rges is not that astounding really. The only food of sound provenance is traditional food. Traditional food and cooking is the benchmark by which we can ascertain, in all confidence, that we are eating natural foods brimming with the exact amounts of nutrients that our body has been designed to digest. It is the food that nature has gifted us in all her beneficence not a product born out of a test tube. It is the only food our ancestors could have consumed. Any changes to food that may have occurred over the centuries happened at a time and pace decided by nature. Never at a speed that fossil fuels can magically deliver. Traditional food and cooking is the vast, varied and tasty body of food our metabolisms has evolved to digest.
It is really quite astounding how earlier populations – regardless of what part of the world they hail from – had an innate, as opposed to scientific, understanding of best practice when it comes to growing, rearing, harvesting, preparing, cooking and preserving the food they had access to. What our ancestors knew and understood they passed on to the next generation with love. Traditional food and cooking was a thread stitched from one generation to the next in a continuous seam without interruptions for thousands of years. It was abruptly severed when factories powered by fossil fuels were able to mass produce food in a way the home hearth never could and when chemists began to patent their new food inventions advising us their invented products were healthier than the food that when before.
The time is now ripe for us to reengage in traditional food and cooking. Just about the only non-traditional aspect of Master in the Kitchen is the huge variety of real food from all over the world we now have access to. After a century of misleading information on food safety, healthy diets and invented foods traditional cooking is once again modern. Many of us are fortunate enough to benefit from the kind of kitchen equipment and utensils our ancestors could only dream of. Our access to electric blenders, gas or electric ovens, hand-held blenders, freezers and fridges is distinctly non-traditional. None of these things are consumed or ingested so are safe to use. Never has it been so easy to prepare tasty, nutritious dishes in our own kitchens. Let us make the most of our good fortune to prepare natural, real but above all traditional dishes in our modern kitchens.