There’s a particular sadness in watching a dish become famous. Not the kind of fame that brings a cook pride or a village recognition, but the kind that slowly, almost imperceptibly, pulls a recipe away from its roots. I’ve seen it happen in my own lifetime, in my own country, and across borders. The food we celebrate on the global stage is often the food that has already begun to die at home.

I remember standing in a market in Oaxaca years ago, watching a woman pat masa between her palms with a rhythm that felt older than language. She was making tlacoyos, stuffing them with requesón and epazote, cooking them on a comal blackened by generations of use. The smell was earthy, alive, almost metallic from the nixtamal. A few tourists hovered, cameras ready, but they didn’t buy. They were waiting for the tlayudas, the “Mexican pizza” they’d read about online. The woman shrugged. She knew what sold. But I saw her face, and I saw what we were losing.

The Journey vs. The Heist

Food travels. It always has. Spices crossed oceans, tomatoes reshaped Italian kitchens, chilies rewired the cuisines of Asia. But there’s a line between migration and extraction. When a dish migrates, it adapts. It marries local ingredients, picks up new names, and becomes a conversation between cultures. When it’s extracted, it’s plucked from its context, stripped of its history, and repackaged for a global audience that may never learn its real name.

Take the humble arepa. In Venezuela and Colombia, it’s a daily bread, a canvas for everything from shredded beef to a simple smear of butter. The arepa is personal, regional, tied to specific corn varieties and grinding techniques. But in the trendy restaurants of London or New York, it often appears as a “Latin American corn cake,” stuffed with ingredients that would baffle an abuela. The arepa hasn’t migrated. It’s been taken. And back home, younger generations see the global version and start to think of their own food as less sophisticated, less worthy of a high price tag.

The Price of Being Trendy

Trends are hungry. They devour ingredients, techniques, and entire culinary traditions, then move on when the next shiny thing appears. Quinoa is the poster child. For centuries, it was a staple grain for communities in the Andean highlands, a sacred crop tied to the land and the seasons. Then the health food boom hit. Global demand skyrocketed. Prices tripled. Suddenly, the people who had grown quinoa for generations couldn’t afford to eat it. The grain was still there, but it wasn’t for them anymore. It was for the bowls in Brooklyn, the salads in Sydney.

This is the quiet violence of the food trend cycle. It doesn’t just change what’s on our plates. It changes who gets to eat, who profits, and whose knowledge is valued. The Bolivian farmers who once grew dozens of quinoa varieties for their families and local markets were pushed toward a single export-friendly strain. The traditional varieties, each with its own taste and story, began to vanish. The grain stayed, but the stories went silent.

When Names Become Empty

There’s a special kind of loss when a dish loses its name. Think of ceviche. Along the Pacific coast of Latin America, every country has its own version, its own soul. In Peru, it’s a matter of national pride—the precise cut of fish, the tiger’s milk, the sweet potato and choclo. But in the global culinary vocabulary, “ceviche” has become a catch-all for any raw fish marinated in citrus. I’ve seen “ceviche” made with salmon, mango, and coconut milk. It might be tasty, but it’s not ceviche. The name becomes a brand, detached from the hands that shaped it. And when the name loses meaning, the culture it carried starts to slip away too.

This isn’t about purity. Cuisines are living, breathing things, and they must evolve. But evolution requires memory. It requires respect for the source. When a dish is lifted without context, without credit, it becomes a commodity. The people who created it become invisible. And we, the eaters, are robbed of the chance to understand food as a story, not just a sensation.

What We Lose When a Dish Leaves Home

We lose more than recipes. We lose agricultural biodiversity. The world’s obsession with a single avocado variety—the Hass—has led to deforestation, water scarcity, and the abandonment of dozens of native avocado varieties in Mexico. Each of those varieties had a different texture, a different oil content, a different purpose in the kitchen. Some were for guacamole, others for soups, others for eating straight from the tree with a little salt. Now, they’re disappearing, replaced by the one avocado that ships well and looks good on Instagram.

We lose language. In many indigenous communities, the words for ingredients and techniques are inseparable from the food itself. The Zapotec word for a particular type of toasted corn, the Quechua term for a fermentation method—these aren’t just descriptors. They’re containers of knowledge, of relationships between people and place. When the food disappears, the words go silent. And when the words go silent, a way of seeing the world dims.

We lose ritual. Food is never just fuel. It marks the seasons, the festivals, the passages of life. The mole that takes three days to prepare for a wedding, the pan de muerto that appears only in the first days of November, the hallacas that turn Christmas into a communal act of wrapping and tying—these are not just dishes. They are timekeepers, memory holders. When a dish becomes trendy, it’s often detached from its calendar. You can find pan de muerto in some cafes year-round now, a sweet bread with a morbid name, stripped of its connection to the ofrendas, the marigolds, the ancestors. It’s just a bun with bone-shaped decorations. The ritual evaporates.

The Silence of the Cooks

I’ve spent my life in kitchens, and I’ve learned that the most important knowledge is often the quietest. It lives in the hands of women who have never written down a recipe, who measure by feel and memory. When a dish becomes a trend, those women are rarely the ones invited to the television studios or the food festivals. Instead, the dish is interpreted by chefs who may have encountered it only in books or on a brief trip. They add their own flourishes, their “improvements,” and the original is slowly buried under layers of reinterpretation. The grandmothers who kept the dish alive for centuries are forgotten. Their knowledge dies with them.

I once met a woman in Puebla who made chiles en nogada exactly as her great-grandmother had. She used a specific apple from the mountains, a walnut that had to be soaked and peeled by hand, a pomegranate that was always seeded at the last moment. She told me that every year, fewer young people wanted to learn. The dish was too much work, too slow. They could buy a version in the city, she said, that was “almost the same.” But almost the same is not the same. The difference is the weight of history, the taste of a particular orchard, the patience that is itself an ingredient.

Can a Dish Go Home Again?

There is a movement, small but growing, to reclaim these lost dishes. In some villages, cooks are documenting their grandmothers’ recipes, not for cookbooks to sell to the world, but for their own children. Seed banks are preserving native varieties of corn, beans, and chiles, not as museum pieces but as living libraries that farmers can draw from. Young chefs are returning to their hometowns, not to open fusion restaurants, but to learn from the elders before it’s too late.

This is not about closing the kitchen door. Food has always traveled, and it always will. The question is how it travels. Does it carry a passport, with a clear record of where it’s been and who made it? Or is it smuggled across borders, its origins erased, sold as something new? The difference matters. When we eat, we are not just consuming nutrients. We are consuming landscapes, histories, labor, and love. To forget that is to lose a part of ourselves.

I think back to that woman in Oaxaca, her hands moving with the certainty of centuries. She knew that the tlacoyos she made would not make her famous. But she also knew that they were true. And truth, in food as in life, is the first thing we lose when we chase the new at the expense of the old. The next time you encounter a dish that has traveled far from home, ask yourself: What was left behind? And who is still there, cooking in the quiet, waiting to be remembered?

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do food trends often harm the communities that created the dish?

When a dish becomes globally trendy, demand for its key ingredients can spike, leading to price increases that make those ingredients unaffordable for local communities. Additionally, the focus shifts to export-oriented production, which can erode traditional farming practices, reduce biodiversity, and disconnect the dish from its cultural and ritual context.

What is the difference between food migration and food extraction?

Food migration is a natural process where a dish adapts to new environments, incorporating local ingredients and evolving while maintaining a connection to its roots. Food extraction, on the other hand, involves taking a dish out of its cultural context, often rebranding it without credit, and prioritizing marketability over authenticity, which can lead to the erasure of its origins.

How can I support traditional food cultures as a consumer?

You can support traditional food cultures by seeking out and learning about the origins of the dishes you enjoy, supporting local producers and markets when you travel, and valuing the stories and people behind the food as much as the taste. When possible, choose ingredients that are grown using traditional methods and that support local economies rather than industrial monocultures.