but also I think there's just been a general improvement in availability of ingredients. It used to be functionally impossible to get olive oil or whole bean coffee in most of the US unless you either lived in a place with immigrant grocery stores or ordered them from a mail-order catalog

I can buy good Korean instant ramyun in what's functionally the UK equivalent of Big Lots. It blows my mind.

Yeah when I was a kid the only ramen you could get was Maruchan and they didn't sell any of the spicy versions in the US. By contrast i can get the very hot Korean ones here in basically any grocery store, even in no spice having Switzerland. It was NOT the case when I lived in France 20 years ago

This is a good point. It’s easier to learn how to cook now as well and celebrity chefs have made cooking sexier for lack of a better word

People are into it now! Sometimes you get abysmal creations but sometimes it's also really good. There are only a few ingredients here where I have to order them online or go to a specialty shop. when we lived in Germany in the '90s it took my mom *years* to find a single shop that sold black beans