tradition is peer pressure from dead people
There’s a place for both. I’m French and I don’t like it when you take traditional dishes or items, butcher them and still call them the original name. However it’s totally fine if you want to update the recipe, make it a fusion with something else, or whatever else you fancy, but just give it a different/updated name.
It depends on the context.
If I’m celebrating a holiday or cultural event, it is good to skew closer to tradition as the food is part of the tradition.
Outside of that, tradition was just optimizing to the cooking techniques of the time. I like Adam Ragusea’s analysis when discussing spaghetti and meatballs. The context of the recipe 60 years ago was that it was a high scale recipe for a large extended family, a context they doesn’t fit most uses today.
Not to mention that spaghetti and meatballs itself is a fusion dish invented in America; it’s not traditional Italian cuisine.
Silly. If it’s tasty it’s tasty
Food needs to be traditional as much as it needs to be modern.
It’s great we are still pushing culinary boundaries, but sometimes you just need a comfort food.
Traditional dishes remind us of where we’ve come from, either literally reminding us of our homeland if we’ve moved, or reminding us of our ancestors, or figuratively by making us think of our childhoods or of grandma’s famous holiday sides.
It’s the reason we eat green beans casserole on Thanksgiving, but never any other day of the year, or why we still crave a PBJ or Hot Pocket.