There is no known group of humans who eat everything available to them

There is no known group of humans who eat everything available to them. A comestible greatly admired by one group is often detested by another. Mrs Beeton, the Delia Smith of her day, had a recipe for "Fishklosh", roast wallaby and parrot pie. The natives of Brunei prize rotten eggs as a delicacy, just as the English sportsman enjoys having his game putrefy before cooking it. Navajo Indians believe fresh fish is poisonous, and a number of important dishes in classical Arab cookery depend on a dough made of rotten barley, known to contain aflatoxins, among the deadliest carcinogens.Historians know that taste tends to move from a general preference for "sweet" to "dry" We are now in a dry phase. If you don't believe me, ask a wine merchant about sales of amontillado in comparison with brut champagne. Yet at Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens (1661-1859), while Champagne was available for eight shillings a bottle, most visitors preferred "Vauxhall Nectar", an emetic concoction of rum, syrup and petals of benjamin flowers.

German wines were sold with added sugar.Patterns in cooking are just as cyclical, a period of excess being followed by a period of austerity. Elizabeth David's glorious cycle of books began when she started longing for exotic ingredients during the drab days of rationing - you were lucky then to get beige soup or a rubbery rissole, never mind pissaladiere or ratatouille. Mrs David's instruction (adapted from Escoffier) to "Faites simple!" was a moral and aesthetic instruction as much as a culinary one And here we are approaching a definition. To understand food and fashion, you have to appreciate that cooking and design have a lot in common. A good design must have a sound concept, fine ingredients, be well made. It should be functional and it should, if at all possible, be pleasant to look at. Similarly, good cooking must also have excellent ingredients and preparation and should follow a reliable recipe The result should be both nutritious and flavoursome.

That's fine, but within those rules there's huge room for variety.In any society evolved beyond (a) rationing or (b) subsistence, food is a matter for social competition, for cultural modelling. Brillat-Savarin said, "Tell me what you eat and I'll tell you what you are." He was right, but should have added: "and what you want to be".It is in formal French cooking that the expression "good taste" first appears, originally as a means of putting down the peasantry and their coarse preferences Social competition was intense in 18th-century France. The Marquis d'Uxelles gave his name to a dish of quails in mushroom sauce, still in the classical repertoire as cailles a la duxelles. Another famous dish, Filet de volailles a la Bellevue, was named by Madame De Pompadour after one of her favourite houses Louis XV made his own omelettes Boeuf Stroganoff was named for a Russian prince.

These were dishes that were "designed"; deliberate gestures of taste with a "brand" attached.Thanks to a large degree to Elizabeth David, food became a matter of fashion in post-war Britain. Just as during the Fifties the Council of Industrial Design wanted to save English taste through Scandinavian furniture, so Elizabeth David and her followers sought to do the same with robust southern European peasant food. There is a curious precedent to this politicisation of ingredients. The word "restaurant" first appears in the stories of Marguerite de Navarre, where it means a restorative soup. By 1771 it had entered the Dictionnaire de Trevoux, where it was explained thus: "Certain traiteurs in Paris who sell nothing but restaurants are called restaurateurs." In pre-Revolutionary Paris, you had to expect to eat in a private house. The restaurant became established as an institution when, after the French Revolution, cooks left the great houses and set up independently At just the same time, they were able to become celebrities. (It was the same in music: while Haydn had been a tradesman/ servant, Beethoven was an artistic genius.) The original restaurant was, if you like, the very first "consumer" experience, in that it was a service offered for sale to complete strangers (whereas hitherto food had been the subject of master-servant or family relationships).People learn about interior design from the experience of going to restaurants where the style of the food served is always in some sort of relationship to the environment.