by Justin Thyme

Created on: January 09, 2009

All around the world, there are sites of great historical importance and significance, where Stone Age man created representations on cave walls or rock faces of his life and the times in which he lived. This is of course what we have come to know as art in its earliest form, not created by our distant ancestors because they had to, but simply because they wanted to. They felt a human desire to express themselves and record personal details for posterity.

During this period in history, a very different primitive art form was also prevalent but for an entirely different reason. Cooking food did not come about essentially through choice, as it did above, but rather through necessity. People had to eat and they learned through centuries' and more experience that in order to eat certain types of food, those items first had to be cooked. A simple fire would at that time have been created and animals roasted on a crude spit, perhaps soups or vegetable stews made in a primitive pot or pan.

As time went on and millennia passed, just as people such as Da Vinci and Rembrandt took the picture art of the caveman to new levels, so too others did likewise with cooking and food. People learned through experience how to better utilise certain ingredients and how to combine them more effectively and in a more flavoursome fashion. Even a couple of generations ago, someone in the house had to obtain fresh ingredients and craft them in to a meal for themselves and the remaining family members.

Then along came domestic freezers. Suddenly, households the world over were transformed. It was possible to buy meals in supermarkets, ready prepared and frozen. There was no longer any need to peel vegetables, select cuts of meat, or slave over the proverbial hot stove. Meals could simply be taken out of the deep freeze and popped in to the oven or perhaps a pot of boiling water and in twenty minutes or whatever, the food was ready to be served. Unfortunately, worse was to come...

Microwave ovens made it possible for these increasingly chemically enhanced "meals" to be "cooked" in a fraction of the time. We simply put our frozen concoction - containing a few elements of what could once have been classed as food - in to this device, go to change out of our outdoor clothes and listen for the "Ping" that denotes it is time to eat.

What has essentially happened is that devices which were created to be "convenient" have made too many of us dependant upon them and lazy. While cooking methods and recipes used to be passed from generation to generation, now parents buy their child a freezer and a microwave oven as they finally depart the nest! So much intimate knowledge of a craft which has been developed since time immemorial must already have been lost. Where will it all end?

While Star Trek food replicators may for the moment remain some way off, they are by no means an unfeasible development. What then of the culinary craft and its beauty and established techniques? No doubt mankind will continue to express himself in other art forms such as painting and in sculpture - but when the need has gone, what will happen to cooking?

In conclusion, while I don't believe cooking is in any immediate danger of becoming a completely lost art, I believe I have demonstrated why it has already become a very minor form of art.

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