I’m reading the part of Rafael Chirbes’s diaries where he talks about the destruction of the regional cuisines of Europe. Chirbes was a lifelong foodie who edited a culinary magazine for many years. He says that the local rituals surrounding cooking and meal times that had been honed by centuries of the local climate, habits, and community traditions were wiped out within a couple of decades by mass migration.
The middle classes, he says, thought that going into raptures over curries and kebabs made them worldlier and more progressive. They accepted slop on their plates instead of the vibrant, interesting, local dishes because this bought them a self-image of well-travelled sophisticates. The writer lists the food-related rituals and dishes that were lost to the belief that global slop is better than local food art.
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