Why Some Traditions Survive and Others Quietly Rot Away

The other day, in a pub, a friend pulled out a book written in AD 1390. The Forme of Cury. One of the earliest English cookbooks, written in Middle English.

They had selected recipes from it to shape their Christmas feast. Six-hundred-year-old dishes. Still cooked. Still celebrated. That alone felt telling. But it raised a deeper question.

What did people do before feast days back then?

They fasted.

And what did my friends do before their Christmas feast?

They fasted.

Not out of punishment.

Not for optimisation or discipline.

But deliberately.

To slow down.

To make the feast meaningful.

That moment led me to reflect on something bigger.

Why do we keep some traditions, but not others?

Traditions are not inherited. They are selected

We often talk about traditions as if they simply fade away with time. As if modern life accidentally left them behind.

But traditions do not disappear randomly.

They are filtered.

The traditions that survive tend to encourage consumption, fit neatly into institutions, and be easy to repeat, standardise, and sell.

The traditions that quietly disappear tend to slow us down, reduce consumption, centre restraint and gratitude, and tune us into cycles rather than schedules.

The feast survived.

The fast largely rotted away.

Not because it lacked meaning.

But because it does not serve a culture built on constant growth.

At Generation Soil, this same pattern shows up in land and food systems, where extractive practices are rewarded and regenerative food systems are often sidelined.

Culture behaves much like soil.

It responds to the conditions we create.

A fast before a feast

A fast before a feast was never about deprivation.

It was about contrast.

Living systems depend on restraint

In nature, abundance always follows restraint.

Winter before spring.

Rest before growth.

Breakdown before fertility.

Food traditions once mirrored these natural cycles.

Fasting slowed the body, sharpened appetite, and made celebration felt rather than consumed.

This pattern was not unique to medieval England.

Across cultures, fasting functioned as balance. In India, fasting was woven into religious life, seasonal rhythms, digestion, and health. As explored in Feasts and Fasts: A History of Food in India by Colleen Taylor Sen, food was never separate from medicine, morality, or ecology.

Feasts mattered because they were rare.

Special foods appeared at specific moments.

Restraint created meaning.

Modern culture removed the pause.

We kept the feast.

We lost the fast.

Now abundance arrives without contrast.

Food without hunger.

Celebration without meaning.

Rest that never quite restores.

This logic underpins how we approach community composting, where allowing time for breakdown is essential for building healthy, living soil.

Gratitude before food and the lost pause

Before food became instant, eating began with a pause.

Across cultures, saying thanks before meals slowed the moment down.

It reminded people that food was not guaranteed.

That soil, weather, microbes, plants, animals, and human labour were involved.

Gratitude made food relational.

Supermarkets, ultra-processed food, and speed

Modern food systems work differently.

Supermarkets offer endless choice and year-round availability. Ultra-processed foods remove preparation, seasonality, and pause. Busy lifestyles turn meals into background tasks eaten between meetings, screens, and deadlines.

We did not consciously reject gratitude.

We outpaced it.

We kept table manners, which regulate behaviour.

We lost gratitude, which acknowledges dependence.

When food waste collection makes leftovers and scraps visible again, patterns of excess and overconsumption are harder to ignore.

Much of this disconnection begins with degraded soil health, shaped by industrial farming practices that prioritise yield over nourishment.

At Generation Soil, composting quietly restores the pause. When you handle food waste, you see volume, notice patterns, and reconnect consumption with consequence.

Gratitude makes relationships visible.

And when relationships are visible, responsibility follows.

The quiet disappearance of everyday appreciation

Many of the traditions we lost were not dramatic or ceremonial.

They were ordinary.

Communal preserving and bottling days.

Seasonal eating tied to first harvests and last stores.

Rest days without productivity guilt.

Repairing tools, clothes, and furniture instead of replacing them.

Marking sowing, harvest, ageing, and endings.

Keeping time by seasons rather than notifications.

None of these scale easily.

None maximise efficiency.

All deepen relationship.

We did not lose them because they stopped working.

We lost them because they asked too much of our attention.

Relearning these skills does not require perfection, only participation through soil and food education workshops that reconnect people with land, food, and each other.

Why appreciation disappears in modern food systems

Appreciation creates friction.

Friction slows extraction.

Modern systems prioritise speed, convenience, and throughput. Anything that introduces pause is quietly removed.

That is why these traditions faded, not because they were outdated, but because they resisted extraction.

Why Christmas and Halloween were commercialised, but solstice was not

Christmas and Halloween were easy to commercialise.

They already had stories.

Characters.

Costumes.

Spectacle.

They could be simplified, branded, and sold.

Solstice is different.

Solstice is quiet.

Cosmic.

Unscripted.

It does not tell you what to buy.

It asks you to notice where the light is.

You can sell Santa.

You can sell pumpkins.

But it is hard to sell the slow tilt of the Earth back towards the sun.

This long-term thinking shapes how we design landscapes like our food forest market garden, which works with natural cycles rather than against them.

Solstice resists commercialisation because it resists extraction.

It invites attention, not consumption.

The deeper pattern underneath it all

When you line these traditions up, a pattern becomes clear.

Anything that reconnects us to limits, normalises enough, builds in pause and restraint, embeds gratitude into daily life, and aligns us with natural cycles tends to be stripped away.

What replaces it is constant availability.

Constant consumption.

Constant stimulation.

We see the consequences everywhere.

Burnout.

Food without nourishment.

Land without life.

At Generation Soil, composting is a refusal of this logic. It says waste is not endless, inputs matter, and cycles must close.

Soil cannot be extracted from indefinitely.

Neither can people.

Regeneration begins with limits

Regeneration begins when we reintroduce limits.

Not as restriction.

But as care.

Limits create health in soil.

They create health in bodies.

They create health in cultures.

Traditions are seeds, not fossils

Traditions do not need reviving at scale.

They need practising.

A pause before meals.

A fast before a feast.

A solstice walk.

A shared preserving day.

Culture changes the same way soil does.

Quietly.

Locally.

By accumulation.

If you’d like to take part, you can get involved with Generation Soil and help us regenerate land, food systems, and community from the ground up.

This article is part of our wider work exploring food, soil, and regenerative culture.