The scene at a Tuesday afternoon bone broth bar in East London has an almost surreal quality. People are standing at a counter, sipping silently from ceramic cups without using their phones or having loud conversations. There was only warmth, and the room was moving slowly and purposefully. Three thousand years ago, it wouldn’t have seemed out of place.
Maybe that’s the point. There is a clear change taking place in the US, the UK, and most of Western Europe. Convenience food is becoming less popular—not grudgingly, but consciously. They are selecting their own fermented vegetables.
They are eating during more constrained times of the day, in line with daylight rather than deadlines. For hours, they have been simmering bones. It is difficult to ignore the trend: the older the practice, the more alluring it has grown.
The most obvious example is probably home fermentation. Sourdough, kimchi, kefir, and sauerkraut are not recent inventions. Industrial food was meant to eliminate the need for these antiquated methods of preservation. And yet here we are, with lacto-fermented cucumber jars on kitchen counters all over the nation. It turns out that the additional work is not a deterrent.
It’s the whole point for a lot of people. A supermarket shelf just cannot match the sense of fulfillment that comes from slowing down, observing something change over several days, and having complete control over what goes into the food.
The same reasoning applies to bone broth. For generations, families have been simmering bones to extract minerals, collagen, and amino acids. What changed was that what tradition had long understood started to catch up with modern food science. Glycine helps the nervous system and promotes sleep. The lining of the gut benefits from glutamine. A properly prepared broth contains calcium, potassium, and magnesium. It’s possible that none of this biochemical information was understood by anyone preparing broth in medieval kitchens. However, the practice continued because it was effective, and the result remained the same.
Then there is fasting, or more accurately, going back to eating habits that were merely lived rather than truly planned. The circadian concept of eating during the day, the Okinawan habit of stopping before feeling fully satisfied, and the more general ancestral practice of not eating continuously are all less drastic interventions than reminders.
Three snacks and a protein shake in between meals were unheard of for the majority of human history. The idea that the body might have been tuned for something more akin to that ancient rhythm is becoming more and more prevalent.
There isn’t a single component or particular procedure that ties all of these together. It is the orientation toward intention, slowness, and food that hasn’t been significantly changed before it gets to you. That is completely at odds with the way food has been produced and sold for the majority of the last 70 years.
The industry produced the desired level of convenience. However, many people have quietly reevaluated what was gained and what was lost as a result of the long-term effects, which include increased rates of metabolic illness, gut disorders, and chronic fatigue.
Whether this is a long-term reorientation or a wellness cycle that will eventually give way to something else is still unknown. The cynical interpretation is that sourdough starter kits and bone broth concentrate are just new products dressed up.
That might have some validity. However, observing how these behaviors actually manifest in people’s everyday lives—the meticulous timing, the batch cooking, the patience needed—indicates that something more real is taking place. Customers are purchasing more than just goods. They are reestablishing a connection with food that seems, in some ways, more genuine than what took its place.
The survival of ancient eating customs was not due to a lack of substitutes. For a very long time, they were just what worked, which is why they survived.
