Eating Thanksgiving dinner – the turkey, et al – I got to thinking, “Is the foodie movement dead?”  Granted, we have seen incredible advancements in the food industry over the past 50 years.  At that same Thanksgiving dinner, my mother ordered raw tuna with sushi rice.  Would this have happened 30 years ago in suburban Pennsylvania?  Never (unless you were an immigrant from Japan, perhaps).  But what is there that has the power to WOW us today?  How can something be cooked different than it already is?  I think the foodie movement is dead – or at least gasping for a breath.

Our global interconnectedness has brought us things young school children only dreamed about years ago.  One of the best restaurants in D.C. serves goat, for the love of god – and people flock to eat it!  We eat sushi when we want.  Visit Ethiopia via U Street or Silver Spring.  Kabobs are on street corners, and Cincinnati chili can be eaten in a strip mall.  Anything and everything those children imagined is now available on our virtual doorstep.

And we’ve tasted all these foods prepared in diverse and questionable ways.  We’ve deconstructed Caesar salads down to a foam.   Whiskeys are now being infused with toasted marshmallows.  And pears are being crossed with plums and grown in the shape of Buddha!  Where else can we go?  You can only sauté, boil, butter, roast, stir-fry, and bake so many things in so many ways.  Only so many foods can be whipped into a foam or reduced to a powder.  Liquid nitrogen is riding on the water skis with Fonzi.  Perhaps, in the end, we’ve come full circle.

We now go out and order meatloaf.  We go gaga when tater tots are on the menu.  Macaroni cheese has popped up in the finest of restaurants.  Are we returning to the 1950s?  Have we eaten so many new and exotic cuisines that we now demand the comforts of home, the delicacies that still reign supreme in Ohio, the recipes of Betty Crocker?  I wouldn’t go so far.  But I do think, with so many choices, that we’ve become tired of the exotic and the new.  My mother eats sushi for Thanksgiving because she’d never eaten it until five years ago.  You and I grew up with it.  It’s normal.  We’re immune to the insane.

So where do we go from here?  Unexpected combinations of food?  Fire-roasted cherry and peanut balls?  Anything is possible.  And don’t get me wrong, I love everything that’s going on in the foodie world.  I just wonder how much farther we can push it.  Good, fresh ingredients cooked to perfection, absent the molecular dressings, can entice even the pickiest of eaters.  Let us look to the future boldly and without fear.  A new trend is bound to arise, a new food discovered, and new cooking technique perfected.  And we’ll all be there, hoping for a bite or a sip, confident that while the foodie movement may be ailing, we know our own adventurous spirit will never die.

AEK