Talk:Traditional food

Silly article

This is a naīve and silly article. Its opening paragraph seems to define as a "traditional food" any food that has been around for more than one generation, whether home made or industrial, whether limited to one household or eaten worldwide. So what is not a "traditional food" by this definition? Spaghetti alla carbonara was apparently invented in the 1940s; is it "traditional"? Pop-Tarts have been eaten by several generations of Americans; are they "traditional"? How about canned ravioli? The only thing it seems to exclude is restaurant inventions, like say Crêpes Suzette — though you can even find sources that classify them as a "traditional dessert".

Yet on the other hand, many foods which clearly have been around for centuries or millennia are not mentioned at all: bread, porridge, fried eggs, beer, wine, cheese, steamed rice, bean soup, roast leg of lamb, boiled greens, salted anchovies, etc., etc.

The article includes both prepared dishes and raw ingredients: collard greens, pork (bizarrely listed under "Mexico", as though it was not widely eaten in Europe, China, and the rest of the Americas), rice, sweet potato, crayfish, whale meat, Bresse chicken, etc.

It includes both individual dishes and classes of food like the English full breakfast and the North American Thanksgiving dinner.

This could become an interesting article if, instead of assuming that the notion of "traditional food" was well-defined, and trying to list any food that anyone has ever called traditional, addressed the vagueness and open-endedness of the term and discussed a variety of criteria that have been used to define it, and the uses that are made of it. Some of the existing sources in fact cover this topic. --Macrakis (talk) 20:21, 31 July 2016 (UTC)

PS See also my Wikipedia:WikiProject Food and drink/Original, authentic, and traditional.

Macrakis I'm reading in your comment here (from 10 years ago) that this article would be best served by making the subject one of "authenticity in food" and collating commentary and history around that topic. I've got some directions I can go with that, but do you still think that is the best direction, and if so, do you have recommendations for sources that should be drawn upon? Rollinginhisgrave (talk | edits) 06:45, 23 November 2025 (UTC)

Rollinginhisgrave Thanks for your comment. It really isn't clear what to do about this article. "Traditional" at this point seems to mean almost nothing. It is certainly used as a marketing term to evoke a mythical past. People like Alberto Grandi and Karima Moyer-Nocchi (Chewing the fat: an oral history of Italian foodways from fascism to dolce vita ISBN 978-0-9965466-0-7) have shown how much of what we think of as "traditional Italian cuisine" is nothing of the sort. Shockingly, neither Grandi nor Moyer-Nocchi are mentioned on the Italian cuisine page, which on the other hand is packed with boosterism and clichés. Authenticity in the Kitchen (2005 proceedings from the Oxford Symposium, ISBN-10 1-903018-47-1 -- full text freee at https://www.academia.edu/34841819/Authenticity_in_the_Kitchen) seems like a good place to start. --Macrakis (talk) 06:50, 29 November 2025 (UTC)

Many thanks Macrakis, I'll check out the Authenticity in the Kitchen text. I've been keeping an eye out since making this comment and have come across Eating Traditional Food: Politics, identity and practices which I found very interesting. From the foreword:

‘Eating Traditional Food: politics, identities and practices’ wrestles down the concept and practices of producing and consuming ‘traditional foods’, without falling either into the ethnocentric, nationalist rendering of tradition, or the blanket denunciation of the very concept of tradition by critical scholars, who thereby abandon any notion of common practices over time, which can be used to contain invented traditions and criticise market and state manipulation of heritage. We are reminded that tradition is the production of the past in the present...

There's certainly an article to be written on "authenticity in food", and maybe? an article on traditional food as a subject, though I don't think there is any world where we end up with a simple List of traditional foods as the article is now. Rollinginhisgrave (talk | edits) 07:15, 29 November 2025 (UTC)

Ningnongtwit I'm sure this is covered in the sources above, but perhaps one way to approach "traditional" is to think about what it contrasts with:

• industrial production (TV dinner)
• chef creations (lobster mac and cheese)
• food we didn't know in our youth
• food that is identified with some other group
• cosmopolitan food (hamburgers)

Just some ideas. --Macrakis (talk) 07:26, 29 November 2025 (UTC)

Define "traditional cuisine"

I totally agree Macrakis. There is no exact "scientific" definition of what traditional cuisine is. For example –tomatoes were introduced to Europe in the fifteen hundreds by Christopher Columbus yet are considered a part of traditional Italian cuisine. I'm calling bullshit on that. Tomatoes are definitely NOT Italian. The Portuguese introduced chillies into India in the 16th century yet nobody blinks at them being considered part of the traditional cuisine, which is a load of bull farts. Chillies are NOT Indian. Traditional Indian curry is not hot, contains no chillies, tomato, potato, capsicum or for that matter any post-Columbian import. All of that crap is nothing more than post-colonial British Imperialism - or something akin to that. Anywhinge it's not accurate.

Just exactly how long does a dish have to be eaten in a region to be considered 'traditional'? One generation? One century? One millenium? Is curry a traditional English dish, seeing that you can order it in practically every pommy inn? Is traditional Australian food witchetty grubs, fish and chips, or chinese stir-fry? Are we talking pre-colonisation or what? 1800s? 1900s? 2000 and on? Too soon?

I guess in a lot of people's minds, and indeed the general bulk of historians and other academics, we're looking at post-war time periods. Many countries had their borders redefined in the late Forties and it would be reasonable to say that "traditional cuisine" refers to pre-war regional food.

Maybe.

Maybe not. It's not science. Like astrology it's a craft or an art. Likewise, scientists are out of their depth here. Ningnongtwit (talk) 08:29, 11 September 2020 (UTC)