The Impacts of Modernization Towards Ethnic Food Practices

Food modernization has become a key issue in maintaining local food traditions of a particular ethnic food. Current modernization has led to ethnic food increasingly lost to the ages. New generation of a particular ethnic does not know how to prepare their traditional ethnic foods. There do also some of the generation not know their own ethnic food traditions and never eat and taste them. With a variety of foods available in the market such as those offered by the food service industry, generation now prefer to enjoy fast food that in line with the current modernization rather than the traditional food. Therefore, this study was undertaken to examine the impacts of modernization of food towards ethnic practices. By using respondents from the three main ethnic natives group in Sarawak, the study found that most of these ethnic received a very large impact on the modernization of their traditional food. The implications of these findings for the impacts of modernization are discussed. This study contributes to the literature by expanding the ethnic food gastronomy in Malaysia.