How Cuisines Change

The Recency of Cuisine

Cuisines are not that old. It was only a few decades ago that soy sauce — now a staple of many American households — became widely available in stores across the United States. The same can be said of hummus, tofu, tempeh, kombucha, and many others.¹ It was only a few hundred years ago that potatoes were introduced to Europe from the New World. And only around this time was the capsicum family — more commonly known as chilis — introduced to Asia. Through trading and just a few centuries of innovation and permutation — see, for example, the combination of the many-thousand-year-old jang with capsicum to produce gochujang — these items have become keystones of various cuisines in the Old World.² It was only a few thousand years ago — a small blip in our human history — that the agricultural revolution occurred, and our cuisines and diets morphed around staple crops like wheat. And only recently have technological advances shifted our agriculture toward hybridity, consolidation, then monoculture.³

Why Change Cuisine?

Cuisine mutates. It does so rather quickly, and so does the economy around it. Some 15% of global GDP is associated with the broader agrifood industry. But its importance is yet broader. It supports almost 40% of global employment; it accounts for nearly a third of human-emitted greenhouse gases; it accounts for many billions — likely trillions — of dollars in healthcare costs and lost economic efficiency due to poor nutrition and malnutrition predicated upon the misfortune of almost a third of the global population who cannot afford a healthy diet.⁴ But importantly, cuisine is also mutable. The recency of most cuisines shows us that cuisine can change often, and often by the efforts of just a few individuals: the trader who packed a capsicum seed in their pack or the early settler who decided to cultivate soybeans and manufacture soy sauce in the colony of Georgia in 1769.⁵ That is, we can all consciously develop cuisine towards more efficient (and therefore often more affordable), environmentally friendly, and economically supportive ends.

Some crops grow better than others. Some are easier to process than others. It is our taste and the culture of our taste — we’ll call that cuisine — which determine how and how much we consume these foods. Take animal agriculture as an example. Beef may convert only a small fraction of usable calories and protein — 3-5% — from feed into food. Broadly, animal agriculture accounts for about 36% of crop allocations on a calorie basis, but only 12% of calories in the global human diet.⁶ If we can make feed delicious and part of our cuisine — that is, turn feed into food ourselves — that could drastically improve the efficiency of our agricultural industries. The U.S. is a major exporter of feed crops and feed ingredients, including soybeans, corn, and distillers’ grains; China has been an important destination, although export patterns vary by product and year.⁷ Otherwise — barring processing — some crops are simply more efficient than others. Rye grows efficiently as a cover crop in the Northeast United States, but lacks enough demand to be grown on an increasingly large scale.⁸ Kelp is very efficient requires little input, and utilizes far less agricultural land, but lacks sufficient demand to rival popular terrestrial crops.⁹ The more we shape taste, cuisine, and therefore demand, the more we increase the efficiency of our agricultural industries. And the more efficient those industries are, the more affordable our food will be, the more our local economies can rely on local supply chains, and the more we and our environment thrive.

Who Changes Cuisine

In food, we are often given a false choice between tradition and innovation. If you’re interested in this topic, read this great article by SFIG (the Sustainable Food Innovation Group). It would be remiss to ignore that cuisine — like all that is cultural — is steeped in tradition. To change cuisine toward the end of changing consumption, we ought to understand the synergy between traditional food cultures and new approaches to food.

So, where and who changes cuisine and who dictates the intersections between tradition and innovation? I admit my thoughts here are half-baked, and I invite others to help complete them:

1. Cuisine is disseminated by restaurants.

Roughly 56% of food spending in the U.S. is spent on outside-of-the-home eating.¹⁰ Restaurants also show food prepared well, and as such serve as outsized inspiration for home cooking. Sichuan food, for example, can be understood as significantly shaped and disseminated by restaurants.¹¹

2. Cuisine is formed by the interrelationship between restaurants and homes.

Many cuisines have a form in restaurants and a related form at home. Techniques more appropriate to food preparation in bulk, like deep-drying, coexist with small-batch and home-style techniques. But importantly, they share ingredients and techniques, explored below. See here another CCD article on Cantonese home cooking.

3. Cuisine is predicated upon a unified larder: a shared lexicon of ingredients and grammar of techniques.

In Japanese cuisine, that includes shoyu, miso, various pickles (zuke), dashi, and more. Even while produce, which often serves as the center of dishes, changes seasonally — sometimes entirely — dishes remain coherent and recognizable due to their shared set of condiments (etymologically, ‘pickled things’) and techniques.¹²

Of course, this is a very incomplete description. Cuisine and consumption, especially now, are dictated by trends, availability in stores, the divide between rural and urban food access, and many interrelated factors. So really, this is more of an open question: how does cuisine change?

Northeastern Cuisine

The Northeast U.S. is a particularly ripe case study. Much of its modern food culture — or lack thereof — has developed after industrial abundance. We are given a unique opportunity to ask what a cuisine of this place might be, one that supports local farmers and businesses and contributes to our shared development of a more efficient agricultural system. Traditional food cultures show how techniques like preservation and fermentation can increase the appeal and value of abundant ingredients.¹³ By paying more attention to those ingredients, and by creating some constraints around what we choose to cook with, we can begin to develop a clearer larder and food culture for the Northeast.

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