Most Europeans have one, max 2 cars per household. A fuckton of Europeans also go on holiday with their cars once or twice a year.
One car needs to work for most use cases. It’s fine if you have more cars than people in the house that one of them is a 100 mile range commuter, but a different kettle of fish if the same car needs to do an 800+ mile trip to the Mediterranean in summer and a 500 mile ski trip in winter.
The UK has some of the best produce in the world. What the average person at home does is of course something else but that’s no different in a lot of countries.
As someone mentioned rationing didn’t help the image but also the drabness of industrial canned food in the brown seventies. And people just forgot how to cook.