Editing The Chef In The Food Part 2 (section)

==== The ‘Chef’ in the Food ====
Just like all Art in the West, the Food also went the way of the strange and the individual, as the rest of the Art forms did. Food started deteriorating as soon as the Chef entered the Food.

The chefs were ever encouraged to do something ‘new’ in order to stand out, in order to create ‘signature dishes’ which no one else could and which they could patent and prevent others from making. Very soon, this search for the ‘new’ turned into a search for something ‘strange’.

As a result, most of the dishes that the Masterchefs and the Michelin Star Chefs create are so strange they are only as useful in a home kitchen as the fashion show clothes are useful in a daily wardrobe. Most of these chefs pride themselves on creating dishes which are ‘pieces of art’. And this has come to mean how difficult the dish is to prepare. It was not that earlier all dishes were easy to make. But difficulty existed in a dish because it was necessary because the said ingredient had to process to a degree to be edible or palatable.

In the new world of experimental food, the difficulty is introduced for difficulty’s sake, so that the chefs are admired for their troubles, and other chefs can’t easily copy the dish by looking at it. Ingredients are processed so much so that they are no longer recognizable. Finished products are used as ingredients. Technical and commercial machinery is used to give food a certain ‘look’.

Blowtorches, gelatin, and nitrogen capsules are now regular ingredients and processes of cooking. Nitrogen cooking is a thing now. People make ice cream in one minute with nitrogen. Instant mousse is available. A new word is introduced, ‘plating’. Food has become what it looks rather than what it means for the body. As one contestant at a Masterchef competition says: “You eat with your eyes!”

The chefs, in order to stand out, create ever new and ever strange dishes, in order to create ‘signature dishes’ named on them and patented in their name.

As a consequence, food has become more of an intellectual idea. And like every intellectual idea, it is given to deterioration. People, who go to the restaurant and pay exorbitant prices for some dishes, are actually eating an ‘idea’, and not a dish.

They pay money for how it ‘looks’. Taste is important too, but after a while, all the important taste buds of the modern man has already been excited, he just does not feel excited about taste and taste only. He has to be excited about how the food ‘looks’ too. The modern man is coming nearer and nearer to ‘eating an idea’ and idea alone.

In a traditional society, healthy food was very easy to make because the goal was to approximate the norm and not to deviate from it. It is entirely possible to settle on healthy and tasty food if you don’t have to worry about throwing up ‘new dishes’ all the time.

In modern society, healthy food is increasingly hard to make as the goal is to deviate from the norm and not to approximate to it. In traditional cooking, even one foreign ingredient can throw the entire health balance of a dish completely awry. That is why, in modern cooking where the premium is on the ‘new’ and the ‘novel’, it is increasingly hard to whip out dishes which are both ‘novel’ and ‘healthy’.

This further pushes the food into becoming an ‘art’. It means that innovation is more in ‘how it looks’ than ‘how it tastes’. And we know that healthy had long gone down the drain.

The Chef has arrived in the Food. And the Food is consequently dead as the ‘food and medicine’ whole. It is now an ‘idea’, an ‘art form’, and like all other modern art forms, it is strange and strange only and that is its defining virtue and quality.