This applies to so many aspects of human life – our memories are too short, and every generation has to learn again the mistakes that previous generations made.
Originally shared by Bob Lai
I found this quote from Chef Magnus Nilsson to be of interest, but perhaps not for the reasons one would think.
Most foods are designed for sort of immediate consumption, which means that if people stopped practicing the traditional ways of doing them, after one generation, all the primary knowledge about how to do something is gone. And after two generations, also the secondary knowledge, basically the people have seen someone else do it, that’s also gone. After the third generation, which is not that long, it’s just, perhaps, I don’t know, 70 or 80 years, everything that’s left is written or otherwise recorded knowledge, and that’s not the same as practiced knowledge. Because even if you read a recipe, you can never actually know how something is supposed to taste by doing so.”
– Magnus Nilsson, The Mind of a Chef, S3:E15
Now, I understand the culinary implications, and Chef Nilsson’s observation is spot-on. We don’t cook the same way as our grandparents.
*It’s the political implications of Chef Nilsson’s statement that I find disturbing.
America is sitting here, some of us wondering how a country where the Greatest Generation was known for fighting Nazi Germany and directing its social and political will towards winning World War II. But, after Donald Trump repeatedly lauded White Supremacists and alt-right Nazi protesters as ‘very fine people,’ blaming those who stood in opposition to them; after his vice-president could not be arsed to speak out against same; and after continued attempts for such groups to hold rallies and protests where they chant mottos like ‘Blood and Soil,’ have we found the equivalent of that three-generation ‘loss’? We’re losing (or have lost) the primary generation who fought in WW 2. The second generation is in their 50’s and older. What comes next? Voters who don’t understand … what, that Nazi Germany was the embodiment of evil? That Fascism is a dead end? That authoritarian governance is ultimately self-destructive?
Is ‘Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it?’ doomed to be America’s epitaph?
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Violante de Rojas Tagging my historian e-sis, even though this will likely show up in her stream.
Alex Grossman because I appreciate his insight and approach to civil discourse.
Edward Morbius for similar reasons.