“On a summer afternoon in the city of Sumter in South Carolina, three men…stood in a field, boiling watermelon juice,” says Aeon magazine in a deep dive into “a growing global movement to establish a culinary canon and to restore the actual local ingredients that composed it.” As in literature or music, a culinary canon would capture high points of cuisine. Writer Jill Neimark quotes psychologist Paul Rozin as saying that cuisine was traditionally regarded as a sort of low art but has risen in esteem over the past 20 years. “You attend a restaurant as you do a concert. The composer, in this case the chef, tells you what is on the menu, and you all experience it together.”
Aeon says as cuisine rose in respect, “The ingredient itself – the ineluctable thing itself, the pure taste on its own – began to take center stage.”