This diet, at least as I remember it in my household, consisted of canned everything, and instant everything. The first time I tasted frozen peas in early adulthood I remember thinking they didn’t taste very good. I had only ever known the pea in its dark, mushy, semi-fermented, straight-from-the-can incarnation. Other household standbys beside canned veggies included Shake’n'Bake chicken, Kraft Dinner, hot dogs on white Wonder Bread buns, and something we called rice and meat sauce.

"Wonder Bread Helps Catch Boys!" 1968

Here’s the recipe for rice and meat sauce: Fry up some ground beef, mix in some spaghetti sauce from a can or jar, dump this on top of a bed of white Minute Rice, and serve. It was my brother’s favorite dish.

Why were we eating this way? Had the evil geniuses in food industry marketing departments talked us into it?

Monty Python did a spoof on marketing back in the ’70s,  in which a salesman finds himself with a big box full of short bits of string, and must come up with clever ways to position them. “Simpson’s Individual Stringettes!” he cries. “A million household uses!” This soon gets upgraded to, “pre-sliced, rustproof, easy-to-handle, low-calorie Simpson’s Individual Emperor Stringettes, free from artificial coloring, as used in hospitals!” Marketing is like that. Sometimes the producers are trying to foist something on you. On the other hand, sometimes they’re just eagerly attempting to stay abreast of a burgeoning, consumer-driven demand.

The food movement, as represented by Michael Pollan, often speaks of the food industry as an entity that has sold us on highly profitable processed goods. No doubt there’s plenty of truth in that. But I can clearly remember the pre-modern grocery store. I remember that it had plenty of raw materials on offer, as well as legions of grannies who still knew how to keep the butcher and the produce department manager honest. My family bought the cheap, canned, boxed, processed goods mainly because they required extremely little preparation. And why was that important? Well, for the obvious reason that both my parents had to work.

So we demanded those cheap, convenient processed foods. It was all we were eating. The more processed foods the food industry came up with, the greater the variety at the dinner table. And yes, our family also swallowed all that debunked nutritionist propaganda about fat being the great killer. We believed that so long as we were popping multivitamins and so long as we weren’t eating eggs fried in bacon grease for breakfast every morning, the processed food would take care of our nutritional needs just fine.

It’s certainly convenient to refer to the “food industry” as though there has been one guy in a suit running the whole show for the past forty years, pushing the highly processed food on an unsuspecting public. But when I reflect on food culture and what’s wrong with it, I can’t help thinking of my upbringing, and wondering if maybe the foodies have glossed over first causes.

Consider this: My parents generation was the first in memory that didn’t stand a chance of prospering without two incomes. Almost at the same historical moment that having a career became an option for all women, it became necessary for both parents to work in order to get by. And the food has been mostly crap ever since. If there are dark forces at work here, it has to do with more than just the food industry. Somewhere along the line families saw their workload doubled—without a corresponding increase in wealth and happiness. Perhaps that’s a better explanation for the modern diet.