It's a popular factoid on tumblr that "in the past, most people ate street food rather than preparing their meals every day." This is supposed to reassure people that it's true that it's hard to cook every single goddamn day, and you shouldn't feel bad for ordering out.
This, of course, is kind of ridiculous if you think about it for a few seconds: even if we start counting from, say, ancient Mesopotamian Uruk, usually recognized as the oldest city, it was 2007 when the world's urban population surpassed the world's rural population. Throughout history, most people did not live in a setting when restaurants or street food made sense.
This is because "they went out to eat fast food" is a more palatable answer than the truth: throughout history, work was done by wives, children, servants, and slaves.
Ultimately, that is the answer. The people you learn about - the Roman senators, the Renaissance artists, the Aztec emperors, the ancient philosophers, the nineteenth century scholars - had the drudge work of life being done by their wives, their children, servants, or slaves. Even grad students spending all summer in the field and then writing their doctoral dissertations in the 1970s usually had their wives doing most of the work for them - and in fact, grad students to this day have workloads calibrated to the assumption you have a live-in housewife doing all your cooking and cleaning for you! It's not good!
(The other answer is that for a lot of people, for a lot of history, they owned maybe three outfits, and they ate the same thing every day. If you lived in The Past odds were good that 90% of your meals consisted of the staple grain of your region in a pot that could be left simmering over the fire for hours while you did other work.)
There's no easy answer for a world that believes in equality. A world that believes that whole classes of people shouldn't actually deserve to get relegated to maintenance work so that a few individuals can be brilliant. Because the answer in the past was wives, children, servants, and slaves. We need a better answer for the future.
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