Food As “Entertainment”

As the writer of three cookbooks, there are times when I wonder who their readers are. I have a library of mostly battered cookbooks some 50 strong, mercilessly whittled down from several hundred.

Those themselves were of necessity culled monthly in the days when, as a food writer for a global news agency, I was sent books almost daily. They were delivered by the long-suffering mailman, staggering up the steps under their weight.

My mother, a remarkable cook, taught herself solely from Elizabeth David’s “A Book of Mediterranean Food,” and never really did more than flick through the few other cookbooks she was then given. What she also had was a scrapbook of recipes clipped from newspapers with the scribbles of recipes dictated by friends.

How times have changed

These days, I more often access Google for a recipe than I do a book. I suspect most people new to cooking, and excited by the prospect of tackling a novel dish, head to YouTube, not to bookshelves. The cookbooks they have bought may lie on the floor by the bed to ring in the changes in bedtime reading.

They are missing out. Social platform cooking videos are limited by audience attention spans, so leave no time to cover context or technique.

On Instagram or Tiktok, you will not learn the history, or social circumstances, that were the background to creating whatever it is influencers are cooking.

Of course, it may not matter. For the inquisitive, there are cookbooks that do more than just provide the instructions for creating a dish, and specialist tomes on specific food subjects.

Cooking as entertainment

For decades, cooking has been a means for TV companies to make a handsome profit on mainstream entertainment, with little outlay because cooking shows are so cheap to produce.

Now, self-filming in the kitchen has become a route to creating social media stars (who may, ironically, aspire to turn their 60 seconds at a stove into a physical cookbook).

So how do we expect to preserve and record the traditional recipes of our grandparents and their grandparents? Novice cooks sign up for a delivery of packaged portions that are turned into a meal by following the step-by-step instructions that come with them.

But are they hassling their elders for the secrets of their traditional food? And will their ancestors be confident that there is much point in passing them down to a generation whose approach to eating and cooking is so different from their own?

UNESCO to the rescue?

The concern that we may be losing what is called our culinary heritage is official. UNESCO has taken steps to formally recognize several national cuisines and cooking methods – French gastronomy, Mexican food, Washoku (traditional Japanese cooking), Ukrainian borscht, Singapore’s hawker street food culture, the Pizzaiuolo’s art of making the authentic Napolitan pizza.

That is just six out of a modest total of thirty global culinary traditions and practices on its “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity” list compiled in 2013.

Enter “Big Food Biz”

And then there is Big Food Biz. It has transformed food production processes globally, and has altered what we buy and how we eat. Its creation of an extraordinarily wide range of prepared meals, easy and speedy for time-strapped families to put on the table, has led to a homogenization of diets and dishes.

Along with this has come the loss of food traditions and practices and preparation techniques. In addition, post-COVID food safety fears have put additional pressure on increasingly stringent standards for food hygiene.

The result is that the developed world is losing its culinary heritage. At the same time, the swell of tourists discovering parts of the globe only previously visited by travellers on handsome budgets is reducing the range of local dishes available to them as restaurants focus on a small selection of recipes quick to serve, and guaranteed to please.

The loss of identity

Once upon a time in the west, food was part of our identity. While the Brits still tuck into fish and chips and roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, and the United States into burgers and fries, hot dogs and ribs, a significant part of the developed world’s eating week is taken up with Chinese take-outs, Korean fried chicken, bao buns, Indian curries, Mexican tacos, and more.

These are not meals we tend to make in our own kitchens. We are not cooking much, just forking in take-out feasts while glued to cooking shows.

Food vloggers do pass on traditional recipes, particularly those in Asia. But they are limited. One, a hot oil+scallions+garlic+chillies+ginger dipping sauce, is commonly demonstrated by every one of them.

It makes sense: They can be demonstrated inside a minute. And besides, we are all in love with gyozas, dumplings and dipping all manner of food in sauce.

What we see less of are the recipes that belong to parts of Asia, and the rest of the world, whose menus haven’t yet penetrated the mainstream, so we remain unfamiliar with them.

Preserving our culinary heritage

There is a danger these may disappear from record before we become so, and even from within home kitchens where the transmission by word or example of the techniques, traditions and recipes surrounding food is disappearing as different generations no longer live together in tight communities.

Just as we have seed banks to preserve the continuity of plants, edible and floral – over 1,700 of them around the world – so, perhaps, we should create recipe vaults, to prevent recipes from disappearing before the newest generation of eaters has learned how to cook.