The transmission of culinary knowledge today

Content about food is abundant on the various social networks, whether in the form of reacts, in which people watch other people cook and give their reactions, or videos teaching recipes, product tastings, sensory analysis, in short, a vast world.

It’s not uncommon to find this material with tags, questions to the content producers, followers inviting other people, arranging to do it or asking someone they know to do it for them.

Yes, it used to be recipe books, the favorite medium!

The pandemic was undoubtedly a catalyst in this process and there has been no shortage of reports that have tackled this subject from different points of view, whether analyzing the digital environment’s stimulus to the consumption of ultra-processed foods, habits and impacts on consumption, or criticizing the way in which bodily changes are approached on social networks. We can see that, even after the pandemic, content about food is still on the rise.

However, what we’re going to highlight here is a possible migration in the place of use of the recipient of different recipes. While recipe notebooks used to be the preferred medium, with manuscripts combined with cut-out collages, today we have folders on social networks.

If chemists, physicists and chefs reject recipes as outdated, considering them to be writings that ignore the processes involved in cooking, historians, anthropologists and linguists revel in the possibilities of studying recipes, their wording, the terms used, the utensils requested: all vast material for producing knowledge. But what about outside academia? Outside academia, recipes are still the desired Grail of cooking. The popularization of social networks has brought us closer to the great chefs; today they are not isolated in their clean stainless steel kitchens, they are within easy reach of a message. They often make recipes in their own homes, recording videos and sharing tips. A quick glance at their posts and we see a series of comments: “What about the recipe? Can you share the recipe? What’s the digital recipe?”

In various videos and lives in which chefs are willing to cook or even actually teach a preparation, they ask that the focus not be on the recipe, that the process be understood and that the quantities be given afterwards. Some of them are very uncomfortable with the requests for recipes. It’s a real dispute: on the one hand, the chefs and their dislike of recipes, and on the other, what we’ll call the public at home, who may or may not be responsible for their own or others’ daily diet, and those who are referred to, in a somewhat pejorative way, by food professionals, as recipe collectors, who put together several recipes but don’t actually make any.

When it comes to recipes, one aspect to consider is their sentimental value. Whether you’re a professional or not, it’s hard for anyone not to recognize what an honor it is to receive a family recipe. The way in which this transmission takes place is not simple – you don’t just take a manuscript and pass it on to someone else or pass it on from hand to hand, not least because often the manuscript of that family recipe hasn’t even been made yet. Transmission takes place in the process of teaching through doing: the person who holds the knowledge (usually a woman) makes and unravels the “secrets” for the apprentice, and the apprentice is set to make and have their final product “analyzed”. The highest level to be achieved is to be equal to that of the person who taught. Repetition and standard results are what you want in a kitchen, whether it’s professional or not.

The new “recipe books”, how this material is being stored nowadays.

If the end is the same, we can leave the theoretical scrutiny to their respective areas of knowledge and think that perhaps the format of social networks is almost the ideal medium that best represents the changes in family organizations in recent decades. The increase in commuting time and the changes in domestic service mean that recipes are being transmitted less and less, magazines have also fallen into disuse, and TV recipe programs have had their times reduced and are either shared with current affairs or restricted to pay channels. Simply taking a recipe-text from the internet and reproducing it can lead to confusion when executing it, which is why the video+subtitle format seems to be an appropriate combination that responds to the changes highlighted so far.

Even though the act of cooking your own food is one of the first to be sacrificed for political, social and economic reasons, it still arouses interest and even genuine passion. Just look at the reach of this content on the web. In fact, the fight for food sovereignty, for an improvement in the population’s health and so many other factors debated in public policies involves access to quality ingredients and also knowledge of how to handle these ingredients, in other words, how to actually cook them! And recipes are still the best-known pillar for this.

That’s how we got to you

As Massimo Montanari says, “bread is the food of civilized man” because it comes about through the transformation of the nature of grains into food. We are attentive to the next formats that the recipes will use to continue to be shared, taught and valued, because for centuries this material has proved to be unalterable even in the midst of so many changes.