You may well question how anyone can harbor a passion for food—isn’t it simply a basic necessity of life? Take, if you will, a mental inventory of the world around you: the truth is that we take this elemental part of our lives for granted far too often. In America, for instance, ever-expanding fast food chains and prepared-food aisles in supermarkets mirror the changing pace of life, the shifting values of an entire population. As author Thomas McNamee asserts in his article “Cooking,” from The New York Times, these trends go hand-in-hand with “the chain-linked epidemics of obesity, diabetes, arteriosclerosis and cancer.” Alternatively, in her article “The Decline of European Home Cooking,” from The Wall Street Journal, Rose Prince reasons that issues such as social and economic restructuring after World War II, including urbanization and female liberation, placed European families at the risk of “rearing a generation of ‘kitchen orphans’ who have never seen their mothers use the oven.”
In light of the sobering realization that cooking and eating have taken such a markedly negative turn, the phenomenon currently sweeping through bookstores, television-attuned homes, and the Internet is particularly astonishing. McNamee remarks: “while accurate statistics don’t seem to exist, the cooking sections of bookstores look to be overflowing [and] sales of a hundred thousand copies aren’t uncommon.” In addition to bookstore aisles, food has entire television networks, with their scores of celebrity chefs, dedicated to it. Moreover, anyone with access to the Internet has—literally, at their fingertips—a wealth of individual blogs cataloguing food that is made, photographed, and written about by authors that range from professionals, epicures, and gourmets to home-cooks, foodies, and hobbyists.
Prince rightly argues that there is no substitute for the traditional process of learning how to cook from one’s parents. Nevertheless, as I reflect on the current relationships with food in the world around me, I feel grateful that there is a community of food lovers on print, on television, online that generously share their advice, recipes, and even gorgeous food photographs, that stand in for the cultural, communal traditions of buying, making, and eating food which seem to have disappeared and left us orphaned in the kitchen. I hope to explore the intricate evolution of this relationship throughout recent history: how passed-down recipe cards and cookbooks switched places with television shows, networks, websites, and blogs to provide inspiration and education for anyone around the world who wishes to rebuild their relationship with food. If you, dear reader, are among the novices like me, or are perhaps orphaned from or out-of-touch with the wonder of a home-cooked meal, take heart in T.S. Elliot's wise words, quoted in this post's title: "What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from."
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