"food words" news and stories

There's a certain amount of liberal bourgeois guilt among those of us who are paid to spend our days sampling things like squab-and-foie-gras croustillant and then write about it.

We generally don't discuss it, except perhaps after we've reached the bottom of the second or third scientifically blended cocktail at a place like Death & Co. in Manhattan's East Village and otherwise exhausted ourselves trying to pinpoint exactly what it was that gave that $13 glass of whiskey its particular piquancy. Was it an infusion of Fuji apple? Or the spiced pear?

After all, the downside of decadence is the sneaking suspicion that when the revolution comes (admittedly a remote possibility), we'll be rounded up with others of our ilk -- film critics, art historians -- and shipped off to some gulag in Alaska to break rocks.

The same sort of cynical despair gives us all manner of indy films and just about anything written by Jonathan Franzen. it also gives us the occasional tirade by a food writer, in this case last Friday's blog post by LA Weekly's Amy Scattergood, "Top 10 Foodie Words We Hate: Starting with Foodie."

I grew up in New England, and I'm not sure what other families did, but we never called the nighttime meal "dinner." We always called it "supper." Now I always call it dinner. I don't know when it changed, but somewhere along the line it did.

AOL Food has a fun poll where they ask you what you called certain food things in your region. Did you call it dinner or supper (there's also an "other" option, though I'm not sure what that would be). Sprinkles or Jimmies or 100s and 1000s? Sub, Hero, or Hoagie? Soda, Pop, or Tonic?