From what I've read on culinary history, traditional foods would have been spiced heavily at the time just with local herbs and things that are absolutely everywhere on the planet like garlic and onions. Blandness is a much more recent problem caused by war rationing and mass produced processed/ready made foods that pretty much annihilated traditional cooking knowledge and warped the public's tastes around the blandest slop possible.
Historically people would find basically any way possible to make food taste better or at least more interesting within the limits of their environment, and it's only relatively recently that "idk just throw more salt, sugar, and fat on it and that's all the flavor the slop needs" became the culturally dominant culinary theory.
Yeah, though I've read that it's also true for the UK. I speculated in another comment that it could be from how urbanization and industrialization went in Europe, where people were displaced from traditional sources of spices and thrown into an environment where there weren't really alternatives/replacements available, and the traditions have just further atrophied and been annihilated over the generations since with fast food and ready-made foods in stores catering to those atrophied tastes and just stacking more salt, sugar, and fat into things instead of going for flavor. In other places urbanization and industrialization were more abrupt and happened in a context where spice production was already industrialized, so tastes remained largely the same and their respective fast food and prepackaged food at least tried to mimic that to some extent.
I also can't help but assume that ludicrously cheap meat was also a big factor in food becoming blander in the US, at least, because it was an excuse to be lazy and not learn to cook when someone could just throw a cheap piece of beef in a pan with maybe some salt at the most, then douse it in red corn syrup that maybe had a detectable bit of vinegar in it, and it would be palatable enough to eat even if it was bland and mediocre.
From what I've read on culinary history, traditional foods would have been spiced heavily at the time just with local herbs and things that are absolutely everywhere on the planet like garlic and onions. Blandness is a much more recent problem caused by war rationing and mass produced processed/ready made foods that pretty much annihilated traditional cooking knowledge and warped the public's tastes around the blandest slop possible.
Historically people would find basically any way possible to make food taste better or at least more interesting within the limits of their environment, and it's only relatively recently that "idk just throw more salt, sugar, and fat on it and that's all the flavor the slop needs" became the culturally dominant culinary theory.
I mean sure, I do agree. But that's more an issue in all the western world, than specifically the UK.
Yeah, though I've read that it's also true for the UK. I speculated in another comment that it could be from how urbanization and industrialization went in Europe, where people were displaced from traditional sources of spices and thrown into an environment where there weren't really alternatives/replacements available, and the traditions have just further atrophied and been annihilated over the generations since with fast food and ready-made foods in stores catering to those atrophied tastes and just stacking more salt, sugar, and fat into things instead of going for flavor. In other places urbanization and industrialization were more abrupt and happened in a context where spice production was already industrialized, so tastes remained largely the same and their respective fast food and prepackaged food at least tried to mimic that to some extent.
I also can't help but assume that ludicrously cheap meat was also a big factor in food becoming blander in the US, at least, because it was an excuse to be lazy and not learn to cook when someone could just throw a cheap piece of beef in a pan with maybe some salt at the most, then douse it in red corn syrup that maybe had a detectable bit of vinegar in it, and it would be palatable enough to eat even if it was bland and mediocre.