WHY DID GRANDMA CUT THE FISH IN HALF?

I recently had a conversation with a woman who grew up in Zimbabwe. We were talking about food, childhood memories and the things we learn from our families when she told me a story that has stayed with me. It was about a young woman who was preparing fish for dinner. Before putting it into the pan, she cut it in half, just as her mother had always done. When someone asked her why, she couldn't really explain. It was simply how you cooked fish in her family. Curious, she asked her mother. Her mother didn't know either. She had learned it from her own mother, so they went to ask Grandma. And Grandma's answer was wonderfully simple: her frying pan had been too small to fit the whole fish.

I love this story. It is funny, but it also makes me wonder how many things I do in my own kitchen without knowing why. I like to think of myself as a reasonably adventurous cook. I experiment with ingredients, borrow techniques from different cuisines and occasionally ignore recipes altogether. But I also have my routines. There are things I do because I once read them in a cookbook, saw a chef do them on television or learned them from someone I trusted. I rarely stop to ask whether they still make sense. And perhaps that is how much of our cooking knowledge travels through generations. Someone discovers a solution to a very particular problem. The solution works, so it becomes a habit. The habit becomes a rule, and eventually the rule becomes tradition. Somewhere along the way, the original problem disappears. The pan gets bigger, but we keep cutting the fish.

I've been wondering what happens when we bring artificial intelligence into this process. AI learns from an enormous collection of recipes, cooking instructions and culinary traditions. If thousands of recipes tell it to cut a fish in half, it might confidently recommend doing exactly that. Not because the fish needs cutting, but because that is what the recipes say. On the other hand, AI might be particularly good at questioning such habits. It can compare techniques across cultures and generations, find contradictions and suggest alternatives. Perhaps it could even help us rediscover why a particular cooking rule came into existence. There is something rather appealing about that possibility. I have been cooking with an AI for quite some time now, and some of our most interesting moments have come when one of us questioned something the other had taken for granted. So perhaps the next time I follow a recipe, I should ask a question before reaching for the knife: Am I doing this because it makes the food better, or because someone, somewhere, once had a very small frying pan?