[saalweachter]

Food preservation and international commerce have eliminated seasonal diets. All of our fruits and vegetables used to be largely seasonal with only a handful that could be kept edible in cellars before canning. Meats, dairy and eggs too had seasonal ebbs and flows -- you'd slaughter your hogs in the fall as their forage ran out, your cows might dry up, your chickens probably stopped laying. Winter diets would grow steadily more monotonous and you might spend a few weeks going hungry.

The range of our diet had also globalized. Potatoes are now a staple worldwide, and tomatoes flavor dishes around the world from where they were developed. Spices aren't very exotic, even if some of us like our food plain.

And salt! Salt had gone from a spice and vital preservative with a value comparable to hard currency to something we throw on roads in the winter.