If you’ve ever sat with your family during the holidays and thought, “What exactly am I eating right now?” congratulations, you’ve lived through the American culinary evolution: from real butter and scratch-made traditions to … well … whatever the ’90s were doing. (If you know, you know.)
This all started because two of my clients — born decades apart, in two very different parts of the country — recently shared their beloved Christmas food memories with me. And let me tell you, the contrast was jarring. Beautiful. Horrifying. Insightful. All the things.
Exhibit A: Jane, born 1939 (the Era of Actual Food) in the northeast. Jane grew up in a time when “holiday cooking” didn’t mean tearing open a box. At 14, she was entrusted — entrusted! — with her family’s secret olive oil cake recipe. She said it wasn’t a real Christmas without it. Her holiday dinner? Creamed chipped beef on toast, mashed potatoes, homemade everything, real cream, real butter. Food that had ingredients you could pronounce.
I could practically smell the nostalgia (and the saturated fat, but the good kind — the kind humans survived on for thousands of years).
Exhibit B: Joan, born 1960 (the Era of “If It Exists, Put Jell-O In It”) in the south. Her food memories didn’t fully kick in until the mid-’70s, and let me tell you, America was experimenting. This was a time when someone, somewhere, decided a perfectly-fine baked ham desperately needed Ritz crackers and canned pineapple. And everyone else just said, “Yeah, absolutely, put that on the table.”
Her other holiday classic? A dessert literally named Better Than Robert Redford Cake. I’m not kidding. That was the actual name.
And then there was Jell-O. In everything. Savory, sweet, layered, molded, suspended — pick a food group, and someone had trapped it in gelatin. Homemade-but-not-homemade was the vibe – real food “enhanced” (term used loosely) by new chemical inventions promising convenience and flavor. Spoiler: They delivered neither.
Exhibit C: me, born 1983 and growing up in the ’90s, a culinary fever dream. Ah, the ’90s. The decade that boldly declared: “What if mashed potatoes came in a powder?”
Stuffing? Box.
Gravy? Packet.
Cookies? Pillsbury tube.
Someone in every family was always “on a diet,” which, lucky for them, was very convenient because the ’90s also gave us Olestra. Remember Olestra? The “miracle fat-free oil” with the charming warning label: “May cause anal leakage.”
A phrase that really captures the holiday spirit, don’t you think?
And now … the present-day body count. Here’s where I connect the dots (and where things stop being funny for just a second). As our food shifted from real to boxed, bagged, canned, powdered, artificially sweetened, hydrogenated, fortified-but-still-empty, our national health followed. The U.S. obesity rate has more than tripled since the 1960s and continues to rise each decade. Type 2 diabetes? Up. Metabolic disease? Up. Inflammation? Up. Gut issues? Up.
This isn’t a coincidence. Our bodies are designed for real food, not chemical science projects. The more processed the holiday table became, the more our bodies struggled to absorb nutrients, regulate blood sugar, manage inflammation and make sense of what, exactly, a “pig in a blanket” from a frozen box even is.
Our grandparents weren’t healthier because they were magical. They just ate food that was … food. So here’s my Christmas wish for you:
This year, whether you’re making Aunt Gerdy’s 7-layer dip, your cousin’s famous saltine-toffee-thing or your mom’s “don’t ask what’s in it” casserole, see if you can make it a little more real and a little less artificial.
Swap canned for fresh. Swap boxed for scratch. Swap “mystery ingredients” for ones your great-grandparents would recognize. And no, I’m not asking you to give up comfort food. I’m asking you to give it back its soul. Food should nourish you and taste good — without needing a chemical engineering degree to understand what’s in it.
I have absolute faith in you. Where there’s a will, there’s a way – especially in a kitchen filled with holiday spirit and real butter.
