This essay was originally published on my website and sent to my newsletter, where I write about food, culture, and the search for meaning. New essays arrive weekly.

---

It’s easy to forget your origin story. Once a person, place, or thing experiences success, they risk forgetting what made that success possible in the first place. Where it came from. What problem it was originally meant to solve. 

One of the clearest examples of this is bouillabaisse.

I first encountered this French seafood soup in A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. The novel follows an aristocratic gentleman placed under house arrest inside Moscow’s Metropol Hotel after the Russian Revolution. 

In one memorable scene, he sets out to make bouillabaisse — carefully assembling ingredients, even devising a clever plan to obtain saffron, those delicate Middle Eastern flower threads that immediately signal luxury. 

After reading it, I thought of bouillabaisse as fine dining. It belonged, in my mind, alongside duck confit and boeuf bourguignon. A dish defined by refinement.

But bouillabaisse isn’t quite like those other French classics.

Its luxury coding is something that happened later. Not because the dish demanded it. But because stories were layered onto it. Bouillabaisse didn’t begin as a symbol. Or as an $80 menu item. Or as a performance.

It began as fisherman food. A practical solution made from scraps that couldn’t be sold. From fish nobody else wanted. From whatever was left at the end of a long day on the Mediterranean waters near Marseille.

And that’s what makes the dish interesting in the first place.

Because the real story of bouillabaisse isn’t about soup. It’s about what happens when performance and optimization enter the kitchen; how easily meaning drifts once something stops being used and starts being displayed.

And this pattern isn’t limited to bouillabaisse. It’s present across our food, cities, careers, and institutions. It increasingly appears in the systems we’re building today.

For bouillabaisse, it helps to witness the transformation itself, from fisherman’s stew to fine dining performance:

When performance enters the kitchen

Bouillabaisse was historically made from rockfish and other seafood common to the Mediterranean. Its now-famous broth came from fish bones, flavored with whatever aromatics were on hand — fennel, citrus peel, olive oil, etc.

There were no recipes in the beginning. The broth was made quickly, from scraps, over high heat. Whatever fish were available that day were poached and eaten.

What mattered wasn’t luxury, but function. A mix of lean and gelatinous fish that cooked well. 

No plating. 

No ceremony. 

No audience beyond the people standing nearby. 

Fishermen ate it by the sea.

That began to change as France industrialized. Railroads connected Marseille to Paris, and Parisians began traveling the country more freely. They returned to the capital with stories of Provence, of the Mediterranean, of regional specialties that felt both rustic and exotic. 

Soon Parisian kitchens began adopting those dishes. Bouillabaisse was no longer being cooked by fishermen for themselves or their communities. It was now being prepared by professional chefs for an entirely different audience. 

Imagine the motives of the French fisherman vs. the professional chef — one cooks to solve something, the other cooks to impress.

Performance, presentation, and consistency started to matter. Ingredients were fixed and written down as the variety narrowed. Exotic fish replaced scraps while luxury ingredients like saffron entered the broth.

This standardization elevated the dish, but it also stripped away its original context. What had once been a solution to waste slowly became a representation of taste.

Once performance became the point, it grew harder to remember what bouillabaisse was for in the first place. 

The optimization trap beyond bouillabaisse

When anything gets commoditized it risks losing its soul. Whether it’s bouillabaisse or punk rock. The minute the “professionals” get involved is the minute the craft starts to lose its edge.

Daniel Boulud may be one of the great modern French chefs, but his bouillabaisse is unlikely to resemble the original from the docks of Marseille. Just as some A&R guy at a record label is unlikely to be Patti Smith. 

Professionals have to optimize for performance. They have more investment, capital, and risk on the line. 

The fishermen on the docks of Marseille were just trying to solve a simple conundrum — how do I maximize my scraps for dinner? 

The professional is trying to attract attention. They are trying to impress and perform. They have massive costs relative to the fishermen from real estate and labor to inventory and machinery. 

Their reputations are at stake. 

The fisherman can afford to experiment as he’s just seeking sustenance for himself, his family, and his friends. 

So I want to be clear here — I’m not knocking the Daniel Bouluds or the A&R guys. In fact, I quite enjoy fine dining and commercialized music. But I know that I’m entering a performance the minute I sit down at that white linen covered table or press play on The Black Keys. 

At some point, people have to eat. 

There’s a reason David Chang no longer spends his days behind a ramen stove. Restaurants are fragile whereas products scale. Chili crunch oil is not a betrayal of Momofuku, but a response to the same optimization pressures that reshape every craft once it succeeds.

This is nothing against the player, but the game. 

The optimization game strips us of the necessary origin stories. Of how Momofuku came to be. Of how bouillabaisse went from fisherman’s food to fine dining. 

We’ve optimized to a point where it’s almost impossible to find the OG version of bouillabaisse. No fancy lobster or crab or halibut or any other ridiculous fish. 

What was once defined by restraint is now defined by excess. 

What we’ve lost is the reality that the origin stories for bouillabaisse and classics like it are crucially important. 

Why origins matter more than ever

I know I’m probably sounding like some nostalgic kid from the 1990s, but I promise — I’m not here to convince you that Michael Jordan was better than LeBron James (even if he was). What I am here to tell you is that you cannot appreciate LeBron James without first understanding Michael Jordan. 

Jordan is LeBron’s origin story. If there wasn’t an MJ, there probably wouldn’t be a LeBron. At least not the same guy. 

LeBron optimized MJ. He’s the MJ who didn’t gamble and stay out drinking and smoking cigars all night. Who took his training seriously. Who never quit to play baseball. Who went harder for far longer and for far worse teams, but who was also undeniably influenced by MJ. 

Origins are important because they provide context for the present. If you didn’t have the origin story I gave you on bouillabaisse you might brush it off as some form of French savoir faire (or know-how). You might laugh it off as one of those fancy French recipes. 

Until you learn that bouillabaisse is anything but. It’s simply optimized culture that was appropriated for a fine-dining crowd. 

But at its heart it’s fisherman food. 

If we lose sight of these origin stories, we risk losing the soul of what makes something great or worthy of cultural prominence. If we constantly seek to optimize and throw caviar on everything, from food to art, from politics to our personal careers, we might forget why we pursued something in the first place. 

Origin stories explain motive. Purpose. Intent. 

They explain why some crazy kid dreamed he could be the best basketball player in the world and go on to influence generations. And they explain how fisherman’s food became a fine dining staple. 

If we forget our origin stories, we don’t just lose cultural context, we lose a piece of ourselves. And in a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, remembering what made us human in the first place may be the most important work we have left.