I firmly believe most nostalgia for the glorious past is delusional thinking. I used to write a magazine column in which, each month, I would research just how horrible the previous centuries were—disease-ridden, dangerous, cruel, racist, sexist, smelly, superstitious, and poisonous. I wrote about food, but also childrearing (opium lozenges to calm kids), clothes (tiny-waisted corsets that deformed women’s bodies), and jobs (nightmen, the eighteenth-century workers who would haul manure from houses).
