America ate lard and cold cereal and paid a lot of money for it.

It’s hard to imagine many Americans begging to switch places with a 1915 gourmand. Food was not only less varied in 1915, but also considerably more expensive. The typical American spent one-third of his income on food 100 years ago, which is twice today’s share.

The early 20th century was a golden age of cold-cereal products—Corn Flakes, Quaker Puffed Rice and Puffed Wheat, and Shredded Wheat all came on the market between 1906 and 1912—but on the farm, people enjoyed a heartier meal of eggs and pancakes. Lunch at the office provided a logistical challenge, as in 1915, there existed no such thing as a plastic bag to keep a sandwich fresh. Instead, contemporary cookbooks called for keeping sandwiches moist by "wrapping [them] in a dry towel, covered with a towel wrung out of hot water.”

The average American ate roughly equivalent amounts of lard and chicken—11.5 pounds and 14 pounds, respectively, per year. One century later, the ratio has, blessedly, widened. Americans eat 57 pounds of chicken, compared to just 1.5 pounds of lard. But Americans, gluttons to their core, have replaced fat’s flavor with something even worse: Their sugar intake has jumped from 88 to 130 pounds in the last 100 years.

American home life was extremely crowded.

"The business of America is farming business," one might have said in 1915, but industrialization was slowly removing the “farming” part. America had one-third of its current population in 1915, and it was considerably more spread out. Half of all families lived in rural areas, or in towns with populations below 2,500.

But you wouldn't notice the relative sparseness if you just just stayed home. The average household was crowded, with more than four people, a figure which has fallen with each passing decade, and now resides just above 2.5 people. Loneliness was a financial impossibility, back then, as few could afford to live alone. Children remained under their parents’ roofs until they were married (at an average age of 21, for women). Practically no couples got divorced, and widows moved in with their adult children.

Owning was a rarity. In 1920, there were about four times as many renters as homeowners, whereas today, the homeownership rate is above 60 percent. Houses were cheaper, but buying was a relative hassle: Although the average value of a home was no more than $75,000 in today’s dollars, mortgages typically required a downpayment of about 50 percent.

Infants were both more abundant and more precarious. Women had more children—three, on average—to help on the farm in the old agrarian economy. But the more disquieting reason women had so many children was that children were likely to die: Ten percent of infants died in their first year, compared with one in every 168 births in the U.S. today. For this happy and dramatic improvement, mothers and fathers can thank the professionalization of baby-delivery. Giving birth at home in 1915 wasn’t merely normal; it was ubiquitous. In a major city like Pittsburgh, 87 percent of births happened outside of hospitals.