The illusion of perfect food

Katerina Pavlakis written by

It's not your cooking. It's your conditioning.

I have noticed something: The more we’re surrounded by processed and packaged foods (and celebrity chefs on TV) the more we expect our home-cooked meals to measure up. Not in nutrition, but in texture, gloss, and aesthetic.

That extra silky hummus. That super shiny sauce. That impossibly smooth soup or fluffy white bread.

And when we make it from scratch - even if it tastes great - we think that something still feels… off. Like it’s not 'quite right'.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, especially after a couple of recent conversations in the shop…

Like, his week, someone asked me how to thicken a stew.

Simple, I said: just simmer it until the liquid reduces.

They looked… surprised. No flour? No cornstarch? No magic packet?

And reminded me of another conversation I had in the shop about… hummus. A customer wanted a better homemade recipe - but not because theirs tasted bad. It just didn’t seem right. “It’s never like the stuff we buy,” she said.
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And that’s the thing, isn’t it?

We’ve been trained to believe that factory-made food is the gold standard. Shiny sauces, perfectly smooth dips, the ‘right’ texture, the ‘proper’ taste.

We expect home-cooked food to mimic the factory made 'perfection' - instead of the other way around.

Like those impossibly red supermarket apples: waxed and polished, bred for looks over flavour, and stored for months in low-oxygen chambers. Or that eternally soft bread that never goes stale - achieved through a cocktail of dough conditioners and preservatives that would may alarm you, if you took the time to decipher the small print.

We’re conditioned to think this is quality.

But the real cost? It's not just about what we see: it's about what we've lost.

Wonky veg gets binned. Ancient grain varieties vanish because they don't suit industrial baking. Small producers go under because they can't afford to achieve that factory-perfect finish. And the chemicals that make all this possible? They usually hide behind vague terms like ‘natural flavouring’ and often don't even need to be listed on the label.

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So here’s my nudge:

• Start seeing through the fake perfection.
• Choose rough over shiny.
• Cook at home, shop local, support the people who still grow, raise and sell real food.

And when you catch yourself wishing your stew or hummus looked more ‘perfect’, remember:

That’s not your cooking. That’s your conditioning.

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We don’t need trickery in packets to make real food taste real good.

We need to trust our senses.
We need to remember that cooking is messy, human, and joyful — and most of all, ours.

If you ever catch yourself wishing your stew or hummus were more like the shop-bought stuff…
Pause. And call out the illusion.

This isn’t a downgrade.

It’s a homecoming

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Categories: : (RE)THINK