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April 12, 2017 1:37 PM

What used to be considered common or low quality that's now considered a luxury?

I was chatting with coworkers at lunch and one of them talked about how lobster used to be so common that it was served to servants. Sometimes even servants would refuse to eat it, it was considered so low-quality. Another coworker mentioned that oxtail used to be much cheaper than it is today.

That made me curious--what other things used to be considered "for the lower class"/lower-quality and are now far more expensive/considered luxury items/"for the upper class"? This can be food, objects, or activities.

posted by sprezzy to Grab Bag (94 answers total)

Oysters.
posted by Catseye at 1:39 PM on April 12, 2017 [16 favorites]

skirt steak, flank steak
posted by leahwrenn at 1:41 PM on April 12, 2017 [5 favorites]

A suntan
posted by KateViolet at 1:42 PM on April 12, 2017 [32 favorites]

8 hour working days, with a decent quantity of unspoiled vacation time.
posted by JoeZydeco at 1:43 PM on April 12, 2017 [18 favorites]

Mod note: One comment deleted; please don't use the edit function to add or change content, just make a second comment and flag your previous one for deletion.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 1:44 PM on April 12, 2017 [3 favorites]

Liver, brains and other 'weird' parts of an animal are now (in the West, don't know about everywhere) only likely to be served at more expensive restaurants.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 1:45 PM on April 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

Caviar
posted by bifter at 1:45 PM on April 12, 2017

Owning and riding horses.
posted by furnace.heart at 1:46 PM on April 12, 2017 [6 favorites]

Jeans.
posted by Cold Lurkey at 1:47 PM on April 12, 2017 [6 favorites]

Denim jeans.

(though they never left the 'lower classes')
posted by Kabanos at 1:47 PM on April 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

Kale!
posted by oceanjesse at 1:50 PM on April 12, 2017 [4 favorites]

shitty low quality beer like PBR isn't a luxury, but it's now a marker of a "cool" subculture rather than the crap your blue-collar dad drank while watching football games
posted by AFABulous at 1:51 PM on April 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

Good customer service in department stores.
posted by eeek at 1:51 PM on April 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

Bones (for broth).
posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 1:52 PM on April 12, 2017 [5 favorites]

Horse-drawn carriages and horse riding in general
posted by AFABulous at 1:54 PM on April 12, 2017

Polenta
posted by jalexei at 1:54 PM on April 12, 2017 [2 favorites]

a "pad"/place to live in the city or urban area
posted by strelitzia at 1:57 PM on April 12, 2017

Servants. Back a while, say pre-WWI, any family with a good income would have a cook, and maybe someone to help with cleaning and laundry. Pre-vacuum cleaners and washing machines, ordinary household tasks were more than the wife (sorry ladies) could get done.
posted by SemiSalt at 1:57 PM on April 12, 2017 [11 favorites]

Pet chickens for fresh eggs
posted by invisible ink at 1:58 PM on April 12, 2017 [3 favorites]

Salmon: it was so plentiful and cheap that some apprentice agreements in 17th century London specified that salmon should not be served more than 3 times each week.
posted by anadem at 1:58 PM on April 12, 2017 [8 favorites]

Servants. On preview, SemiSalt beat me to it, and it goes along with the customer service eeek mentioned, but I'll add this: As technology progresses, most products and services become less expensive, but those that require a fixed or near-fixed amount of labor become relatively more expensive; this is called Baumol's effect. The standard example is that a one-hour performance by a string quartet takes four hours of labor, the same as it always did.

Agatha Christie supposedly said she never thought she would ever be wealthy enough to own a car - nor so poor that she wouldn't have servants.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 1:59 PM on April 12, 2017 [26 favorites]

Clothes that require ironing.
posted by SemiSalt at 2:00 PM on April 12, 2017 [3 favorites]

Homemakers and full time moms.

Single income families.
posted by Michele in California at 2:01 PM on April 12, 2017 [7 favorites]

People used to knit/sew clothing because it was cheaper than buying store-bought clothing. Today, it's usually done as a hobby and costs much more than just buying the thing at a store, even if you don't count the value of your time spent. Admittedly, I don't sew myself but I do knit and yarn's certainly not cheap.
posted by eeek at 2:06 PM on April 12, 2017 [19 favorites]

Whole grain bread, especially "rustic" loaves
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 2:06 PM on April 12, 2017 [21 favorites]

My parents tell me that when they were growing up (In Shanghai) there used to be a class of tailor that would repair clothing by weaving new threads into the existing fabric. Like darning a sock, but good enough for outerwear. The relative prices of labor and cloth have now made this technique uneconomical.
posted by d. z. wang at 2:09 PM on April 12, 2017 [8 favorites]

Living in an old warehouse
posted by theodolite at 2:10 PM on April 12, 2017 [10 favorites]

Not sure if this is quite what you're looking for, but tiny houses are basically upscale trailers.
posted by FencingGal at 2:12 PM on April 12, 2017 [30 favorites]

In the last 150 or so years : Cosmetics. They were viewed as very low class during the victorian era, anything other than tinted lip balm would've made you seem like a prostitute. Now, dramatic makeup is a status symbol and luxury brands offer insane ranges of shades and products.
posted by InkDrinker at 2:23 PM on April 12, 2017 [3 favorites]

Home canning of pickles, jams, and other preserves.
posted by bilabial at 2:24 PM on April 12, 2017 [4 favorites]

Lobster!

Home sewing, in that materials are much more expensive now and women working outside of the home have less time. Besides, it's not strictly necessary to sew at home now with ready-to-wear clothes.
posted by jgirl at 2:32 PM on April 12, 2017 [4 favorites]

Living on the water. Used to be for schulbs who caught fish for a living.
posted by Melismata at 2:33 PM on April 12, 2017 [6 favorites]

Similarly to sewing in general, quilting was once a frugal way to use up scraps, but now people buy new fabric, and it's a very expensive hobby.
posted by FencingGal at 2:34 PM on April 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

A garden.
posted by ridgerunner at 2:36 PM on April 12, 2017

Oxtail.
posted by Ragged Richard at 2:37 PM on April 12, 2017

Lobster!

Yes; I heard the same thing as mentioned above for salmon - there were laws limiting how often you could feed it to your indentured servants.
posted by thelonius at 2:38 PM on April 12, 2017

fresh vegetables grown without pesticides

whole-grain bread
posted by amtho at 2:38 PM on April 12, 2017

Coal fires. This was the norm for heating a standard, working-class house where I grew up in the 1970's, whereas the middle classes would have mod cons like central heating. Now coal is what you have in your fancypants weekend house in the country.
posted by Jabberwocky at 2:40 PM on April 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

From what I understand, Bourbon fits this category. Especially certain types of Bourbon. Thing like Old Granddad now have bonded bottles that sell for 40 bucks a pop, and would have been comparatively around 20 or so before the boom of the past 10 years. That's to say nothing of all the small batch labels that typically sell like 60 dollars per comparable bottle. Your average liquor snob drink would likely be (depending on the time) vodka, gin, tequila or rum - if it was a whiskey, then probably scotch. That's been supplanted (but may be subsiding) by being a bourbon snob, and the price tags to match. For example, one of the most sought after bottles is Papper Van Winkel, which before the boom was going for like 40 bucks or something ridiculous. That same bottle is probably hundreds of dollars currently.

If you watch older media you'll see that bourbon is often a signifier of a lower class drunkard, but that drunkard would need to change brands with today's marketplace.
posted by codacorolla at 2:43 PM on April 12, 2017 [4 favorites]

In some pricey areas, having more children
posted by sestaaak at 2:47 PM on April 12, 2017 [8 favorites]

Living in your own one-bedroom apartment is considered a luxury to me and a lot of my peers. Everyone I know lives with a roommate or an SO; if someone lives alone: "oooooh, lucky."
posted by windbox at 2:49 PM on April 12, 2017 [3 favorites]

Foraged anything.
posted by HotToddy at 2:52 PM on April 12, 2017 [3 favorites]

For some, "minimalism": owning a curated collection of high quality belongings vs. having to hang onto anything that could be useful one day because you can't afford to repurchase it.
posted by eeek at 3:00 PM on April 12, 2017 [21 favorites]

Durable home appliances - you can find (e.g.) vacuum cleaners from the 1950s that still function fine but anything of the same quality now is expensive. Most things are cheap plastic.
posted by AFABulous at 3:05 PM on April 12, 2017 [4 favorites]

Stay-at-home moms
posted by vunder at 3:09 PM on April 12, 2017 [7 favorites]

Whole grain bread, especially "rustic" loaves

My grandmother worked as a baker from the 1940s through the 1970s and the thought of her making, much less selling, anything than a very fancy loaf of the whitest white bread is laughable. It would have been like handing someone cardboard when they asked for printer paper. I think about this often, since I haven't baked, bought, or eaten white bread in probably 20 years. Times can change quickly!
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 3:10 PM on April 12, 2017 [5 favorites]

I spent five years living in Greece in the mid-1990s, and the 'older' generation (anyone aged 50+) looked wildly askance at anyone swimming in the sea. I don't know why, but it was considered very infra dig, and I've since learnt that this was a Mediterranean-wide phenomenon. O tempore o mores!
posted by HandfulOfDust at 3:11 PM on April 12, 2017 [6 favorites]

Any fresh food skirts the line of luxury or not luxury depending on location and season, and the dividing line is sometimes less about then and now than it is about there and here.

All the seafoods mentioned - oysters, lobster, salmon - were a glut on their local market. Anybody in New England could catch more lobsters than any sane person would have time to shell and eat, but that doesn't make them any less scarce elsewhere. Without the global economy that introduces a local item to a new area, it's not that lobsters in 1800 weren't a luxury in New Mexico, it's that they didn't have them. And then we had ice produced in freezers, and airplanes to transport lobsters all over the world, and they became a luxury item because rich people could have them outside of New England. Did they then automatically become a luxury item in New England? Arguably no. They're not common and low-class by any means, but the locals still consider them more a summer backyard food than a formal dinner food.

Which leads into my point - consider the rambutan. Is it a luxury just because they're hard to find in the USA? Someone in Malaysia would have said they were boring and common because they could buy giant sacks of them at the local market, but it doesn't cross the threshold of your question until local growers decide they'd rather export than sell locally.

Or the fresh juicy ripe peach - that is a total luxury. But in late July in rural Georgia, it is easy to have more ripe juicy peaches than you know what to do with. Or especially, it used to be, back when a larger percentage of people had their own peach trees. Common! But even then it was still only in July, so a peach in September would arguably have been a luxury.

It's complicated, that's what I'm trying to say.
posted by aimedwander at 3:11 PM on April 12, 2017 [18 favorites]

Cigars.
posted by fixedgear at 3:12 PM on April 12, 2017

Merino wool every day clothing, for adults or kids.
posted by BostonTerrier at 3:17 PM on April 12, 2017 [2 favorites]

Veal. It used to be a byproduct of the dairy industry. (I mean, it was still meat, so not super cheap, but it was much cheaper as meat than it is now).
posted by LizardBreath at 3:21 PM on April 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

Farm-to-table meals.
Locavorism.
Vegetarianism.
posted by vunder at 3:27 PM on April 12, 2017 [2 favorites]

hand-made furniture, clothing, accessories, home features.
posted by vunder at 3:29 PM on April 12, 2017 [2 favorites]

backyard chickens
posted by vunder at 3:30 PM on April 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

Obesity.

I remember a history teacher once telling us where the "beefeaters" in London got their name... they were fed lots of beef, therefore burlier and more able to defend the Tower of London, etc.

Overweight-ness used to be a luxury; it meant you had plenty of food to eat. Today, it's more often than not a symptom of living off cheap, processed (junk) food instead of real, whole foods.
posted by ToucanDoug at 3:38 PM on April 12, 2017 [13 favorites]

Seconding salmon, my Dad had said when he was a kid it was so cheap they fed it to the cats.
posted by mermayd at 3:42 PM on April 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

Add swordfish to the list of fish that once were cheap and now are dear.
posted by tomboko at 3:47 PM on April 12, 2017

If anyone is interested in going more in depth into white bread versus wheat and the racist overtones of what bread you bought at what period (early 20th century to the near present), I read an interesting book called "White Bread: A Social History of the Store-bought Loaf" by Aaron Bobrow-Strain that is about this.
posted by Rufous-headed Towhee heehee at 4:00 PM on April 12, 2017 [7 favorites]

Breastfeeding.

Carrying babies in some kind of contraption on the body. When my oldest son, now 47, was a baby they were just starting to make baby backpack sort of things. I took him to see my grandmother wearing my baby on my back and she just about had a heart attack. She insisted that only "peasants" -why she used that word is a mystery as she was born and raised in the US midwest- carried their babies around like that. She promptly went out and bought me a stroller which was nowhere near as convenient.
posted by mareli at 4:07 PM on April 12, 2017 [18 favorites]

Penthouse apartments. Before elevators and fire safety codes, the higher up you were in a building, the worse off.
posted by Rock Steady at 4:09 PM on April 12, 2017 [5 favorites]

Mareli's point about breastfeeding and what is now called "baby wearing" could proabably be applied to everything about attachment parenting.
posted by vunder at 4:18 PM on April 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

Game meats, except perhaps venison, which is pretty widely eaten in season by the people who actually hunted for it.
posted by jgirl at 4:18 PM on April 12, 2017 [3 favorites]

Anything now thought of as "hipster" past-times. I mentioned in the gardening app FPP about how local ordinances forbidding backyard chickens vary wildly depending on the hipness (or striving towards hipness) of the municipality. In the city, we can have them, but out in many of the suburbs it's still considered something only undesirable, poor people do, and thus is forbidden. You have to go way, way out into legit farmland for it to become okay again.
posted by soren_lorensen at 5:39 PM on April 12, 2017 [4 favorites]

Absinthe -- originally the herbs were to mask the taste of cheap gin / other spirits

Brown sugar & unbleached flour - the cost of the refinement processes and the association of white with purity meant that less processed staples were looked down upon by the upwardly-mobile middle class.

Brown eggs -- same reasoning as above, but with no actual change to the content of the food. They just bred hens that laid white eggs instead of brown.

Buying food directly from farmers / growing your own food -- now a trendy way to eat local, in the past importing as much of your food from either overseas or from food canning companies was only for the posh

Gelatin in all forms (aspics, blancmage, etc) -- first gained popularity in the 1920s among the upper classes who were the only ones to have access to enough meat bones to make it, with the development of Jello it became the food of the common people. With the recent craze for artisanal cooking and traditional methods of preparation, aspics are found on high-end menus once again.
posted by ananci at 5:42 PM on April 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

Vintage fashion. Until the 1960s there was a serious stigma to wearing used clothing, and it really didn't become mainstream until the 90s.
posted by veery at 5:48 PM on April 12, 2017 [5 favorites]

Lamb. Crazy expensive now.
posted by SyraCarol at 6:03 PM on April 12, 2017 [2 favorites]

I read somewhere that quinoa was originally fed to livestock, and only the very poor ate it themselves.
posted by dogmom at 6:38 PM on April 12, 2017

My mother told me that when she was growing up in India non standard grains like millets and barley were considered poor people food. Polished white rice was the most fashionable. Now it's the opposite and everyone's crazy about all the unusual grains and the more unrefined the better.
posted by peacheater at 6:39 PM on April 12, 2017

Sushi. It was invented in the Edo Period (originally with fermented rice, rather than vinegared) as a way to preserve fish and sold by street vendors.
posted by rivtintin at 6:47 PM on April 12, 2017

Not owning a car/being able to walk to work

Lobster (as you mentioned)

Macaroni and cheese in some circles, especially when it's gourmet

Being thin

Bone broth
posted by floweredfish at 7:01 PM on April 12, 2017

Horses were never low class or for common people! Nice horseflesh has always been a marker of wealth.
posted by fshgrl at 7:23 PM on April 12, 2017 [6 favorites]

Agreed, poor people in the past (thinking mainly pre-Civil War here) aspired to owning horses, even draft horses. It wasn't common. Horses were for the prosperous. Oxen, mules, were for the less prosperous farmers and haulers. Many just wished they had burden animals.
posted by Miko at 7:30 PM on April 12, 2017

Plays. Daily newspaper delivery. Adequate customer service. Bespoke clothing. Metafilter (I mean, we're all serious and member-supported now, like public radio and the Met).
posted by killdevil at 7:32 PM on April 12, 2017

Cooking with Lard.
posted by frecklefaerie at 7:37 PM on April 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

Truffles.
Diamonds were not sought after in engagement rings until De Beers stepped in; artificial scarcity creates high prices.
Cod liver oil supplements, now-gourmet cooking oils, and sea salt have also skyrocketed in price, but I doubt cartels are involved.
posted by Iris Gambol at 7:37 PM on April 12, 2017 [2 favorites]

Whole bean coffee, as opposed to ground coffee.
Doctors who make house calls.
posted by Ideefixe at 7:38 PM on April 12, 2017

Oh, and at one point the upper classes used to have rotten teeth due to high sugar consumption, while the working classes had relatively white teeth and fewer caries.
posted by Iris Gambol at 7:47 PM on April 12, 2017 [2 favorites]

Keeping chickens, goats, lambs and bees. My grandparents actually kept lambs in their suburban yard!! And they were not $$$.
posted by Toddles at 8:11 PM on April 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

Fast food served on ceramic and glass - or wrapped in newspaper - instead of paper and plastic.

The way we buy clothes today used to be for poorer/common people - "slops," cut in standard sizes and sold off the rack. Wealthier people always got custom-designed and cut ("bespoke") clothes - poorer people either made their own, had it made by a family member or cheap tailor, or bought "slops" off the rack, mass manufactured in generic sizing. Now, that's the most common way we buy clothes, but that's only because the lower-class standards for fit became everybody's standards - that is, not that good a fit at all.
posted by Miko at 8:14 PM on April 12, 2017 [6 favorites]

Living in the city vs. suburb.
posted by Toddles at 8:15 PM on April 12, 2017 [4 favorites]

The Zoo, Natural History Museum, Art Museum and Botanic Gardens.
When I was a kid and even into College these were all free, at least in Denver Colorado. Now it's too expensive to just drop in for a few hours and that's if you can find a parking spot.
posted by BoscosMom at 8:36 PM on April 12, 2017 [3 favorites]

Once common, now so expensive that most people don't have it? Furniture, cabinets, and flooring made out of solid wood. Pillows made of cotton or wool instead of polyurethane foam.
posted by salvia at 8:50 PM on April 12, 2017 [6 favorites]

When I was a kid in New Zealand, chicken, fish and pork were for fancy occasions. Beef and lamb were cheap and plentiful (and usually home-killed by a neighbour). It's the other way around now, because I guess NZ exports so much of its red meat.

Pork belly was like this until about five or six years ago - used to be super cheap (sometimes you could get it free) and now it's one of the most expensive cuts.
posted by lollusc at 9:46 PM on April 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

Bark on furniture. At one time it would have indicated home made furniture, pretty much all furniture produced by cabinet/furniture makers wouldn't have any bark or even wane; now it's something you pay extra for and usually from artisans who specialize in producing it.

HandfulOfDust: "I spent five years living in Greece in the mid-1990s, and the 'older' generation (anyone aged 50+) looked wildly askance at anyone swimming in the sea. I don't know why, but it was considered very infra dig, and I've since learnt that this was a Mediterranean-wide phenomenon. O tempore o mores!"

I speculate the volume of untreated sewage being dumped into local waters has a strong correlation with the number of people not wanting to swim in those waters.
posted by Mitheral at 10:31 PM on April 12, 2017 [3 favorites]

Natural fibre clothing. I'm only early 40s but remember them being standard in most chain stores well into the 90s. Now it's almost impossible to find clothes on the high street that aren't mostly polyester/viscose and cotton, wool etc are for expensive online shops.
posted by cardinalandcrow at 2:09 AM on April 13, 2017 [4 favorites]

Having babies at home/natural birth/hiring a midwife.
posted by veery at 6:37 AM on April 13, 2017 [3 favorites]

Not replacing your clothing all the time. Used to be that you invested in buying a coat and wore it for years, but pretty well everyone had a winter coat - now lots of people just get by with a think little jacket, and have to replace it pretty well every year. Back in the day that coat was durable. It went through ten years with you, trimmed up with astrakan around year five, then passed on to your sister and given a rabbit fur collar before being handed on to someone else around eight years later, still going strong. You have to be really rich to buy a coat of that quality now.

Not buying things on credit. Used to be poor people didn't have credit (except at the pawn shop) so they paid cash. Only rich people had credit. Poor people had to save up for things. Now poor people use credit and never pay off their debts and rich people buy things outright to save on interest charges.

Clothing appropriate to the weather. : Do you remember back in the days when everyone in the family had rain boots and a rain coat and a rain hat? Now they might have an "all weather" hi-tech jacket that keps them nearly dry in wet weather, nearly warm in cold weather and not too sweaty in hot weather, but I bet you there is at least one person who just wears the same sneakers regardless of rain or snow.

Flowers. Yeah, like who here has fresh flowers twice a week? Remember that?

Clean good quality tap water.

Having kids. Notice how the birthrate has gone down? A lot of people have decided they can't afford them anymore.
posted by Jane the Brown at 9:14 AM on April 13, 2017 [4 favorites]

shitty low quality beer like PBR isn't a luxury, but it's now a marker of a "cool" subculture rather than the crap your blue-collar dad drank while watching football games

Is that still true? I have the impression that the PBR=cool thing was a fad from about 2010 that's pretty much over now.
posted by cosmic.osmo at 9:25 AM on April 13, 2017 [1 favorite]

tomatoes right off the vine, especially ones with flavor. maybe never looked way down on, but hardly valued.
posted by acm at 10:25 AM on April 13, 2017 [1 favorite]

Cosleeping. Not that it costs more now, but it still plays out on class lines: the wealthy attachment parenting who still have a crib for naps, of course, versus sleeping together because you have one room or one bed.
posted by hapaxes.legomenon at 4:44 PM on April 13, 2017

Wood floors. It used to mean you couldn't afford carpets, now it's a mark of money.
posted by fshgrl at 8:46 PM on April 13, 2017

I live in Asia (not in India though) and yes, as peacheater says for older people eating brown rice was a sign of poverty and deprivation compared to polished white rice. Older people preferred the fluffy texture of white rice to the chewiness of unrefined. Nowadays, red/brown/black rice is popular for health and nutrition reasons and is more expensive than white because apparently eating too much white rice leads to diabetes.
posted by whitelotus at 1:00 AM on April 14, 2017

Eyeglasses were once seen as specialist equipment for those working in the textile industries and certainly not appropriate or polite for everyday wear outside the workshop.
posted by Sonny Jim at 1:41 AM on April 14, 2017 [1 favorite]

Kale is still considered food fit only for livestock in France, so hard for Bobos and expats to get their green juice and kale for salads.
posted by lettezilla at 6:08 AM on April 14, 2017