Growing up in Ireland in the 80s, pasta was a novelty. We never had it at home. The only time we had it was at a restaurant. That’s how I was introduced to pasta,” explained a chef and restaurant owner at a talk recently. Somehow, while pasta was considered exotic just a few decades ago in this corner of Europe, my family had been enjoying it since at least the 1930s. Thousands of kilometres away from Italy, it was commonplace at our family’s dinner table. By the time the 80s rolled around it was, if not completely blasé, then at least a kitchen staple. How things come to be through the vagaries of time, circumstance and personal curiosity, is not something that can be readily explained.
Perhaps it is simply a product of history, fashion and exposure. They come and go. Things come into fashion and fade away just as soon. Foods, ideas, opportunities, modes of living, even new people come along. Then move on.
Often, what happens in a place is shaped by a prevailing mindset of the time.
“Being a child of the 50s we had to be sustainable. I knew how to identify herbs and chop them before I could go to school. And, my mother needed the herbs not just for cooking but for the children’s well-being,” said a landscape designer, recently, recalling her childhood.
Sustainability was not a buzzword then, it had probably not even been coined as a phrase, but the practise existed, shaped by a mindset – waste not, improvise, save. This was post-War Britain and the garden designer, even at such a tender age, knew a thing or two about working with nature. Much of the knowledge about how to grow and use herbs as medicine has been lost in the intervening years. Although sustainability is now a buzzword, it has lost almost all of its original meaning. Sustainability today has to be taught, accounted for or measured. It is not coming from family knowledge, heritage or home.
Time changes things and what was once a novelty becomes routine or vice versa. Pasta, once considered exotic is now a staple nearly everywhere. Sustainability, once a real, and important practise is simply a buzzword. Meanings change and the ones who have engaged in something for a long time, may not be considered experts, their experience no longer deemed relevant.
It is enough to know that simply judging things by their outcome does not give a full picture. You really must delve into what came before. This is often a combination of history mixed with other factors. And, even that really has no ultimate bearing – mistakes and triumphs, achievements and failures, faults and virtues, the whole swath of history itself, are mere apparitions in time and space. A so-called finished thing is only part of the story. Appearances are only partially true.
This original article first appeared in the FALL 2026 issue of City Style and Living Magazine.
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