Why eat?

Back when I was a high school kid, a classmate, who managed to get a hold of catchy statements from somewhere during those dark days before the internet was invented, said "eat to live, but do not live to eat."

Sounded good to me.  But at home we seemed to have struck a wonderful mix of both--we lived to eat well to live ;)

Even in this eating well, we often remarked that we tended to eat a lot more than normal if we had company, especially if our favorite relatives were visiting.  Everything seemed tastier too.

Life in these modern times is very different.  It feels like four hundred years have gone by, yet it has barely been four decades.  Our eating habits are dramatically different from the past.

One of the major changes has been that we seem to have less and less shared dining experiences and tastes.  We live in an age of ever increasing personalized food, as much as we have personalized movie-watching.  Every where we turn, the "we" and "our" are rapidly yielding to "I" and "mine."

If that is the way we prefer, then the market delivers:

Nick Popovici is one of the entrepreneurs seeking to take advantage of these firm expressions of preferences. He founded Vita Mojo, a small London chain offering ultra-personalised healthy meals to busy workers in the City of London in 2016. Popovici argues that we will soon reach the point where special diets are the norm, and the food businesses will succeed by accommodating them.

Ultra-personalized meals, as if mere personalized ain't enough!

When Vita Mojo first opened, Popovici and his colleagues didn’t know to what extent customers would embrace the personalised meal. The café also offers pre-assembled dishes and Popovici, who was inspired to set up the business after suffering from debilitating food intolerances, imagined that around 10% of customers might go for a fully personalised meal. He was staggered to find that, from the start, more than 90% of customers chose that option. He reckons that the desire for personalised meals was there all along, “It’s just that no one asked people whether they wanted it before.”

Sure, it appeals to our unique tastes.  But, eating all things including what we don't like much is pretty much a lesson about life itself.  In life, we have to deal with all kinds of unpleasantness, right?  We cannot really ultra-personalize our life!

Popovici told me that he recently got in a big argument with René Redzepi, a Danish chef, who felt that personalised nutrition contradicted food’s true purpose, which, as Redzepi sees it, is to bring people together in a kind of communion.
We are fed by more than food when we sit down and break bread. When we eat the same food at the same time, we are brought a little closer together. A human alchemy occurs. Maybe you wish the sauce contained a fraction more garlic and I would like it more with an extra pinch of chilli, but to pay too much attention to these tiny selfish differences would be to miss the bigger transformation, which is the unifying of flavours, of conversation and of company.

Indeed!