Essential Question:What are the criteria that makes food authentic?

I am exploring my essential question through research and interviewing. The answers I’ve gotten so far has been in the realm of what I expected. I expected both articles and videos to say that authenticity is about spices, ingredients, and the chefs relationship to the food. My expectations seem to be accurate so far and none of the answers have surprised me yet. Exploring my essential question has allowed me to read and think about things that I didn’t orginally focus too much on in the beginning of my project. The importance of cookbooks has come up in both my research and interviews. I had never thought cookbooks were too important before, and I only ever saw them as an antiquated recource for looking up recipes. I didn’t understand the importance of cookbooks when the internet existed. But I now realize that cookbooks, especially old family ones, hold much more valuable information then I had previously thought. In cookbooks there is nuance, often personal anecdotes, and in general a more wholistic view of a dish then a simple online recipe offers.

When starting this project I had orginally planned to interview 25-30 people. I thought that this would be an easy goal to achieve before I actually started. I was surprised by how hard getting 25-30 to be interviewed is. I wasn’t previously aware of how much organization, attention to detail and general communication skills it takes to schedule interviews with that many people. Reaching out, getting people to agree and getting people to respond proved much harder to do in real life than as an idea in my head. Now I’ll be happy to have interviewed 10 people by the end of Senior Project. To deal with getting more people to interview I now realize how important reaching out and communicating is. I now try to offer as much explanation in my emails requesting an interview as succinctly as possible. Crafting a well written, concise and easy to understand email has been the greatest challenge as well as the greatest success for me so far. Since I’ve refined my emailing process I’ve been able to confirm interviews with big time chefs who I’m very excited to speak to.

So far I’d say I’m half way to getting an answer to my essential question that I’m comftorable with. Through researching and interviews I’ve noticed some themes that run through out all the answers I’ve read. Seasoning, ingredients, intent, technique and relationship to cooking have came up many times. I would like to know more about intent in cooking. In two interviews I’ve conducted so far, I learned that caring about what you make and enjoying cooking is what makes them consider something authentic. I think that is really interesting and would like to explore that more. Another thing I would like to explore more is the perspetive of the diner. Restaurants, chefs, brands and and many more things throw around the term authentic. I would like to know more about how a diner considers authenticity. My first essential question was, how does cuisine change and evolve once it reaches America. I know think that question did not fit the essence of what I was trying to understand. Recently I’ve been conducting my Senior Project with the essential question, what are the criteria that makes a dish or ingredient authentic, in mind.