"Our food culture today is composite and changeable. It is advertising. It is branding, marketing, travel and Instagram. Recipes aren’t passed from hand to hand, they come at you from all angles. They’re on TV, on the internet, in newspaper supplements, on YouTube and in the comments under Instagram posts. Restaurant trends like smashburgers spread like a rash from New York to London, Lahore and Tokyo, via the infrastructure of the commercial internet. We’ve gone from learning how to eat from the people around us to learning how to eat from a few billion dissenting voices across the world via the global food machine. This expansive food culture is not, it bears saying, always pure of heart. But it is culture. And, once you start thinking about these forces acting on your seemingly personal tastes and desires, you can begin to look at your own diet with curiosity, rather than judgement. Why do I want what I want? Now, there’s a question."