Internet and Food

Appears in
Oxford Companion to Food

By Alan Davidson

Published 2014

  • About
The Internet has revolutionized our relationship with food and ingredients. If we want lamb tagine for dinner, a hundred recipes are a search and milliseconds away; we can order the ingredients for delivery from our local supermarket via an online store and then seek advice, if we run into trouble cooking the dish, from amateur and professional cooks accessible through a plethora of Internet communities. Instead of learning to cook at mother’s knee, we can tap into kitchens all over the world.
The Internet provides us with a global store cupboard. Sourcing previously difficult-to-find ingredients is as easy as reaching for a bag of sugar from our own kitchen shelf; rare-breed pork and pigeon from Bresse as easy to obtain as a jar of marmalade. We now have so much flexibility, choice, and knowledge at our fingertips that identifiable local cuisines are in danger of being outmoded concepts.