Since When Did Food Start to Taste Like This?

A Morning in London

London had energy that morning. Not calm. Never calm. But energy. The sun caught the glass of office buildings. Light ran along the pavements. Cafés opened their doors. Delivery bikes cut through traffic. People moved quickly with coffees, phones, school bags, tote bags, messages half-written, and lives already in motion.

Nobody had quite arrived in the day, but everyone was already moving through it. Parents checked bags. Office workers walked too fast. Someone laughed into a phone. A man balanced coffee, laptop and the expression of someone already late. Life was everywhere.

I was in the middle of it with my children. A jumper had been found and lost again. A school bag had been checked twice and was still missing something. One train had already left without us. Nobody had eaten. So I made the sensible choice.

The Perfect Answer

I crossed the pavement, pushed through the glass door of a fast-food counter and ordered breakfast. Sausage. Cheese. Egg. Bun. Breakfast, in theory. It arrived quickly, wrapped in paper and warm in the hand. No waiting. No plate. No cutlery. No pause. It was built for one hand, a school run and a morning with no room left in it. In that moment, it was almost perfect.

The children ate happily. There was something beautiful in their appetite. Children do not interrogate pleasure. They receive it. Around us, paper opened, coffee lids clicked and screens glowed. The food was hot, soft, salty, sweet and immediate. It worked. That was the point.

Then I took a bite. I did not recoil or become the man delivering a speech about real bread and lost civilisation before nine in the morning. I simply paused. The bun was soft, but not like bread. The sausage had seasoning, but no animal memory. The cheese melted, but did not really taste of cheese. Everything arrived together: fat, sugar, salt, warmth, stickiness.

It was not bad. That would have been too simple. It was competent, clever and perfectly adjusted to the morning. It tasted as if someone had studied hunger, fatigue, children, cities, speed, softness, comfort and the small panic of being late, then built a product to answer all of it.

And that was the problem.

Food From Nowhere

I am not making an argument against convenience. Convenience is often what keeps a difficult day moving, and the freedom to reject it can itself be a luxury. Nor is this a sentimental claim that every meal once took hours, every loaf came from a village baker and everybody sat together around a generous table. That past never existed for everyone.

The question is different. What happens when convenience stops being one answer and becomes the operating system of food?

Processed food is usually discussed through ingredients, health and regulation. All matter. But it is also a cultural process. It removes uncertainty. It reduces the need for skill at the point of service. It makes flavour reproducible, transportable and recognisable. It allows the same promise to survive a change of cook, city, season or supplier.

Commercially, this is a remarkable achievement. Culturally, it can become a quiet erasure. The tomato no longer needs to taste of August. The bread does not need a baker. The cheese does not need an animal, a pasture or a place. Flavour becomes a signal—smoky, creamy, spicy, indulgent—rather than the consequence of something grown, made and cared for.

The system had understood our morning perfectly. It had understood the late train, the hungry children, the need for warmth and the absence of time. It answered with precision. But not with food that tasted of anywhere.

What Hospitality Is For

This matters beyond fast food. Restaurants, wine bars, hotels and food businesses now operate under the same pressure: remove friction, shorten the wait, standardise the outcome, make the choice easier and the margin more predictable. Much of that pressure is real. An operation that ignores cost, consistency or the guest's time does not become soulful. It becomes badly run.

But efficiency is a structure, not a purpose. When it becomes the purpose, hospitality starts to imitate the systems that are already better at speed, convenience and scale. The room may be beautiful and the language elaborate, yet the experience can still feel as processed as the breakfast bun.

Hospitality has another job. It can return specificity to daily life: a welcome that is not scripted into emptiness, a dish that belongs to its season, a bottle chosen because it changes the meal, a person who knows enough to guide without performing knowledge. These are not decorative luxuries. They are the things that make the exchange human.

The future of hospitality will not be secured by opposing technology or professional discipline. Both are necessary. It will depend on knowing where process should stop—where judgement, appetite, generosity and the productive imperfection of a real person must begin.

The Question That Remains

Food is one of the first ways a civilisation explains itself. Through it we learn season, place, patience, celebration, scarcity, memory and care. When food becomes detached from all of those things, we do not only lose flavour. We lose a small part of our ability to recognise where we are and who made life possible around us.

For anyone operating a restaurant, a food business or a wine company, the practical question is simple: what part of what you offer could only have come from you, from this place and from these people? If the honest answer is nothing, efficiency has completed its work.

Outside, London was still bright. The children had finished eating. Nothing had gone wrong. That was the strange part.

And quietly, without drama, the question remained: since when did food start tasting like this?