Culinary Change, Disruption, and Death: Do Traditional Cuisines Have a Future?

In recognition of a worldwide wave of extinction of minority languages and dialects, linguists are intensely engaged with the issue of language death. A related process of ‘cuisine death’ is also underway, likely on a similar scale to what is happening with languages. It is therefore striking that there is little discussion in food studies of cuisine death. In this paper, we discuss why the field, despite its awareness in a general way of the loss of specific foods and foodways, has failed to recognise the wholesale demise of traditional culinary systems. We situate this discussion within a typology of cuisines based upon differently structured networks of culinary discourse and argue against a view that all cuisines are hybrids. Only through recognition of the existence of deep grammatical structure in cuisine can one appreciate the nature of culinary death. Finally, we call upon the field to develop an effort to document as fully as possible endangered cuisines.