When you think about cooking in the abstract, it seems strange, almost magical, what transformations you can work upon any given ingredient depending on what you choose to combine it with, how long and by what method you cook it, and so on. It makes cooking seem almost like a form of alchemy, the old practice by which people hoped to discover the elixir of life by combining certain ingredients and heating them up in strangely shaped glass containers.
Thinking of cooking as a modern sort of alchemy makes me wonder about its future. I have come to the conclusion that, as with most things in life, the answer is both positive and negative. On the one hand, however much our eating habits may be altered by changing times and technology, food is here to stay. Science-fiction writers to the contrary, people would not be content—even if it were possible—to subsist on vitamins and stuff squeezed out of tubes. But what kind of food will we eat? For the mentality of “you can never be too thin or too rich” is still very much with us; too many of us, obsessed with our diets, view a well-cooked meal not as a pleasure, but as a temptation.
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