This week, as a going away present, my mother has made several gourmet vegetarian dishes. Since I was little, she always liked to joke that I drove her crazy by demanding all sorts of “exotic” foods; exotic being anything that did not originate in the subcontinent of India. Recently, we have had baked pasta, an excellent vegetarian chili with a dollop of sour cream on top, double-cheese nachos, and veggie quesadillas, with the latter being something that she has learned almost exclusively for me. This entire week, I’ve been wondering how these dishes came into fashion. With pasta, did someone decide to shape grain into quirky shapes and douse them in various vegetable and meat sauces? Is the idea of tossing vegetables and meat together with peppers the only reason chili was invented? Humans, the connoisseurs of art, music, and yes, food must surely have had some underlying reason for inventing cuisine.
On a primal sense, cuisine is completely unnecessary. Killing an animal and roasting it upon a spit to rid it of disease, harvesting roots and berries, or simply eating vegetables plain would give us all the essential nutrients necessary for living a healthy life. Why, then, does food exist? PBS's "Why Do We Cook?" informs us that cooking allowed us to make the evolutionary jump from mere primate to human. Although we can get nutrients without cooking, cooking also breaks down plants’ cell walls, allowing more nutrients. Heat also denatures proteins, allowing the human body to digest them easier. This, on a fundamental level, explains why humans cook their food.
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However, is there any true explanation for why we developed cooking past a basic level of just putting things over a fire? I understand that different regions have different ingredients and therefore different cuisines, but the jump from elementary cooking to more advanced cooking seems to be lost in mere history.
In any case, I suppose I will always wonder if a new cuisine will ever be invented that it becomes a staple food similar to pasta or rice. Food has played such an incredible role in all of our lives past basic nourishment. There will always be favorites, like pizza, and the abhorred, like Brussels sprouts. There will be those who devote their life to it, those who view it with a slight intellectual curiosity, and those who couldn’t care less about what they shovel into their mouths. In short, food and cuisine runs the gamut of the human experience: utter devotion, mild interest, and utter nonchalance.
As I eat sautéed mushrooms and more baked pasta coupled with chilled limeade this very minute, I remember that cooking, no matter its origins, is perhaps something we will never truly understand. The evolution of food throughout the ages is undoubtedly a rich and storied history. To those who essay to create new things to please our taste buds, I applaud you. To those who pay no heed to cuisine as a culture, I encourage you to take a look. To those, like myself, who have only a small, nagging curiosity, I hope that this has truly been food for thought.
