Their ubiquity might be a little obnoxious, but the truth is when presented with a cronut, an impossibly-huge rainbow milkshake garnished with full sized desserts or a cute AF Japanese-style egg salad sando, we’re going to eat it. And probably enjoy the hell out of it.
That said, there’s the grammable trends… and then there’s the trends we actually can’t stand for reasons more important than over saturating our Instagram feed. Here’s the food trends that we wish would die, immediately. Please and thank you.
The Search for So-Called “Authenticity”
If you ask 1,000 different Mexican grandmas, you’ll probably get 1,000 different molé recipes, so which one is the “authentic” one?
Trick question: they all are.
It turns out that trying to define the “quintessential” approach to a recipe or cuisine is a distinctly white person pursuit that’s distinctly directed at POC cuisines. A recent study of 20,000 Yelp reviews by Sarah Kay, a masters candidate at the NYU Food Studies program showed that the term is used overwhelmingly to define – and therefore judge – restaurants owned by people of color. But unfortunately, the search for “authenticity” comes up again and again as a food trend.
“The use of authenticity in the dining landscape is counterintuitive. It’s usage to promote white supremacist norms furthers an atmosphere that’s antithetical to the spirit of authenticity. The language of authenticity holds up the supremely inauthentic — a single ideology that supports possibly the most powerful social group: white people,” Kay writes.
Rather than the talking heads [of mostly privileged white people] deciding in the media and marketing materials what is “authentic” and what’s not, let’s instead focus on increasing representation of marginalized voices in our workforce. Databases of creatives, copywriters, photographers and recipe writers may be found at Creatives of Color and Equity at the Table. As a bonus, Equity at the Table lists even more resources on this page.
Cultural Appropriation in the Booze Industry
Lots of celebrities are in the booze business, but not everyone is like our girl Pink, who secretly took winemaking classes at UC Davis and is now the winemaker of record for her Two Wolves brand. 2019 saw the introduction of a couple of booze brands where celebs seemingly parachuted in from their private helicopter. Wealthy, famous white dudes questing through Mexico tasting lots of booze to decide which already-perfected product to buy, rebrand and promote. You love to see it.
Many times that product has been made for generations by the people they are buying it from. In many cases, celebrities are simply slapping their label on a bottle, and raking in dollars and glowing reviews. This is called cultural appropriation.
Can celebrities invest their dollars in businesses from underrepresented communities? ABSOLUTELY – please do more of this! But when you market it, tell the story of the people who made it. Don’t make it the Show You’re Famous For Mezcal. We can vote with our dollars and professional actions to support brands that support makers and underrepresented communities in non-appropriative ways.
“Better for You” Booze
First, society tried to convince ourselves that wine is healthy (This dates back to Pliny the Elder, btw – “just add some cabbage juice to your wine and pour it straight into your ears and you’ll feel better, pronto”). We understand the urge. We love it so much, can’t it just be good for us?
Now, makers are going all sorts of directions with supposedly better for you booze products – “natural” wines, hard seltzer, low ABV products, etc.
The truth is that alcohol is not healthy for us. It just isn’t. The bad side effects? Cancer and death, among other things.
But you know what? Neither is eating meat (Cancer! Heart disease! Killing the planet!). Neither is driving a car (Death for humans! Death for the planet!). Without a shred of nuance, these things are not healthy for us or for the Earth. And yet we accept them with a lot less moralizing and health policing. We have BIGGER FISH TO FRY, people.
It’s time to just accept alcohol in moderation, too; we know it does not do positive things for the human body, but a little once in a while is no worse than a host of other things we do on a regular basis – in fact, it’s a lot less harmful than a lot of things (obviously, the illness of addiction is a very real exception to this).
Saying an alcoholic beverage is “better for you” is full of shit — oops, did we say “full of shit?” We meant “proven false by science.” The only amount of alcohol proven to be healthful is ZERO. And honestly, it perpetuates the moralization of an inanimate object and contributes to an unhealthy, binge-promoting relationship with alcohol that we’d be better off without.
Drink booze – whatever kind you like! – because it is delicious. There’s just no need to pretend that it’s good for you.
Kale Salads
We’re as surprised as you are to report that the kale salad still seems to be a food trend in 2019! And you know what? We have no problem with kale salads in general. What we have a problem with is their ongoing status as The Salad. We’re bored.
Everyone can make a kale salad in their own kitchen. They are good, and they’re generally good for you. We know how to thinly chop kale, massage it a little to make it easier to chew, and dress it well. It’s common knowledge that kale’s dark leafy greens are full of crucial fiber and vitamins and they’re a solidly good idea. We got it!
We would love to see something *new* in the salad world. Kale salads aren’t trendy anymore. They’ve graduated to being a normal part of life – which is an awesome development but not awesome for us to keep it on the menu month after month. Thank u, next.
Going Cashless is Great if you Don’t Like Poor Folks
Not a lot of nuance to this one – 7% of Americans do not have access to or use a bank account. 1 in 4 is underbanked. That’s over 90 million Americans who operate exclusively with cash. And the reason, according to an FDIC survey, is that they don’t have enough money on a regular basis to keep an account open.
Chains as large as Shake Shack and Sweetgreen have dabbled in going cashless – and then abandoned it. For good reason.
Certainly there are theoretically benefits: having no cash onsite reduces the risk of burglary, and reduces the man hours spent making transactions. But since there are actual human beings being treated unfairly on the other side of the equation, this is a trend we can’t get behind. We applaud the cities and states across the country making it actually illegal to be cashless. He’s dead, Jim! Let’s move on.
You might be sensing a theme here with our least favorite trends, and it’s true here, too: this trend disproportionately impacts the poorest and most marginalized among us.
