Food, festivals and tradition

Because food is the part of a festival you can actually share. A ceremony can be watched, but a meal has to be eaten together, so it pulls scattered relatives back to one table. The dishes also carry meaning. At Tet, the square sticky rice cake represents the earth and gratitude to ancestors, and offering it on the family altar comes before anyone takes a bite. Without the food, the day would feel like an ordinary holiday. Fewer families make these things at home for fairly unsentimental reasons. Wrapping and boiling the cakes takes the best part of two days and needs a yard, a huge pot and several pairs of hands, none of which a couple in a small flat has. Meanwhile a supermarket sells a perfectly decent one for the price of a lunch. I do think something is lost, mind you. The value was never just the cake; it was the night spent around the fire while grandparents told stories, and you can't buy that in a box. Even so, I'm optimistic about the future of traditional foods themselves. People grow more attached to them, not less, as daily life becomes more international; someone who eats pizza all year still wants the old dishes at New Year. What will change is who makes them. I imagine specialist producers taking over, with home cooking kept alive as an occasional family project, a bit like baking bread in Europe.