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.