The article mentions cafés and restaurants looking the same, but a more significant change in my opinion is that regional recipes are disappearing and all food is beginning to taste the same.
I've seen this gradually happening in the towns in Spain where I've visited my family since a child: for instance in Bilbao the traditional pintxos/tapas are gradually becoming erased and substituted with a more 'international' style of elaborate mayonnaise combos that are photogenic for spread on social media.
And in a weekly newsletter I get about Spanish culture this was the latest topic: specifically how traditional Mallorcan restaurants are disappearing and being replaced by more generic 'Spanish' tourist-pleasers.
As I've seen this happen in pretty much every city I've visited over the last decade (including Stockholm where I live now), I imagine it's a generalized phenomenon that will be hard or impossible to reverse.
This is the one that makes me sad. I lived in a variety of places while growing up (countries, states, etc). Different countries had very distinctive types of food in the 1990s. Living in the U.S., I still visit Europe quite frequently, and it seems like all food is converging toward sameness, and not in a good way.
About a decade ago when my income began increasing I started going to Michelin star restaurants for the "novelty", but now that I've been to enough of them they all seem more similar to each other than different. It's much more challenging to find an authentic old restaurant in e.g., Lyon, that has quality food that hasn't changed over the decades (hint: these restaurants typically have ratings between 3.9 and 4.1 on Google — Americans tend to drag the score down because some aspect of the food or culture is unappealing to them, reinforcing the article's point).
My first thought was that if I was a tourist in Mallorca, I'd much prefer an "authentic" traditional Mallorcan restaurant over a generic Spanish restaurant.
My second thought is: Maybe the market is telling us that we don't need so many cuisines. Think about it: There are probably 100+ distinct cuisines in the world. How many people have tried every single one? How many people have gotten tired of a substantial fraction of that 100+, and are seeking further novelty? Probably not very many.
Mallorca is one of the most tourist-heavy parts of Spain. If I'm already tired of generic Spanish cuisine, I'm probably already going off the beaten path to less-visited parts of Spain, where the niche cuisines are incidentally still preserved.
You say it's happening in every city you visited, but how many cities are you visiting which are off the beaten path?
> My second thought is: Maybe the market is telling us that we don't need so many cuisines. Think about it: There are probably 100+ distinct cuisines in the world. How many people have tried every single one? How many people have gotten tired of a substantial fraction of that 100+, and are seeking further novelty? Probably not very many.
That's like saying that the billions of people on the planet are mostly worthless because you're not going to meet every single one of them.
Local culture doesn't exist to satisfy some "market" or as a sort of collectathon for well-off travelers seeking novelty through fake "authentic culture", it's about the way of life of sppecific people living in specific areas.
> Local culture doesn't exist to satisfy some "market" or as a sort of collectathon for well-off travelers seeking novelty through fake "authentic culture", it's about the way of life of sppecific people living in specific areas.
When local dishes are displaced by international dishes it's normally because the international dishes taste nicer (adjusted for cost etc.). If the locals wanted to preserve the cuisine for their own sake they would do so.
and comfort and familiarity. I can easily imagine tourists in a foreign land preferring McDonald's or generic fast food when they can't/don't/won't make up their minds about what to eat. It's entirely possible for people to basically "vacation wrong" and many do it.
Agreed. Traditional cultures are downstream of traditional political economies. Globalization was always going to homogenize culture and hey look that's what's happening.
> Maybe the market is telling us that we don't need so many cuisines.
I think that's exactly what's happening.
The Market has identified a more costly and less universally appreciated method, and is trying to eliminate it. The Market knows better. The Market knows that the lowest common denominator should be served at the expense of everything else.
And thus the Market eats another bit of joy, sacrificed at the altar of greater efficiency, of more money, at the altar of Moloch.
>Maybe the market is telling us that we don't need so many cuisines. Think about it: There are probably 100+ distinct cuisines in the world. How many people have tried every single one? How many people have gotten tired of a substantial fraction of that 100+, and are seeking further novelty? Probably not very many.
Japan is notorious for protecting and marketing regional/local cuisine nationwide and they're quite successful at it.
Hell, they've succeeded at making global food vendors sell Japan-only food (all them wild Kit-Kats, Christmas KFC, etc.).
The question isn't posed on the consumers, it's posed on the suppliers. Do the suppliers want to preserve their way of eating or not?
> The people selling food are making and selling what is in demand.
The problem is that in highly touristic areas a big chunk of the demand comes from tourists, most of which are happy to pay for crap food as long as it's marketed to them in a way that fits their expectations about the country. The crap-selling businesses have higher margins (through cheap ingredients and unskilled labor) so it's difficult for quality local cuisine restaurants to compete with them. So even if a tourist-driven market is asking for crap, I'd argue the impoverishment of local culture is an unacceptable externality.
That would not be an externality. Which type of restaurant succeeds is internal to the economic activity of people paying for food at restaurants.
Also, what type of cuisine is crap and not is extremely subjective. If a local populace is not sufficiently motivated to make and eat a specific cuisine such that it dies out, that is sad, but just one of many compromises society makes while constantly evolving due to new parameters.
The place/tribe my parents come from is losing its amazing cuisine because it requires one stay at home parent to labor for many hours per day and years and years of experience to master. I grew up eating amazing home cooked food at all of my aunts’ and great aunt’s houses, so much so that going out to eat at a US restaurant was rare and considered a lesser alternative.
However, all of their kids obtained higher education and work, so are unable to devote anywhere close to the time my aunts and grandmas did in the kitchen. Not to mention that they like doing other things like vacationing, playing sports, going to parties, etc. All the institutional knowledge of the fresh, home cooked food is going to be gone in about 20 to 30 years, it wouldn’t success as a business and individuals have priorities other than living in the kitchen.
> That would not be an externality. Which type of restaurant succeeds is internal to the economic activity of people paying for food at restaurants.
The externality is not "which type of restaurant succeeds" but the "impoverishment of the local culture". Call it a side effect if you prefer, one of the many caused by heavy tourism (rise of housing prices, replacement of local commerce by souvenir shops, etc.) that end up pushing locals out of those areas and turning them into theme parks with no soul. Of course you are free to think that's not something worth caring about as a society.
> What type of cuisine is crap and not is extremely subjective.
There's some subjectivity involved, but in the same sense there are books that are bad by any account, there's food that is crap by any account.
> If a local populace is not sufficiently motivated to make and eat a specific cuisine such that it dies out, that is sad, but just one of many compromises society makes while constantly evolving due to new parameters.
At least here in Spain and the Mediterranean Europe in general, they do. You just have to go outside of the heavily touristic areas into the ones where actual locals live. It's true that home cooking has changed a bit in a similar fashion as you describe, but it resists in family and friend gatherings during weekends and holidays.
It's an interesting point you make about the effort involved in making a dish. I'm on a mission to eat, and mostly home cook, food from as many countries as possible. I'm at about 25% of the world's countries now after several years of gradual chipping away.
From that experience I feel that there are some food traditions which will be more durable than others and, as you suggest, this is not just a matter of tourist influence but I think capitalism/market forces are behind most of it.
Factors which I think will work against long term survival include:
-high effort: more families where both parents work for money and where the family unit is very small mean fewer opportunities for elaborate preparation. In my family we think of that type of cooking as a luxury afforded to us because we are wealthy enough to have enough free time from work to do it once in a while, but in the cultures where the food originated it was built into the schedule.
-scarce ingredients: 25% is a lot of the world's countries but I know I will never reach 100%, even if I live to 110 years old. Some countries, especially island nations, have specific local herbs and vegetables that aren't available elsewhere. Over time, the market for cultivating these will decline as it is squeezed out by cash crops for export or non-indiginous crops that grow more reliably or productively. This has happened to some regional foods in my (western) home country and while they are still available, they at risk of disappearing. Another reason for scarcity is overuse e.g. with herring overfishing and surströmming scarcity.
-banned ingredients: as food standards regulations around the world gradually harmonise to allow free trade, some ingredients will be banned. This is an ongoing global war which will carry on for decades, but it already means that some cuisines aren't available in other territories. In the longer term they could be lost from their home countries (bush meat etc.). Again surströmming features in this category and only has a temporary reprieve from the EU.
-unavailable methods: in some cases it's already a stretch to say that I'm cooking the food of a country when I'm improvising with the methods and materials. I don't have a tandoor in my back yard or a wood-fired oven for baking shakh plov; I've not really got the option of digging a hole to ferment some hákarl either. With increasingly urban populations globally, many traditional cooking methods will be unfeasible for most people.
While there are good reasons for some of these influencing factors, like food safety, others are clearly unintended side-effects. There is a strong (non-economic) case for national governments dedicating resources to conserve their cultural heritage by giving their local cuisine some protection from external pressures.
Yeah it seems the same for music, with the provisio of a perfect music discovery service somehow existing.
If it did exist, there likely would be little genuine demand for anything beyond the top million most popular works that have already been produced in the preceding 100 years.
And probably close to zero demand for beyond the top 10 million plus maybe the top half million historic pre-1924 works.
it is not all bad :) look at latin america where colonization has erased a lot of the regional dishes. yet new combinations have arisen from a mix of pre-columbian and european dishes. tacos in mexico combining corn tortilla with cow and pork based fillings, or ceviche in peru are just a few examples of "comida criolla".
right now, it might be a swing in the direction of sameism, but i assure you that eventually new dishes will arise.
> right now, it might be a swing in the direction of sameism, but i assure you that eventually new dishes will arise.
I do hope you're right, and I agree that there are some fusions that are quite exciting and add diversity to some cuisines that are otherwise quite bland and monotonous (Swedish food has definitely got a massive lift from introduced diversity, for instance).
But what I've mostly seen so far, is convergence towards the vaguely 'international' and inoffensive.
In this process, items like blood pudding (a sausage made mostly from blood and fat) or pork wrapped in cabbage with almonds and raisins get phased-out, in favor of homogenous crowd-pleasers that taste the same across Europe.
Some nice things have been introduced to Sweden, definitely, but unfortunately also garlic+onion has gone completely out of control. For instance going to France or Greece or India, countries known for their garlic, and I assume most countries in the world, they still know to not ONLY serve food where the difference in taste is the ratio of garlic to onions. They do still have dishes that use other spices. I asked in a few restaurants in Sweden and they literally did not serve a single garlic-free dish. Swedes went from zero to "old Nordic food is tasteless, so we should put as much garlic+onions as possible in everything to fix that" in ~60 years, and much of that happened in my lifetime in this century.
you are right in the fact that some dishes will be phased out, but new dishes will spring up. they might not be the old ones, but that is the way of human evolution :)
one example that springs up to mind is in dutch cuisine. take for example the "kapsalon" which is a mix of surinamese, dutch, and middleastern dishes. this is a new dish created in 2003 but which enjoys of massive popularity; you cannot find a snackbar in the netherlands that does not prepare kapsalon.
> add diversity to some cuisines that are otherwise quite bland and monotonous (Swedish food has definitely got a massive lift from introduced diversity, for instance).
Other than a lazy dig at "bland Nordic cuisine"[1], I'm not sure what makes this different from the situation bemoaned in the GP post?
[1] ie a culinary tradition of letting the taste of the ingredients stand for themselves, rather than covering them up with spices (originally a measure to make up for the fact that things spoil easily in warm climates)
> Other than a lazy dig at "bland Nordic cuisine"[1]...
> [1] ie a culinary tradition of letting the taste of the ingredients stand for themselves, rather than covering them up with spices (originally a measure to make up for the fact that things spoil easily in warm climates)
I'm afraid if you think that Swedish food is about "the taste of the ingredients stand[ing] for themselves, rather than covering them up with spices" then you really don't have a good familiarity with this cuisine.
Historically the need to preserve food through the long winter, or even make scarce food appetizing during the summer, means that Nordic food has always been much more processed (salting, pickling, smoking, smothering with dill or mustard, and so on) than the much more fresh and unadulterated recipes of the Mediterranean, where fresh fish, fruit and vegetables have always been more plentiful, and a greater part of traditional recipes (together with the sausage and other 'winter' food I mentioned).
I'm also sad to hear that you think my comment amounted to a "lazy dig".
If the subject is restaurant food, French style cooking is standard in all Nordic restaurants above the lowest level. Before it was introduced, I guess you had more like eateries with stew and porridge, or an oven baked chicken, smoked fish and such. The French techniques have really had a huge importance for Nordic cuisines. Combined with traditional Nordic ingredients, you get something truly excellent.
It's a pity that the only food that gets international success is mostly pizza, burger, döner kebab and taco. If restaurants world wide started learning and integrating the French cuisine, they could make some great combinations with local traditions and also let local ingredients shine in a way that you can never do with a god damned burger or kebab.
Part of it stems from the fact that wholesalers, in addition to raw ingredients, also sell partially prepared pre-packaged meals to restaurants. A number of restaurants resort to this model, in particular major chains (Applebee's, IHop, Waffle House, etc.) as it means less kitchen staff to hire. This is at least very common in North America, where Sysco is the goliath and has cornered the market on this front. Perhaps the same thing is happening in Spain?
Could it be that locals don't want to eat in a restaurant the things they cook at home, while tourists are looking for food which is more familiar to them?
haha no, I doubt those restaurants are changing their recipes because “people are watching cooking channels”
they want to be able to serve more people so they serve less opinionated food, if you serve something some people think is absolutely vile and disgusting but others think is really good you’ll get less business than if you serve food everyone thinks is just “okay”.
Even though we give the French a lot of shit, they stay true to their recipes for the people who like it. It’s very opinionated, if u arrive at a French restaurant in France and you don’t like their food, if it’s rather rural they won’t have an all inclusive “oh here you go” meal, you’ll eat the pig intestine or go hungry.
Less appealing to the masses, staying true to their recipes
I wonder if there's an element of cost cutting involved here, too. Restaurant owners have to juggle the availability and pricing of their ingredients. I know of at least a few cases when a menu change was done to get better ingredient reuse or to manage these costs.
I've seen this gradually happening in the towns in Spain where I've visited my family since a child: for instance in Bilbao the traditional pintxos/tapas are gradually becoming erased and substituted with a more 'international' style of elaborate mayonnaise combos that are photogenic for spread on social media. And in a weekly newsletter I get about Spanish culture this was the latest topic: specifically how traditional Mallorcan restaurants are disappearing and being replaced by more generic 'Spanish' tourist-pleasers.
As I've seen this happen in pretty much every city I've visited over the last decade (including Stockholm where I live now), I imagine it's a generalized phenomenon that will be hard or impossible to reverse.