Was it this, or was it that your mother/grandmother was a great cook? I hear a lot of older people talk about how awful their food was, limited ingredients, everything was boiled...
Food also probably tastes better when you're actually hungry, and not able to Doordash whatever you want to eat at any time of day.
If I get red cherries in winter from Chile, they are not as good as the ones from eastern Washington in the summer. Local seasonal fruit in WA is amazing (cherries, peaches, apples, now is pear season)
I appreciate how food tastes, and cherries in the winter are expensive and tasteless. Summer cherries are the complete opposite, specially if you live in a state where they produce them locally. In WA they invented their own hybrid cherry, the Rainier, which is also really good but you can only get during a short period of time.