Foodways like any other aspect of culture, are never static. Even without the influence of other cultures, we would be eating and cooking differently from the generations that came before us.

Home cooking is always concerned with quality, because people you care about will eat the meal.

How fragile is a world so connected and tied together that a change in food fashion in one place can lead to starvation halfway through the world?

Food is also the stuff of international politics, and the power of one country to control the daily bread of another has always been politically important.

Food is packed with meaning, as well as vitamins, carbohydrates and protein. It satisfies needs beyond those of the body and the pocketbook. Food is a medium to build families, religious communities, ethnic boundaries and a consciousness of history.

The idea that foods and diets will “just mix” when they come into contact is clearly a vast oversimplification.

People want to think of a food tradition as something that would continue unchanging and timeless, unless some outside force knocked things askew.

There is no culture where everyone cooks in the same way.

But instead of being frozen in time, I want to show that “local” and “authentic” food are as much creations of modernity as survivors from before it. Authenticity is therefore a problem, not something we can ever depend on as some kind of naturally occurring category. Tradition is crafted, just as much as modernity is manufactured.