Let's travel back in time and go shopping in a German supermarket from the 1980s.

It will appear to us like a tragedy of the shortage economy.

When it comes to fruit and vegetables, we have to be content almost exclusively with Central European field and tree fruits and completely forego exotic fruits such as kiwis or litchis.

The mango is in the tin can, no one has ever heard of broccoli, and shallots are only available before high holidays.

Jakob Strobel y Serra

Deputy head of the features section.

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    We won't find bamboo shoots or soy sauce, rarely Farfalle or linguine, no Serrano ham and certainly no vegetarian sausages. The selection of apples, potatoes or cabbages is larger than in the future, while we can choose from an encyclopedic range of German sausage products at the meat counter. And we will find that today we live at the stove and table in a world full of paradoxes.

    We are currently experiencing the simultaneity of simplicity and diversity: never in our culinary history have we had a greater choice of foods, and never before have we had to cope with a greater loss of so many centuries-old foods.

    We experience a spectacular diversification of our food in our everyday life and on our travels we notice a galloping homogenization of eating behavior all over the world.

    Globalization has also globalized our taste, and at the same time, knowledge of our own culinary traditions becomes less and less with every foreign bite.

    In short: our table is over-laid, but the wealth is often just a chimera.

    What is a Pichelsteiner stew?

    In 1980 a German supermarket carried three to four thousand products, today there are up to fifty thousand. But this inflation is solely due to industrially produced foods, which often only differ in the label. At that time, Italians, Greeks and the Balkans dominated the foreign restaurant scene, today we have to choose between sushi and kimchi, poke bowl and pho bo during the lunch break - and consider ourselves culinary cosmopolitans just because we can eat with chopsticks and our peace with us Made coriander, which in Germany has long been said to stink like a dead bug.

    At the same time, however, we are content with a tiny section of the exotic cuisine, reduce Japan's grandiose culinary heritage to rice rolls, do not want to cost much more from Vietnam than noodle soup and include the gourmet superpower Peru, the inventor of the Andean-Chinese-Japanese fusion cuisines Chifa and Nikkei Same ceviche - a simplification that has also worked perfectly in Italy's pizza and pasta cuisine since the 1950s. By the way, most of us have long since forgotten what a Pichelsteiner stew is.