"trends" news and stories

Food writer Regina Schrambling says she's finally found a phenomenon even more annoying than Rachel "Yummo" Ray: Precocious kiddie foodies.

Writing in Slate, Schrambling points to some of her main offenders: New York Times' fawning coverage of 12-year-old "restaurant critic" David Fishman, the Times' new "Cooking With Dexter" feature written by food editor Pete Wells about his kitchen exploits with his 4-year-old son, and NPR's 5-year-old Chef Julian, the world's "youngest celebrity chef." These kids are not just being cooed at for their cuteness, she says, they're actually being held up as inspiration for adult chefs.

Schrambling claims that A) Kitchens are not nurseries - they're dangerous places filled with knives and boiling oil - so we encourage kids to cook only at the peril of their forearms and fingertips, B) Kids have less-developed taste buds, naturally craving high levels of salty and sweet, and therefore are less likely to come up with anything truly remarkable to adult palates, and C) The younger you are, the smaller your food memory bank, so a 5-year-old is probably not going to know a "good" burger from a "bad" burger.

"On a larger scale, the trend emphasizes the worst of the food frenzy today: the celebration of celebrity and novelty over authenticity and seriousness," Schrambling writes. "...Today chefs barely out of high school are competing on reality cooking shows, and the bar keeps being lowered, with Internet exposure for every little Thomas Keller."

I find over-precocious kids annoying in general, and I think that any parent who holds up little Ava or Aidan as a paragon of culinary sophistication is totally silly. At the same time, I think it's great for kids to get in the kitchen and learn a thing or two about food. Better than sitting in front of the X-Box eating Cakesters (I'm sure Schrambling would agree). And if having a few kiddie chefs on TV helps encourage a greater respect for food, that's great. Though I'm unlikely to be trying out any of their recipes any time soon.

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You might think that a goofy internet meme about a football-sized lump of bacon might be worth a few blog posts, maybe a newspaper article about all the blog posts, then a swift plunge into the cold outer darkness where D-list reality TV contestants from 1998 and the band that wrote "Turning Japanese" live in eternity.

Well, according to Eat Me Daily, the creators of the "Bacon Explosion" are instead getting a six-figure book deal. The forthcoming book, "Barbecue Makes Everything Better," is based on the BBQ Addicts website.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars. For the Bacon Explosion. Excuse me, I'll be in the kitchen baking a wedding cake with house-cured lardo icing and candied pancetta roses for my upcoming cookbook "Say it With Pork: 101 All-Pig Recipes for Your Special Day."

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Sodexo, a company that provides food services to more than 600 college campuses in the U.S. and Canada, has just released some of their long-term data monitoring taste preferences over the decades. Check out the list of students' favorite dining hall foods from this year, compared with the list from 1989. The results are pretty interesting.

Favorite foods in 2009:

1. Locally-grown fruits and veggies
2. Crispy garlic-ginger chicken wings
3. Mac 'n five cheeses
4. Vietnamese Pho
5. Green tea and pomegranate smoothies
6. Crab cake sliders
7. Mini samosas
8. Tilapia Veracruz
9. Goat cheese salad
10. Chicken Molé

Favorite foods in 1989:

1. Fruit and cottage cheese plate
2. Chicken nuggets
3. Turkey Tetrazini
4. Chicken Chop Suey
5. Egg, bacon and cheese English muffin
6. Half sandwich and cup of soup
7. Taco bar
8. Spanish beef and rice
9. Vegetarian bean chili
10. Algerian lamb stew

The "fruit and cottage cheese plate" strikes me as particularly '80s (this was the decade of aerobics and leg warmers, after all), and the "chicken chop suey" is as retro as it gets.

For those of you who got to partake in the delights of college dining hall fare, please spill - what were your favorite dishes?

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Despite the economic downturn, the kosher food market is soaring, reports the LA Times. And it's not because the Jewish community is growing, but because non-Jews increasingly view kosher food as a higher-quality product, marketers say. Sales of certified kosher foods have risen 64 percent in the past five years, earning a total of $12.5 billion in 2008. Some 28 percent of new food and dairy products launched in the U.S. last year were certified kosher. Kosher foods must confirm to Jewish laws dictating methods of slaughter and prohibitions against mixing certain foods, like meat and milk, and must be approved by a rabbi. Thus kosher food factories may have more stringent manufacturing regulations than non-kosher factories. "Kosher food has gained the reputation of being more carefully produced and thoroughly inspected than non-kosher food," says Marcia Mogelonsky, an analyst at the market research firm Mintel, which tracks food trends. The kosher meat industry, though, has not been without its share of scandal - Agriprocessors Inc., the country's larget kosher meatpacking company, was exposed last year for having illegal and unsanitary conditions in its Iowa facility.

Do you look for the kosher label when you buy food?

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One of the best gastronomic experiences is the gooey rich creaminess of caramel slowly melting on one's palate. Over the past few years, we have seen an increasing number of products, such as Poco Dolce's burnt caramel toffee, adding salt into the caramel equation. A recent New York Times article explains how this extraordinarily sweet and savory combo went from elite chichi Parisian pastry shops to the American mass-market (stores such as Wal-Mart) and the soon-to-be Obama White House.

The article suggests that the financial success of this exquisite pair is due to a fortunate profitable trend cycle. Parisian pastry chefs initiated American chefs' obsession with the caramel-sea salt blend. Then, it ended up in specialty food magazines and food shows. Soon enough, chain restaurants, like the Cheesecake Factory, began selling them. Finally, Wal-Mart picked up on the trend. Of course, it would not have caught on so quickly if it were not for Americans' long-established taste for salty mixed with sweet, a flavor picked up gracias to dulce de luche from South America and Mexico.

As fellow blog Salt News states, the NY Times focuses on the financial and cultural success of the caramel-salt mix without ever delving into the gastronomic sensations it elicits. The title of the article, "How Caramel Developed a Taste for Salt," is misleading since there is never any substantial information explaining how this caramel concoction developed in small villages in the region of Brittany in France. I'm left wondering whether or not caramel indeed activates a desire for salt. Instead, the article gets carried away with Obama's love for salty caramel delights as though it would be hard to imagine. Could you blame him?