How are we cooking food for 8 billion human beings?
This article is about a very simple thing- Food. We all eat it, most of our ancestors grew it, few of our ancestors caught it but every one of them, most probably, cooked some of it.
Whether it’s camping on the Himalayas or mining hundreds of feet under the ground, palaces or yachts, in plates or in hands, sitting or walking, tasty or bland, food is a lifeline without which much of life is unimaginable and soon dead too. So let me take you down a thought hole, seeing how the world eats food?
But first of all, who cooks this food? It might be NASA for some of us but for the majority of the world, it is a female in the kitchen. And in most cases, it’s a mom or a wife.
Each and every day, billions of women stand in the kitchen to cook a meal for their whole family. Sometimes she gets some help and sometimes she doesn’t. Even if she is tired or her baby is crying, even if there is a storm outside or she’s on her vacation, such ladies still have to whip up a meal nonetheless.
Times are a’changing though and more and more families are beginning to change things too. Males, if not victimized or stigmatised, are getting into the kitchens. Not for becoming chefs (which a lot of them do) but for cooking meals for themselves and their families. Your gender or status is less of a factor when you stand in the bickering heat of the kitchen, spoiled by smells yet teased by hunger, biding time in patience as a gentle fire on the stove cooks a savoury meal worth spending time on. But that’s only true for middle-class families with a stable enough income to let at least one of the family members sit home all day to do house chores.
For the others, the story is still more interesting.
The modern world is ensuring that everyone gets the taste of cooking, but it cannot still ensure that everybody does cook. Millions of youngsters getting out in the real world each year are thoroughly unprepared to do simple tasks like cooking or washing clothes. You are lucky if your parents teach you that properly because the education system doesn’t give two shits about simple life skills. And thus a lot of us will rely on fast food chains to get us our food. Really unhealthy food. Or look longingly towards our homes while we munch on the canteen food we are completely bored of. Neither time nor money is particularly favourable to our new generations.
Anyway, the modern world has another side too- Poor people. They are seeing a rise in the difficulty of cooking. In a world where they inhale fumes and dust all day; what makes you think that poverty will get them any better than that in food. That is, of course, assuming they are able to get food at all. Cooking without any kind of fuel in a city is a challenge. Yet somehow, millions of people in absolute poverty go around the edges of starvation before every meal. Sometimes they get something on their hands, cooked or uncooked, eatable or just about eatable, or sometimes they just sleep after drinking lots of water and a cloth tied hard around their waist.
To imagine the hardship and resourcefulness of poor people to survive the wilderness of cities is near impossible. I personally am always divided between my admiration for them and feeling sorry for them.
But even for poor people or unemployed youngsters or just someone who isn’t down to cooking, there are community kitchens organised all around the world. Free or for a small amount of money, such food is the only support for people living on the margins. It stretches from non-profit organizations to small businesses delivering tiffins to your house. Everyone must get food and thus it must be prepared ‘somewhere’.
Even religions like Sikhism organize mass community kitchens at major events or mega kitchens feeding a simple meal without question every day. Many other religions and organizations do this too at a mass scale for free. Cooking is a community event, done in love and service for people who should never go hungry.
It begs a question about the future- Who is going to cook food for the world in the century after this? Will it be individuals cooking for free in every home, or poor people scraping by? Will it be massive kitchens for communities or will it be us, cooking for ourselves? As an optimist, I hope it’s something crazy like robots and as a sci-fi nerd I hope we never have to eat again to survive.
But no matter how it goes, we’ll probably never run out of people looking for the next tasty meal. So whether it’s alone or together, human or robot, doesn’t matter, as long as there is some of that gooey goodness on the plate for all of us.
Thanks to Shiksha Mishra and Harshal for reading the drafts of this.
