Is critical gastronomic thinking dying?

"There is no intelligence without memory. Without memory and knowledge, we will always be at the mercy of experienced manipulators," warns José Antonio Marina, interviewed by Antonio Ortí.

When it comes to eating, the best food should be what we enjoy most. An ideal that represents the perfect balance between the hedonistic self and wisdom for a healthy and satisfying relationship with reality. An unattainable ideal, but one that has shaped the history of humanity and its appetites.

We used to have our own tastes: local (community) and personal (individual). The more we learned, the more we knew and tasted, the more we knew, the better.

Perhaps modernity is against gourmets today. Why know about flavor? Why know the what, how, and why of foods and drinks? Why try? Why learn and build a taste personality if all the answers are categorized, organized, updated, and even geolocated on social media?

The philosopher and educator also warns us: “Our students have come to the conclusion that it is not worth learning what they can find on the Internet.”

And from anywhere, we now access this digital network 24/7 with our mobile phones, which we use as practically infinite external storage. And we unconsciously accept this new condition as cyborgs , without considering the consequences it entails for our relationship with the world.

The privilege of being permanently connected to the internet is indeed a superpower. But with great power comes great responsibility, not only to others, but also to oneself and one's mental balance. Marvel comics have been far more prescient than they ever intended in this regard.

So much unintegrated external memory is a fatality. Our network-dependent connection has turned us into Borges's character, Funes the Memorious, who in the story acknowledged that his memory was a garbage dump. "I suspect, however, that he wasn't very capable of thinking. To think is to forget differences, to generalize, to abstract. In Funes's crowded world, there were only details, almost immediate," wrote Jorge Luis Borges. Immediacy can be very dangerous.

In reality, human beings have always taken advantage of this ability to network the knowledge generated by our peers. No one would survive if they had to invent ex novo each of the physical or intellectual artifacts that assist us from the moment we are born. Fortunately, we learn to eat, speak, cook, relate to others, think rationally… Shared knowledge makes us human and citizens of a series of concentric communities that extend from the family to the global world. This is exactly how culture works. This is also true of that specific part called science and that other part we call food culture, with its shared tastes.

We learn to like what our role models like because we understand it's what's best for us. Or at least that's how we've done it until now.

We humans have (or used to have?) food cultures, with shared knowledge, skills, practices, preferences, and tastes that constantly evolved because this fosters (or fostered?) a beneficial and sustainable relationship with the environment. At the same time, we developed our own skills, tastes, and thoughts because this defined us as people, making us individuals with personality. Full and autonomous citizens with a critical spirit.

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But suddenly, the world became digital, and no one had trained us for it. We improvised our relationship with this very different environment, trying to adapt and survive, clinging to the internet to avoid drowning in the new, unstable, liquid times.

There is no intelligence without memory, or there can be no intelligence without integrating memory to organize thought. The important thing is the questions; you have to know how to ask, yes, but to ask, you have to know how. You have to learn to ask and also to question the answers because the answers are always biased, but perhaps they are not driven by shared interest, by a common interest. Nor by responsibility. Nor by ethics.

Without memory (of taste), without knowledge, without curiosity, without identity, without personality and without a critical spirit, we will be at the mercy of those experienced manipulators who inhabit our screens and try to get us to swallow ultra-processed feed conveniently refined from any trace of landscape, country, commitment, texture, aroma, flavor and even shame.