TEDxBrno - Michal Hromas - Farming and Food Preparation: inspired by our ancestors

Food economy and preparation: inspired by our ancestors Michal Hromas Thank you for the introduction, though it sounded awfully ... awfully dramatic. The awkward thing is that I lecture about the ideals of food then I bgring a bag of potatoes. I do not want to talk about the nobility, the tradition and the heritage but rather to search for something different in it. Do not be confused by the names, the glorification ... Do not be confused or put off by the halo around it, but search for something more, or try to seach for something more. (there is a jewish joke) I deal with judeo-arabic cuisine. The arabic cuisine comprises of cuisines all around the Mediterranean, the Arab world, Spain ... Those are places where the cultures met and clashed and I'm most interested in those places. (that is the place of the joke) The jewish cuisine is all traditional, everything is connected to tradition. Any meal you get on your plate symbolize something. It is an obsession to see symbols in everything. For the most of us, the tradition itself is a symbol. It is something we received and carry on with a vague notion that we have to though we do not know why. I'm interested in the Why. The joke is about foreigners visiting a jewish restaurant. The jews wanted to offer them something traditional. So they made cholent. That meal would not be popular today as we prefer lighter meals, the italian cuisine especially. This is only beans, groats and lard with a ham sticking out of it. They ate it with dissappointment and said "This does not taste too good" They replied "It is not supposed to taste good, it's a tradition." That does not satisfy me so I was searching for more and what I found ... I will not talk about religion in particular but about the manipulation, about the packing around it; around meals, festivities, all of it. Everything is connected and I'm obsessed with searching for the relations and making sense to it, discovering the logic of it. I do not condemn a thing because it symbolizes something. I'm interested in what it symbolizes and why and why they chose that particular food. How is it thought out and how it works. If I can like it, because it is practical and good. If I can ignore the packing and focus on the content. If that makes any sense. I discovered that it is very simple. Whenever a religion grasped a certain amount of people, the one thing they couldn't do is to take away their food. Definitely not. The food is far too important. They had to make up new festivities where people could eat well. Then they added a certain symbol and a new tradition was created and went on. For the system to function well it had to be constructed with a view to natural cycles. No wonder nobody can declare "strawberry-carnage" festival in December. He would not do well as a messiah. Now we see that when we look at it differently, it makes sense. We can start asking: why pig-stickings and carnivals were in winter? You already know the answer, I see I needn't tell you anything. It is something that is coming back. There was a time when people ate everything. (They still do but have less money for it, thank god.) Then people started to get more sentimental and turned to home cuisine again. I experienced something like this in Greece where figs lied about everywhere and nobody ate them. I was really mad. Why don't they eat it?! Our people would pay fortune to eat those! And I remembered the awe in Sahara when we unpacked our apples which lie about everywhere here and nobody cares about them. I have a few more points about what a season is and how it relates to food... and why our ancestors thought things out they way they did... You probably get it already. ... the sequence of meals, the way we eat ... Not because the gastronomic rules say so. Forget about them and forget about tradition. But look for the meaning whether we should like it because it is good and because it works. When we understand how it works. That's all. It is about the homecoming not about national pride. It grows here, it falls from trees here so we pick it up and eat it. That is all. That makes sense. In the same way conservation and food economy was based on consumption of everything. They slaughtered a pig, washed intestines and created sausages. They put them into a pot and poured lard (from the same pig) onto it. That was tinned meat. Sausages are primitively tinned meat. Dried sausage lasts incredibly long even in room temperatures. Nowadays it is a delicacy, it was tinned meat back then. That was the way to conserve meat for months and months. The salt, the spices, the garlic it all had this effect. That is why they did that. It was not like today, when someone buys a kilo of sausages and eat them at once. It had to last. They sliced it to soups e.g. Meat was not available every day It is nice to think about those things in this manner. Why? What is the purpose? Why is it like this? And learn to like it just because it is the way it is. It is a trend of today. That is the last thing I wanted to say: Trend can be full of nonsense A lot of nonsense can become trendy and people are falling for it. It is nice not to have the feeling that I do not want it because it is trendy (it is popular, everybody stuff it, but I don't give a damn) I think it would be good to use the fact that people are like this and make a trend of a good thing for a change. So, why not say: "Tradition is not bad, let's look at it from a different perspective. Let's use primitive, simple things to contrieve." My time is up, thank you for your attention