We had a perfectly good cuisine. Look at cookbooks prior to about 1970.
What we did was quit teaching home-ec. And the moms that would have passed on that knowledge were too tired when they got home from work to cook. So the kids never learned how. Dinner was a TV dinner or pizza.
Now 20yr old girls can’t, largely, even boil water.
I disagree. I took home ec, and they taught us how to put ketchup and cheese on an Engllish muffin and call it pizza. And how to decorate a hanger.
I grew up with all stay at home moms - it was considered very odd indeed that my mother had a job - and the food they made was awful. My mother’s was the best -not that she was a great cook, but we had lived in France, and she had learned some basic principles: she didn’t use any packaged anything. No soda. No candy. No packaged bread, or desserts.
Actually, I need to modify that statement - I lived in an unusual international community, with many people who wrked at the U.N., and the mothers of the kids from foreign countries - especially India - made terrific food.