Talking 'bout My Generation

I recently came across an article—12 Boomer Cooking Habits People Are Ready To Ditch, According To Reddit—and, being a Boomer,* I naturally wanted to read it. As anyone will tell you—especially if that person was born after 1964—Boomers practically invented unjustifiably inflated egos. If we didn’t invent them, we certainly made them a less-hidden vice.

Anyway…

I found the article to be amusing, if slightly flawed. The author—a comedian/writer/playwright named Joe Thristino—comes from several generations of foodies (he is, after all, Italian—and there’s a possibility that his ancestors brought pizza to NYC). It’s only natural that, when not writing plays, he writes about food.

The flaw in the proverbial ointment—or fly in the proverbial soup—was his assertion that baby boomers actually liked the disgusting foods he listed.

We didn’t.

However, we grew up eating them because our parents—The Greatest Generation—preferred them. Things like: canned food, margarine, nothing spicy, and Jell-O salads with a god-awful conglomerate of things no one should ever eat.

In belittling his predecessors for the sake of comedy, he missed the fact that Baby Boomers wanted more from their food than their parents did. The Greatest Generation had grown up in The Depression—all they wanted was easy, plentiful food, preferably something that seemed modern. Boomers ( like Alice Waters, and the folks who ran Moosewood, in Ithaca) wanted none of that. Baby Boomers were the target market for Time-Life’s Foods of the World Series. Between 1968 and 1970, the books introduced the whole world’s cuisines to a generation that was starved for more-and-better. The multi-ethnic fresh food that Gen-Xers consider ordinary and proper—today—are the result of Baby Boomers’ rejection of their parents’ eating habits.

He was, however, definitely right about MSG: we did have an unwarranted phobia about MSG.

I don’t know how old Mr. Thristino is, but I’m guessing that he was born in the 1970s. One of his first successful plays was a nostalgic/sarcastic look at the 1990s. As Boomers love reminiscing about the 1960s, those who do the same for the 1990s are probably Gen-X. Every generation assumes that they are smarter, hipper, better-informed-about-everything than the millions of generations that preceded them—all the way back to the hairy inhabitants of what is now Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge.

Note: The Greatest Generation was the one of first to even be named—ages, like The Gilded Age, or the Age of Reason, had names, but not generations. No doubt, egotism—like entropy—tends to increase over time.

Besides, everyone was hopelessly boring, ignorant, out-of-it, uncool, until we came along.

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*My boomer generation credentials are impeccable: My parents, on their honeymoon (traveling from Cisco, Texas to San Francisco, on July 16, 1945—eighty-one years ago, today), had to wait for several hours as their train was stopped at the New Mexico border. They didn’t know it—at the time—but, that morning, in Los Alamos, the Atomic Age began with a bang. A very big bang. A couple of weeks later, in a Quonset Hut on the Mare Island Naval Base—news came that the city of Hiroshima had been evaporated by a single bomb.

July 16, 1945, over Alamogordo, New Mexico.

August Sixth

I was conceived
in the cool San Franciscan night,

(distant whistle of fire-storms,
inaudible,
as sea-birds keen
in the approaching fog)

In the morning,
onshore breezes float a headline over the windowsill,
and across my mother’s breakfast table

(isn’t it queer, she thinks,
the papers making such a fuss,
over just one bomb,
a single bomb,
dropped on an unknown Japanese city)

“Do you want some more coffee, Jack?”

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