What Happened to Real Food?

No man desires drink only, but good drink,

or food only, but good food;

For good is the universal object of desire.

Plato, ‘The Republic’

Everyone is aware that each distinct region on Earth has their own distinct cuisine, influenced & developed over centuries due to what crops & livestock are native to the region, what trade links the region has, colonisation & resulting export of culture, and local traditions.

Many of the dishes we consider to be cultural staples today have only come into being in their current form in the past century or two, but they have been developing towards this point for much longer. 

It is strange and somewhat disconcerting, then, that in an era such as our own, which is characterised by a high sharing of culture and knowledge than any time prior in human history, are the traditions of cooking in local cuisines going extinct.

A large part of this is due to the industrial & technological revolutions of the past century, which have given rise to many such things that hinder the ability of the individual to be entirely local with their consumption: international trade; the refrigerator; fast food; etc

The problem began several generations ago, in Western nations, as most problems do begin. With a focus on longer working hours and the commercialisation of pre-packaged “food” products, there was little incentive for families to make meals from scratch any more.

This led to the children of such families not learning these cooking skills either, not only because a working family has little time to teach children such things, but because of the normalisation of the view that all children will need to know is taught in formal education.

As time progressed, in metropolitan regions in particular, the tradition of food began to die out, being replaced with other more shallow forms of nourishment such as “convenience”.



FOLLOW FOR PART 2 SOON!