How does immigration influence what we eat?
The most essential part of life is food. The term food has very diverse meaning, what is food for one living being is not for the other and this fact holds good for humans as well. The progress and evolution of civilization taught mankind to switch from uncooked to cooked food and that was the starting point of cuisine. The geographic location, culture of society and climate are the greatest influencers of cuisine. In predominantly cold countries the flora and fauna are different to that of predominantly warm countries and it played a background role in diversification of cuisine. The dependence of sea and river as source of basic ingredient for food also played a huge role in various ways to make cuisines different. The different ways to lit up fire led to different type of contributions to cuisines. The primitive wood fire enabled mankind to cook in a different way than the coal fire. Then came more controlled electric oven, micro wave oven and the mixture of all such ways to generate heat made it possible to explore new avenues towards refinement of cuisines.
The most prominent cuisines are:
- French
- Indian
- Italian
- Chinese
- American
There are so many more cuisines - too many to list out - all significant in their own right. Each country has their own cuisine and such cuisines evolve with the evolution of society. In early days traveling from one country to the other was not easy as the mode of transportation was not suitable. The mode of transportation was limited to train and ship, both were very much time consuming and painstaking. Advent of airplanes revolutionized the mode of transportation and people from all around the world started moving quickly from one country to another very easily and globalization became a meaningful word.
Modern mode of transportation opened a whole new world of opportunity and people started to move to different countries to avail such opportunity and become residents - immigrants. They carried with them their culture and food habits. They also attracted the other people from their own country to settle with them to form a community. As soon as such communities are formed they started to emulate their native cuisine with the similar but different ingredients and it triggered the evolution of cuisine. These communities strive hard to arrange for the specific ingredients from their own country and as such new business propositions come into existence. The French Cuisine will taste different with India grown ingredients. The other way round is when such immigrants try to prepare the typical cuisine of the country they have settled in also will be different. And in the process authentic cuisines appear with different level of arguable authenticity but the main structure of such cuisines holds the identity.
Different types of such immigrant communities render different types of influences on a cuisine, initiating some sort of fusion cuisine where they find their creative pursuit to create new dishes like a French wrap may have tandoor chicken to give it a new dimension. In today’s parlance such Fusion Cuisine can be considered with due importance. The immigrant chefs play a big role in such Fusion Cuisine as they are familiar with their own cuisine and they get to know the specific cuisine of the country they now live.
This fusion cuisine will never have a specific name like, French, Indian, Italian but it will be there and some food entrepreneurs will be highly successful in the process. And as for the common people they will have the chance to taste such innovative dishes. They may be unable to identify the dish as French or Italian but whatever it may be, there will be new taste, new flavour and above all a confluence of delicacy and creativity.