Here’s Where Food Trends Come From
Mother Jones
What makes a food trend? In his new book, The Tastemakers: Why We’re Crazy for Cupcakes but Fed Up With Fondue, out May 27, journalist David Sax sets out to discover the hidden forces behind our diets. From a cupcake stop on the Sex and the City tour in New York to the board rooms of the McCormick spice company to the apple orchards of Ontario, Sax talks to the people who decide which foods become popular and when. Along the way, he learns that few fads spread on their own. Most are the result of well orchestrated marketing plans—like how the pork industry engineered the bacon trend to help sell less popular pig parts. I spoke to Sax about the Chipotle-fication of Indian food, how Sex and the City made cupcakes sexy, and how the dawn of the HIV/AIDS epidemic hastened the demise of the fondue-party era.
Journalist David Sax, author of The Tastemakers: Why We’re Crazy for Cupcakes but Fed Up With Fondue Photo by Christopher Farber
Mother Jones: Your book opens on a Sex and the City tour bus. Why?
David Sax: The book opens on this Sex and the City hotspots tour, which has been running in New York for ten years or so. They stop at the Plaza Hotel, they go by Tiffany’s, they show clips on the bus. The halfway point of the tour is in the West Village, kitty corner from Magnolia Bakery. Most of the people on the tour went right for Magnolia. It was this edible icon of the show and everything it stood for. That encapsulated so much about the cupcake trend. There were people from Sweden, Australia, Middle America. They all wanted to go to Magnolia because this place was the shrine that symbolized so much more than a little cake.
MJ: So is Sex and the City responsible for the cupcake trend?
DS: That was the tipping point. That imparted the cupcake with something entirely above and beyond. It was no longer just about, this is a delicious thing and you should have it. It was about this is a symbol of femininity, sexually liberalized, capitalist feminism. This is the stiletto, the cosmo, the Rabbit vibrator equivalent. It gave cupcakes a storyline. It changed their identity. This is not a child’s treat anymore. This is, ‘You go girl. You get your cupcake.’ The Virginia Slim of the 21st century.
MJ: So that’s one way a food trend can happen, through pop culture. But the way you tell it, the story of bacon was completely different.
DS: This was an industry-driven trend. It was the result of a concerted effort by the pork industry to revive this cut of meat—pork belly, which is what you make bacon out of—that had been so demonized in the 1980s by the low-fat, low-cholesterol diet trend that was so incredibly popular. They spent money to get pork producers and smokehouses to develop round, pre-cooked slices of bacon that would fit on a hamburger, so then they could go to Burger King and Wendy’s and be like, listen, here is the money to help you to develop new burgers. We really want you to try them with bacon. The fast food companies are always looking for something else to sell. So the bacon trend—unlike most trends, which trickle down because chefs are doing it, or some cool bakery in New York is doing it, and it works its way down through Cheesecake Factory to TGI Fridays and Costco—it started in fast food and worked its way up to something that chefs were tossing with Brussels sprouts. And then it hit its cultural moment.
The coffee trend is another example. There is a Swedish tradition of a coffee break called fika in the afternoon. Maxwell House was looking to increase coffee consumption in the ’30s and ’40s, and they happened upon this thing that they put in their ads and marketing. It became such a big thing that it was in union contracts. And that triggered the growth of coffee consumption.
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