Recipe sharing has become a favorite online activity. (I plead guilty.) The Food Channel is a fixture in many of our homes and on our media devices. Chefs are reigning celebrities. Who would have ever thunk it? If you look back, however, to what topics made magazines popular ... all the way back to the 1600s (!) .. it was topics that revolved around homemaking and the domestic "arts" ... chief of which was cooking for family and community gatherings.
Favorite magazine titles that stood the test of time into current day include: Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, McCall's, Better Homes and Gardens, Redbook, etc. They are considered publishing icons. The covers most often displayed some delectable looking concoction. Before the days of "celebrity" ... the two types of eye candy that sold those magazines off the racks always revolved around food and fashion. As an auctioneer specializing in "ephemera", I can also attest the prices that people are willing to pay for back issues of those favorite titles as well as other women's and cooking-oriented magazines that reach back across the decades. There are some magazines that regularly go for $50-$100 an issue. Pristine copies of 19th iconic publications with wonderfully illustrated cover art can fetch well into the $100s. So .. I was thinking the other day ... what is the magic of "food" and from whence comes our collective fascination with it?
I first asked myself: "What is food, exactly?" Food is considered any substance which provides nutritional support for the human body. It is usually of plant or animal origin and contains essential nutrients for "somatic" growth and metabolism. Essential nutrients include proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins and minerals. Food substances are ingested and consumed by a body's cells to sustain life, promote growth and health, and provide energy.
Historically, humans secured food through either hunter-gathering (our earliest ancestors) and agriculture. Today, food production and the feeding of the world's population is an industry in its own right: agribusiness.
Regardless of the origin of food eaten or how it's prepared or presented, all humans have the same different tastebuds needing to be satisfied: sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. Often we hear foods referred to as either sweet or savory. Savory refers to any pleasurable combining of the "other than sweet components" of the tastebud equation.
I then asked myself: "How did this basic necessity become such a favorite topic universally?" While food is about sustenance, it is about so much more. Because the harvesting, preparing, and consuming of food play such an important and central role in human activity, it follows that food, in all its variations, would play such an equally significant role in family celebrations and amongst world cultures. "Food" is an extension of the need to nurture and love and to feel comfort. Feeding our loved ones, our family, and our community is a way to show our love and connectedness. Food is one of the few "essential ingredients" that we as humans, regardless of race, creed, or color, all share in common.
Here's to celebrating "food" and always being grateful that we have it. Here's to making sure that those who have none or not enough have that same opportunity .... to be able to get past food as bare necessity and celebrate it for the culturally shared opportunity it provides us all! (I'm not saying that requires going to the extremes to which Andrew Zimmern goes in his pursuits of "bizarre" foods!) Most importantly ... here's to everyone ... everywhere ... having the opportunity to be members of, what my mom used to call ... the clean plate club!
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