Fooding VIII: Death to “foodie”! 

Every other Friday (or in this case, Monday), Fooding peers at what we eat in Toronto, through the gimlet eye of a recovering restaurant critic.

Discussed in this column: Definitions of the term “foodie,” 1984, 2005, 2011

From The Foodie Handbook (1984): “Foodies are the ones interested in food in any gathering—salivating over restaurants, recipes and radicchio. They don’t think they are being trivial—Foodies consider food to be an art, on a level with painting and drama.”

Urban Dictionary (2005): “Foodie, noun—A person that spends a keen amount of attention and energy on knowing the ingredients of food, the proper preparation of food, and finds great enjoyment in top-notch ingredients and exemplary preparation.”

Urban Dictionary (2011): “Foodie, noun—A douchebag who likes food:
Douchebag - ‘I'm a big foodie.’
Non-doucher - ‘Really? I like food too, but I’m not a tool.’”

It’s the bane of editors and food writers, a title element in countless blogs, and an amorphous definition that bends to its user’s personality, preoccupations, and pride. “Foodie” is a term so ubiquitous and yet so utterly frustrating that we’re forced to ask: What the hell does foodie even mean anymore?

Like “hipster,” “foodie” started out as a fairly straightforward, albeit satirical, description of a small subculture. But rather than being devoted to vintage, distressed denim, foodies pursue knowledge pertaining to all things food. Put like that, it seems almost honourable.

“Foodie” first entered the popular lexicon in 1984 with the publishing of The Official Foodie Handbook. A companion volume to The Official Preppy Handbook and The Yuppie Handbook, it was a self-skewering tome, playing up the most extreme versions of the foodie trope. Fueled by skyrocketing expense accounts, oil, and shoulder pads, the ’80s were the obvious decade to produce foodies. In urban centres, top chefs and restaurants gained devoted disciples who were also obsessed with unique sources of produce and meat, foreign recipes, and any eating experience beyond bland, meat-and-potatoes “North American cuisine.” The rise of cheap international, refrigerated shipping brought a plethora of hitherto unavailable produce to Western Europe and North America. Cheap airfare and a hazy hippie hangover took middle-class North Americans, with vague foodthropological goals and stomachs primed by National Geographic, to experience previously unknown cultures and cuisines.

Early foodies dressed up classism with nice linens and a demi-glace coating of approachability. Straight-up high-culture snobbery—about opera, symphonic music, or painting—was out of the growing middle class’ reach. Food snobbery, however, is accessible with low barriers to entry—maybe no more than the cost of a dinner for two at the Ritz, perhaps—and, even better, is highly competitive. Anyone with enough time and dogged determination can search out the most exclusive cheese monger in the city and thereby lord that over dinner guests until their eyes glass over and they slip into Velveeta daydreams.

Over time, a term that started as a not-so-gentle jab at gustatory evangelists became a catchall phrase for a mainstream devotion. In 1993, not quite a decade since the F-word conquered the vernacular, Food Network hit cable television. Suddenly Emeril, Bobby Flay, and Rachael Ray were in our kitchens, coercing us to buy strangely shaped vegetables and suggesting that a shiv-like boning knife was a mandatory tool for any serious cook.

The Internet didn’t help matters. The hoi polloi became, simultaneously, published writers (blogs) and culinary experts (Wikipedia). We all had boning knives, cheese planes, and cleavers, but how many of us actually know how to debone a chicken? Or cleave?

Nowadays, foodies or, maybe more accurately, the fooderati have split into factions.

There are the Organic Locavores:


The Restaurant Stalkers: Shivering in a queue outside Grand Electric/Parts And Labour/Hoof Cafe—armed with phones smart enough to photograph, tweet, and Tumblr the hottest, newest thing—they sneer at a button mushroom on a menu, but couldn’t pick it out of a grocery aisle. Restaurant Stalkers and their companion, the Wanky Know-It-All, most closely hew to the 2011 definition of foodie.

The Accomplished Cooks: Masters of their own kitchens, their dinner party invitations are highly sought after. They are often found surrounded by cookbooks and sauce-spattered pans, with braised beef cheeks bubbling contentedly on the back burner. They are irritated by restaurant food, because they could make it better themselves, and for cheaper. A.Cs are closest to the 2005 foodie definition.

And finally there are the Epicures: Closest to the original, handbook definition of foodie, the Epicure views food is high art. In Sam Sifton’s last review for The New York Times, he noted that the set price menu at Thomas Keller’s Per Se runs $295 per person without wine, but “[b]y point of context, though, an aisle orchestra seat at the Metropolitan Opera for Donizetti’s ‘L’Elisir d’Amore’ runs $330, also excluding wine.” Epicures choose the dinner. Every time.

Where does that leave our quest for the meaning of foodie? We hate that word, and yet, a suitable replacement eludes us. Epicure, gourmand, gourmet, and glutton are not quite foodie’s synonyms. And using another made-up word like foodist would be just as bad.

But while we struggle to find a suitable replacement, we’re banning “foodie” from Fooding columns henceforth. It’s a profiterole of a word—light, airy, substance-less. In its place we’ll use ... well, whatever fantastic description comes to mind. As long as it doesn’t start with “f.”