memes

Europe has lots of its own spices and historically made very heavy use of them, particularly things that can just be grown in gardens or foraged from the woods. It's more that the traditional culinary knowledge was gradually annihilated over the past two hundred years or so (for a variety of reasons including urbanization) and now even something like "growing a few plants to season food with" is a niche thing that only enthusiasts who are passionate about cooking do instead of just the expected normal thing for most of the population to do.

I'd probably attribute the death blow to war rationing, fast food slop, and frozen ready made food, and it's probably down to cheap fat and sugar meaning the cheapest way to mass produce ready made slop was making it bland but greasy and overly sweet. But that's also mimicking historical signs of wealth in European cooking, where rich people just stuffed their faces with the fattiest foods dripping with expensive sugars because those were all expensive luxuries, while the European poor were left seasoning stews with domestically grown herbs, garlic, and onions. There's probably an interesting investigation to be made of how culinary trends went with industrialization in periphery countries and what was preserved or lost there vs what was preserved or lost in European countries, but I don't have any knowledge in that area. Maybe later industrialization went faster and preserved more existing culinary culture, while slow industrialization annihilated it as large swathes of the population were removed from domestic sources of spices and there were no good replacements available?