Is our food dying?

Earlier this week, we had a longish debate at the lunch table. 

In the foreseeable future, will some foods / food preparations and items stop being made? Meaning, your regular home-made, catering cooked foods. Not factory manufactured biscuits and stuff. We are talking about vegetable, pulses, fruit preparations, breads, rice, accompaniments, domestic snacks, and more like that.

One argument is, everything is cyclical. Things make a comeback. Like bell-bottoms. Nothing really dies. Someone, somewhere will be producing, preparing, and consuming items that are perhaps not easily available. 

So, the item or preparation might actually be 'statistically' dead - but since someone is consuming it somewhere, there is a chance that it might make a comeback and become a rage all over the civilised world. 

I am in other school of thought. I think foods and food preparations are getting extinct. 

Two reasons. First being i have personally seen regular foods transitioning to exotic or once in a while affairs. Like the jowar / bajra / maize breads (locally called bhakari), which once were staple are now eaten perhaps twice a year, on occasions. 

Second is there is no makers, and no eaters left!! Just like the average vocabulary reduces 20% with each generation, i think the food items one is exposed to is reduced with every generation. My grandmother had far wider 'menu' so to speak, as compared to my mother. Perhaps, my mother only learnt and prepares what she likes / or what she is good at...
Similarly, with professional catering. The items on the menu are regular, similar everywhere... And the slightly more seasonal, complicated, expensive ones are discarded with each cook.


IMO, with changing tastes, choices, likes - there definitely will be food items that wont be available. No one will cook them. The recipes will die.

Instead, new items will keep getting invented. One day someone is going to try pizza with black dal topping, or pour egg inside a chapatti and make inside out omelette.  


What do you think? Are we eating the kind of food/s our parents ate? Will the next generation eat food identical to us?