Modern food is shaped by convenience, stimulation, and short-term efficiency, rather than by how the Homo sapiens body actually functions.
熾火焼き菊池
At KIKUCHI | A Pre-culture Kitchen
Our menu reflects a shared strategy to thrive in the modern food environment — maximizing usable nutrition per cost while minimizing biological load and unnecessary stimulus.
Charcoal ember grilling is the earliest form of controlled cooking and remains an efficient way to transform raw ingredients into usable nutrition with minimal interference.
Why It Matters:
Homo sapiens biology evolved over long timescales, adapting to foods and environmental inputs that changed slowly and predictably —
adapting over millennia to what the earth provides.
Modern food systems operate on a very different timeline.
Many prioritize short-term efficiency and profit, introducing synthetic compounds and processing methods faster than biological systems can reliably adapt.
When the pace of change exceeds the body’s ability to adjust, the cost is paid as accumulated biological load.
Thriving requires respecting the natural limits of adaptation rather than continuously pushing against them.
Design Priorities Instead of adding more inputs, our approach focuses on reduction and alignment:
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Informed Choices: understanding how modern food production affects long-term function.
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Natural Nutrition: food that aligns with how the human body actually operates
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Sustainable Practices: methods that reduce unnecessary strain on both the body and its surroundings
Stimulus and Desensitization Highly processed and overstimulating foods reduce sensory resolution over time. As intensity increases, sensitivity decreases. This creates a cycle where stronger inputs are required for the same response, while nutritional clarity declines.
We respect scientific progress, but we also recognize the limits of short-term studies when evaluating long-term biological impact.
Balance and Pace The human body is a distributed system — trillions of cells and microorganisms operating without centralized control.
Stability emerges not from force, but from balance and appropriate pacing.
Introducing novel compounds faster than this system can integrate them increases uncertainty rather than resilience.
Cooking as Translation, Not Enhancement Our cooking methods, including charcoal ember grilling and fermentation, focus on converting naturally occurring compounds into usable forms — not amplifying flavor through artificial stimulation.
The goal is clarity, not intensity.