My partner and I had a conversation recently about the process of learning how to make traditional food from family members. They remarked that their grandma could just touch dough and know how to alter the recipe by poking at it. Or she would say things like, “it rained yesterday” and adjust. In other words, the only way to learn how to make all this stuff was not just to follow the recipe, but to make it over and over with a master and learn the little adjustments.
Compare that to how food is mass produced. Rather than needing a master to adjust the recipe, the entire point is to use processes and ingredients which can be worked with to get consistent scalable results.
And my take is that there’s something fundamentally different between the sorts of foods that can be made through industrial processes and ones that can be iterated on and learned by humans to be made by hand.
The difference is that grandma doesn't have to be a slave in the kitchen any more. That was a huge step for women's liberation.
Before mass produced food, every single meal you ever had in your life was made from scratch. Entirely. By a woman's unpaid labor.
This is an excellent point. I really love the idea of mass produced ingredients being used to prepare food in a cross between restaurant-style dining and cafeteria-style dining that I’ve seen in a couple college mess halls. It’s basically a more comfortable food court & hang out area. People would take turns making the food and eating would be communal
Specialist chefs are better. Most people can barely boil water. It's not grandma's time any more where every woman knows 300 recipes by heart.
mechanized food isn't bad in itself, it's in how they put weird shit in to dilute it that is usually not nutritious at best
I’ve heard that highly processed types of fat and sugar are easier to work with industrially. Is there a communist path where nutrition is optimized over profit and we can maintain similar levels of food production even using materials that are harder to scale?
- no needless transports
- turning restaurants into communal kitchens
- phasing out difficult and dangerous to process foods :vegan-v:
so in a word rearranging and prioritizing differently, made possible by broader changes in how the economy works
I disagree, I think there’s probably a lot more science put into making food as mass scale than home cooks. Home cooks will make better tasting food once they are masters, in general, so I agree there but the efficiencies of scale are too great for them to overcome, and the process is a lot more evidence based and unbiased.
But of course under capitalism putting in whatever toxic or semi-toxic shit in the batch doesn’t matter so long as it sells so we’re constantly going from one food crisis to the next (trans fats, preservatives, BPA, sulfites, etc etc). Also the whole aspect of marketing. People barely ever ate cheeseburgers a hundred years ago now they’re a staple.
People barely ever ate cheeseburgers a hundred years ago now they’re a staple.
This is closer to my point. Food is always going to evolve and gain cultural meaning, but that food is now chosen less by what humans can master and more by what machines can reproduce consistently
Even mass production is an art. It's just a different sort of art.
I will say the art is less in the food, but more in the machines and packaging equipment, but running a clean line is abit of an art form, as most machines are stacked together pieces from a bunch of different setups. Like, I've seen an old candie dispenser used to distribute small snack cheeses into containers. Food science is great. Most plants are these kinds of slap dash amalgamations of equipment. Maybe the process itself is scientific, but getting to that point takes some imagination. Basically, the art is in designing the kitchen so to speak. People who play Factorio (I know the dev sucks don't at me) will get what I'm saying.
Food is an art. Grandma is like an artist painting a mural on your wall. Processed food is like mass produced wallpaper. Both have nominally similar functions, but are not the same thing.
Virgin grandmother adjusting to small deviations in climate
Chad industrial food manufacturer controlling the climate like a chemistry lab
The old world will
burnbake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit in the fires of industry.
the entire point is to use processes and ingredients which can be worked with to get consistent scalable results.
I'm not even sure if that's true. I bet food waste is worse at the very least
All very true and a nice thing to think about. I think I've got this sense with masa harina now, which admittedly is a lot easier to adjust. Fresh tortillas yum yum.
When you make most of your own food from scratch, you get a different relationship with it. And for most of humanity for most of our existence, food was (is) scarce, so we figured out how to make magic with what's plentiful, or simply available at the time. Our best foods came from valuing spending the time to make these things better, to create joy from simple ingredients, even when times might be tough. To make our friends and family happy.
