Just wanted to highlight this from my column at the end of last week. We've lost the knowledge of how to cook simply and we need to relearn it, and looking at other cultures can help us a lot.

Individual recipes are no replacement for an established food culture that weaves together relationships between dishes, seasons and health for an overall, lifelong diet. I say this as someone who writes A LOT of recipes.

These considerations are inherent to traditional food cultures. You don't need to worry about reducing waste, eating seasonally, healthily or affordably because those matters built into the food you eat anyway.

When I was a kid we KNEW that the day after eating Hainanese chicken rice there'd be a plate of chicken fried with sesame oil and ginger because that was how you used up the leftover chicken. Even for me now, chicken rice doesn't feel complete until we have that the next day.

A food culture is a complex system of interrelationships between foods that takes centuries and generations to develop. Trying to re-engineer that one online recipe at a time is a nearly impossible task, and our health, economy and environment suffer from it.

Anyway, here's that column if you wanted to read it. https://www.goodfood.com.au/recipes/news/whats-for-dinner-adam-liaw-on-why-the-answer-is-more-important-than-you-think-20200521-h1o7s0