Editing The Chef In The Food Part 1 (section)

==== Commercializing Food and Cooking ====
But let us rewind here and take a look at Europe and the West. In the West the commercialization of food started happening in the 1920s when feminism picked ground, women stopped cooking in droves, and started eating outside to ‘save time’ or ‘effort’ started becoming acceptable. This was the watershed moment when the commercialization of food started happening. Restaurants started appearing which catered to entire families and a ‘food culture’, meaning eating out in public for pleasure started.

And once this happened, the chef entered the food. Until then, the ‘competition’ in food was the mild friendly jealousy between neighboring women. The criteria were subjective and no matter how bad a home cook made a dish, she or he was not going to lose his ‘customers’ (family members) to the neighbor next door.

But now, the competition was serious and commercial. Restaurants and chefs competed with each other for attracting customers. Yes, food had become an industry and those eating food in the restaurant were ‘customers’. In this competition, the chefs wanted to ‘stand out’ rather than approximate to the norm. What would differentiate them from other restaurants and chefs if the dishes were all the same and up to the ‘norm’?

Search for the New and the Strange in Food Starts

Like in all fields of art, the search for novelty had begun in food too and the entire food culture started unraveling from there. Before this invention of ‘eating out’ in America in the 1920s, the West too had a stable food culture, even if it was not as good as Ayurveda recommends. After the commercialization of food, the ‘chefs’ started looking for the novel and the strange in food.

In order to stand out, they had to do something new. Chefs started whipping out ‘new dishes’ every other day. Throwing all traditional common sense of food out the window, they just started mixing different ingredients and different tastes together to create new ‘flavors’, new ‘textures’ and new ‘experiences’. Food, which had been a matter of bhakti and crafts until yesterday, had become a matter of Art for Art’s sake.

For why would someone go outside to eat the same food which everyone in her home could cook? Why would you eat the dish that your grandmother had been feeding you all your childhood? Even if you did once, why would you come back?

The restaurants then went on a spiral inventing ever new dishes which threw all traditional wisdom in food to the wind. Same dishes were tweaked a bit here and a bit there and new exotic and unpronounceable names were given to them to give them an aura of novel majesty. To ‘try’ all the dishes in a given restaurant became a quest for ordinary Americans. And the quest, just like in a video game, would never be completed. For in the ever-escalating mutual evolution of the chef and the customers, the chefs whipped out new dishes much faster than the individual customers could try them.

Authored by Pankaj Saxena. 
Published by IndicaToday.[[Category:Art and Culture]]