitous, with entire menus of Moroccan, Ethiopian, Indian, Peruvian, Thai, and myriad other cuisines. Lots of substitutions were offered for things I can easily find today -- lemongrass, masa harina, and so on. But the biggest change is the clothing and hair styles. The magazines blend from go go through the hippy eras, so things (hair and skirts) range from very short to very long, bell bottoms put in an appearance, and flowers are abundant. Good fun looking back.