“When did you become such an adventurous eater?” my mom often asks me, after I’ve squealed about some meal involving jamón ibérico or numbing spices. The answer is, I don’t know, but I can think of moments throughout my life where food erupted as more than a mere meal: My cousin and his Ivy League rowing team hand-making pumpkin ravioli for me at Thanksgiving. Going to the pre-Amazon Whole Foods and giddily deciding to buy bison bacon for breakfast sandwiches assembled in a dorm kitchen. Eating paneer for the first time in India. Slurping a raw oyster in New Orleans.
What made me even want to try a raw oyster in 2004, despite everything about an oyster telling me NO, was an entire culture emerging promising me I’d be better for it. Food, I was beginning to understand from TV and magazines and whatever blogs existed then, was important. It could be an expression of culture or creativity or cachet, folk art or surrealism or science, but it was something to pay attention to. Mostly, I gleaned that to reject foodieism was to give up on a new and powerful form of social currency. I would, then, become a foodie.
To be a foodie in the mid-aughts meant it wasn’t enough to enjoy French wines and Michelin-starred restaurants. The pursuit of the “best” food, with the broadest definition possible, became a defining trait: a pastry deserving of a two-hour wait, an international trip worth taking just for a bowl of noodles. Knowing the name of a restaurant’s chef was good, but knowing the last four places he’d worked at was better — like knowing the specs of Prince’s guitars. This knowledge was meant to be shared. Foodies traded in Yelp reviews and Chowhound posts, offering tips on the most authentic tortillas and treatises on ramps. Ultimately, we foodies were fans, gleefully devoted to our subculture.
Which inevitably leads to some problems, when, say, the celebrities the subculture has put on a pedestal are revealed to be less-than-honorable actors, or when values like authenticity and craft are inevitably challenged. What it’s historically meant to be a foodie, a fan, has shifted and cracked and been reborn.
And ultimately, it has died. Or at least the term has. To be called a “foodie” now is the equivalent of being hit with an “Okay, boomer.” But while the slang may have changed, the ideals the foodie embodied have been absorbed into all aspects of American culture. There may be different words now, or no words at all, but the story of American food over the past 20 years is one of a speedrun of cultural importance. At this point, who isn’t a foodie?
Once upon a time, there was the gourmand, which even in 1825, lawyer and self-proclaimed gourmand Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin felt was misunderstood. “There is a perpetual confusion of gourmandism in its proper connotation with gluttony and voracity,” he writes in his seminal The Physiology of Taste. Gourmandism was not about mere excess, but about appreciation. It was “an impassioned, considered, and habitual preference for whatever pleases the taste,” he writes, a love of delicacies and an “enemy of overindulgence.”
As for who can be a gourmand, Brillat-Savarin posits, in the scientific fashion of the time, that some are chosen by nature to have a heightened sense of taste. And although anyone may be born a gourmand, just as anyone may be born blind or blond, to take advantage of that innate sense requires capital. Being rich doesn’t automatically give one good taste, but “anyone who can pile up a great deal of money easily is almost forced, willy-nilly, to be a gourmand.”
For the next centuries, things mostly stayed that way. It was the wealthy who spent on the finest wines and meats, and in the public imagination, to be a gourmand was in many ways to perform wealth and flaunt access. This was true in a lot of places, whether it was a royal Chinese banquet or through the development of Mughal cuisine, though Brillat-Savarin was speaking squarely from a European stage.
As gourmandism crossed the ocean from Brillat-Savarin in 1800s France to 20th-century America, it was often limited to fine dining and French cuisine; finding joy in the offerings of Grandma’s pot or the Automat did not earn you a culinary title. But in the later 20th century, the purviews of American gourmands were changing, as both access to fine ingredients and knowledge about their preparation became more populist. Craig Claiborne turned restaurant reviews into sites of true arts criticism, and Julia Child and James Beard insisted that the greatest food was completely achievable in your own kitchen, often using humble ingredients. Alice Waters celebrated the fruits of California, and Ruth Reichl championed places like New York Noodletown, a Chinatown spot that she described as “a bare, bright, loud restaurant where the only music was the sound of noodles being slurped at tables all around.”
The scope was widening. But “the thing that makes food both challenging and interesting as a cultural vector is that food is not a mechanically reproducible experience,” says Helen Rosner, food critic at the New Yorker. You still had to be physically in those locations, or have those ingredients in your own kitchen, for it to work. It seemed absurd for someone to care what Chez Panisse was like if they never even had a chance of going. So while new technologies had made other cultural products — music, film, television — easier and cheaper to engage with than ever, allowing new communities to form over their shared interests, food was still a more localized obsession. “If I have an opinion about a movie and I live in Los Angeles, my opinion is still relevant to somebody who lives in Toronto,” says Rosner. “If I have an opinion about bagels and I live in Queens, my opinion is barely relevant to someone who lives more than 10 blocks from my apartment.”
And yet, at the turn of the last century, two platforms developed in food culture that shifted it from an individual identity to a shared one, turning food from culture to pop culture: food television, and the internet.
Chef Hubert Keller looks skeptically at contestant Ken Lee’s pan-seared halibut. The two pieces rest against each other over a soybean puree, encircled by tomato compote and a ring of fig gastrique, like a glamorous mandala. But during Top Chef’s first-ever Quickfire Challenge, Lee has already gotten into trouble by tasting a sauce with his fingers, and arguing after being told that was unsanitary. The cast has turned against him, questioning his hubris in the face of bland fish. Later that episode, he becomes the show’s first chef asked to pack his knives and go.
Top Chef, which premiered in 2006, immersed viewers in the world of the professional kitchen. Chefs use “plate” as a verb, hand things off to the “pass,” don their “whites.” I probably didn’t even need to put those words in quotes, as you already know what they mean. They’re part of our cultural vocabulary now.
How did we get to chefs-holding-squeeze-bottles as entertainment? The 1984 Cable Communications Policy Act deregulated the industry, and by 1992, more than 60 percent of American households had a cable subscription. Food Network launched in 1993, and compared to Julia Child or Joyce Chen drawing adoring viewers on public broadcasting programs, the channel was all killer, no filler, with shows for every mood. By the early 2000s, you could geek out with Alton Brown on Good Eats, experience Italian sensuality with Molto Mario or Everyday Italian, fantasize about a richer life with Barefoot Contessa, or have fun in your busy suburban kitchen with 30 Minute Meals. Anthony Bourdain’s A Cook’s Tour gave viewers an initial taste of his particular brand of smart-alecky wonder, and there were even competition shows, like the Japanese import Iron Chef.
The premiere of 2005’s The Next Food Network Star, which later gave us Guy Fieri, baron of the big bite, was the network’s first admission that we were ready to think of food shows in terms of entertainment, not just instruction and education. But Food Network was still a food network. The mid-aughts brought the revelation that food programming didn’t have to live just there, but could be popular primetime...