I’ll never forget this conversation that I once had with a local council food-safety officer.

She was lamenting to me about how many restaurants were making their own mayonnaise.

‘It’s such an annoying trend’, she said.
‘Just buy it like everyone else’.

‘How do you think it was made before corporations commercialised and made it shelf-stable with pasteurisation, preservatives and an unnecessary amount of sugar?’...

Was what I would have said if I wasn’t waiting for her to sign off on the certification for our food business

Instead I just nodded and commiserated about proper storage, danger zones, pathogens and the dangers of unpasteurised eggs.

Just to make extra sure she knew that I had that shit down pat.

(NB: Safe food handling practices are important, but not the point of this thread)

It brings to mind these words by Michael Pollan:

“The economic and ecological lines that connect us to the distant others we now rely on for our sustenance have grown so long and attenuated as to render both the products and their connections to us and the world utterly opaque”

To bake our own bread, to make our own mayonnaise or cheese reminds those of us embedded in modern food systems that these are more than ‘products’ made in a factory.

It “implicates us in the natural world in ways that the industrial economy would have us forget”

This is why cooking and food literacy in general is so important to me.

It’s not just about having skills to feed ourselves nutritionally and affordably, it’s also about having the knowledge to free ourselves from the blind reliance on corporations for basic sustenance.