Adam Liaw - Tonights Dinner 2: Even More Recipes From The Cook Up

some were your forebears, and many of them were made by total
strangers who contributed to what is now a body of human wisdom.

Those decisions affected what crops to grow and how to grow
them. They affected how we understand how our bodies work
and what we need to eat to survive first, and thrive second.

They affected how we structure our economies and societies.

If you want to be a nerd about it, a plate of Spaghetti bolognese
( page ) started its journey to your table even before the
beginnings of agriculture, when our tastes guided what foods we
foraged or hunted. It adapted over millennia of trial and error as
humans had to learn what foods were good for us and what might
kill us. ( Even as recently as the 15th century, many people in Italy
thought the tomatoes we use in bolognese were poisonous, with
tomatoes only arriving around that time from the Americas.)

It would have adapted as we learned to domesticate and farm
both plants and animals. It would have travelled from Italy around
the world with waves of migration after the Second World War,
and it would have only landed on your table after we developed
the industries and systems that made those ingredients available
to you at a reasonable price and at minimal effort, plucked easily
from the shelves of your local supermarket.

My writing a recipe for it and you perhaps cooking it are just the
very last steps in an extraordinarily long journey.

The thing is, while the story of any dish might contain within it the
grandest story of all of human existence itself, it also contains
something much more personal to you. It contains your own story,
and it is being written every time you sit down at your table.

Ive always believed this, but its only recently that Ive understood
that our individual stories are told through food in ways that go to
the very heart of human nature.

Our tastes define who we are, by our biology but also by the way
we put context around the food we eat. As omnivores, humans
need to learn about food to survive, and this ability to learn
through food has become instinctive for us.

We learn about tastes even before were born. Tastes from what a
mother is eating can be passed to an unborn child, priming them
with a knowledge of what to eat once they are born into any given
environment. More tastes are passed in the mothers milk as that
child begins to grow. And it doesnt stop there. As we go through
life, we pick up the context and clues of the foods around us and
it shapes our relationship with food the same way it shapes our
relationship with people. Our relationships with food and people
are often one and the same.

As just one example, none of us like coffee as children. If a child
tastes coffee, its bitterness is immediately repulsive a biological
mechanism to warn children off something that might be
poisonous. But over time, we see our parents drink it and we see