That’s an exceptionally persuasive response.

The original post, admittedly, gave me the giggles. I read it shortly after returning home from a restaurant that opened in 1612 and, unfortunately, never bothered to update the menu. Granted, in 1612, some neighborhoods were ringed with farmland and there were livestock stables and barns on the real estate that chain supermarkets and boutiques now occupy (a particularly trendy area still retains a name that means Barn District). Even so, the tradition of commodifying food (and the separate matter of dining in public) is deeply rooted in times long before the European invasion of America.

I’d add that for any person whose enterprise has ever been something other than subsistence farming, food is fundamentally a commodity by default, which puts the cultural shift to which Lisa refers somewhere around the Bronze Age. And likely earlier; the introduction of currency (or that supposedly “new thing called a ‘wage’) didn’t exactly invent the concept of trading inedible-but-desirable items for food.

Anthropologists where you at!

A lot of the high calorie staples of restaurants are cheap to mass produce, but a huge hassle to make from scratch at home. How often would you eat French fries if you had to make them yourself from raw potatoes? Probably not more than once a week, even if you love fries.

I haven’t been able to find an explanation for those missing data points either here or at the referenced source, either.

Over time, the ability to afford such a thing on a more regular basis has gradually expanded to more and more people.

If we’re talking about a timespan of the last 150 years, this is definitely an accurate statement. However, the timeframe of this graphic is 1974-1994. Is it really true that an increasingly greater proportion of people became able to afford eating out during this timespan?