The Cost of Convenience: What We Lost With Industrial Food

Some of my earliest memories are tied to a kitchen table and a pile of cherries.

I sat there with my grandmother and cousins, working through bowl after bowl, using a peculiar little device that looked like a miniature Eiffel Tower. You placed a cherry in it, pressed the handle down, and the pit dropped neatly out the bottom while the fruit remained intact — at least in theory. In reality, it didn’t always cooperate. Sometimes the cherry collapsed, sometimes the pit refused to budge, and occasionally the whole mechanism seemed to conspire against us. Today, that device — the “Wilesco Zack-Zack” — is sold on eBay as a vintage artifact from the 1950s and 60s. Back then, it was simply a tool we used for hours at a time.

My grandparents had two cherry trees, conveniently named the sweet cherry tree and the sour cherry tree. The sweet cherries rarely made it into the house. We ate them straight from the branches, spitting the pits as far as we could, turning it into a game of distance and aim. The sour cherries, however, had a different destiny. They became jam, preserves, something to last through the winter. And so we sat around the large kitchen table, pitting cherries for entire afternoons, occasionally discovering a worm hidden inside one of them, which caused equal parts disgust and fascination.

A few weeks later, the ritual repeated itself when mirabelles and plums were ripe. There was always plum cake at the end of it, the kind that seemed to belong to a specific place and time, something so ordinary back then and yet so difficult to replicate today.

If the kitchen was a place of warmth and abundance, the cellar was its opposite. It was damp, musty, and dimly lit, with a tiny window deliberately blocked to keep the potatoes stored in large wooden racks from sprouting. As a child, I found it unsettling. And yet, that was where the real treasures were kept. Shelves lined with jars of preserved fruit, pickled cucumbers, carrot and celery salad I never quite learned to love, and jams of every kind. Large barrels stood in the corner, filled with overripe plums and mirabelles that would later be distilled into schnapps, and bottles from last year that were stored safely out of our reach.

This was normal. Not just for my childhood in the 1990s, but for generations before. Summer was not only a season of abundance; it was a time of preparation. You preserved what you could because winter would come.

Fast forward thirty years, and I find myself scrolling past debates about the “tradwife” trend on TikTok, alongside videos of women rediscovering the knowledge of their grandmothers. Preserving, fermenting, juicing — skills that were once necessities have become hobbies. I dabbled in it as a student, making elderberry juice or cooking jam now and then, but when I moved to Italy fourteen years ago, I stopped altogether.

Only this year did something return. Perhaps it was inherited, something that had been quietly waiting. I started gardening again (on my balcony). And when the loquat tree down by our condo produced more fruit than we could ever consume — a tree I hadn’t even known growing up — I found myself making jam once more, rescuing the fruit left unpicked by everyone. The first jar is already empty. I am disproportionately proud of it. What surprises me most is that the knowledge is still there, buried somewhere deep, guiding me with a kind of intuition I didn’t know I had.

Sometimes I give these small creations away — elderflower syrup, for example, which turned out to be unexpectedly popular among the Italians who mostly see these trees as weeds. For a brief moment, I even considered selling the syrup. The idea lasted about thirty seconds, roughly the time it took to skim an article outlining what it means to sell homemade food in Europe. Hygiene certifications, inspections, documentation, regulations. Even something as simple as labeling a jar of jam turns into a minor science. How am I supposed to know the exact nutritional values of a fruit from the tree in my garden?

I understand why these systems exist. Food safety is a hard-earned achievement. A century ago, the risk of dying from foodborne illness was significantly higher, with threats like botulism posing serious dangers. Today, issues like listeria or salmonella still exist, but overall we can trust that what we buy in a supermarket is safe. We have grown accustomed to that reliability, to the idea that everything is always available.

But there is a trade-off.

With the industrialization of food, something else has been lost: not just knowledge, but experience. We can read about preserving, watch short videos, follow instructions step by step. But that is not the same as knowing. How do you recognize mold before it becomes dangerous? What does something smell like when it is just beginning to spoil? How long will your preserves actually last, and under which conditions?

As long as everything works, this gap doesn’t matter. As long as supply chains hold, electricity flows, and prices remain manageable, we can rely on the system. But what if that changes? The question is not if the next supply chain disruption will occur, but when, where, and how. We have reached a point where we can choose from a list of inevitable triggers — be it war, natural disasters, or terrorist attacks. Most people have little to no food reserves at home, despite repeated recommendations from civil protection agencies. Not even for a few days. Availability has become an assumption.

At the same time, we are losing more than just practical skills. Our gardens have turned into decorative spaces or, in many cases, into gravel. Small farms continue to disappear under economic pressure and regulatory burden. With them, local knowledge fades. We lose resilience. We lose independence.

And we lose diversity. Not only in terms of plant varieties replaced by optimized monocultures, but also in local recipes, regional identities, even the diversity of our gut microbiome — something science is only beginning to fully understand.

So the question I keep coming back to is this: is there a middle ground?

Is it possible to maintain high standards of food safety while still allowing small-scale, local production without overwhelming it with bureaucracy? Can we regain a degree of autonomy without romanticizing the past?

I don’t have a definitive answer. But I see small signs of possibility. In all those pots and boxes on my balcony that manage to produce something edible. In a loquat tree that was planted as decoration and turns out to be surprisingly generous. In the quiet satisfaction of opening a jar and knowing exactly where it came from.

Maybe that’s where it starts.

Saskia Karges is a corporate strategist for Fortune 500 companies and a solarpunk author. She specializes in bridging the gap between rigid business operations and radical creative visions for a sustainable future. Her work explores neurodiversity in leadership and the systemic shifts needed to build resilient, circular societies.

Her novel, AMATEA — Memoirs of the Last City (2026), dives deeper into these themes, exploring the thin line between a sustainable utopia and an eco-fascist dystopia. You can find her insights on strategy and creative rebellion on Medium and follow her mission to amplify unique voices and planetary health.

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Previously Published on substack

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