Culinary Modernism: Making Food Better
People can doubt a lot about what is the most important thing in their life. It can be family, career, money, glory etc., but most of them, for sure, include health in that list. Healthy lifestyle depends on many factors and demands a lot of time and sacrifices; and there is always a direct connection between the diet one chooses and his/her health. It is a hard task to make food delicious, healthy, long-preserved and not very expensive at the same time.
Rachel Lauden has recently presented an exhaustive research “A Plea for Culinary Modernism: Why We Should Love Modern, Fast, Processed Food” on culinary traditions around the world and revealed the origin of some traditional dishes of some nations. The historian states that food has always meant a lot to people; not all kinds of unprocessed and fresh products are really good for people, before the industrialization of food it was a hard and exhausting process to cook something edible, and that the era of culinary modernism can actually completely change the outlook of modern food.
Food not only gives people energy but also supplies their bodies with necessary vitamins and minerals to keep them able to live and function. Since the prehistoric times, when people partly behaved as animals, searching some food was one of their main activities and concerns. They struggled to procure food, devised ways of cooking it in the most applicable way. For the farmers, who took the most active part in making products, for a long time food meant something they had to fight for. Lauden claims that most of country citizens were obliged to spend most of their money on taxes and they couldn’t afford to eat a lot and tasty (294, l. 16) and for those people any kind of products they could get to feed their families and themselves was precious. They also relied on the weather (296), so in case there were poor weather conditions, there were no harvest and that meant starvation. Traditionally, in many countries people used to greet their guests with the best and the most delicious dishes. If one person shares bread with another one that means they trust and respect each other and enjoy each other’s company. Food interested people as some unknown animal, travellers and traders, who had a chance to travel to other countries, would always bring some products and cooking traditions from the places they had visited. In order to vary the local food with the foreign one people started looking for any ways to plant and breed products from other countries or resorted to expensive costs just to have a chance to drink black coffee as the French, the Dutch and the English did (293).
Gradually, the kind of food people used to eat became an indicator of a social status. The rich people even used to organize feasts and invited the poor just to have a …
