A Case Of The Mondays: Or, Food Trends That I Hate

Good morning, friends, and Happy Monday.

I write that with sarcasm, because Monday mornings are horrific. Monday mornings in general, and this one in particular. I think of them as a small reenactment of what birth must have been like: there you were just minding your own business and dozing off in your cozy, quiet womb when all of a sudden you're grabbed by the ears and yanked into bright lights, noise, and chaos. Hello there, world! Now please put me back where I came from.

I'm in a mood today, people, which means that I'll be using this space to complain about something.

(Ed. Note: Yes, I am aware that today is the first day of summer and could instead be an opportunity for a gushing, optimistic post about the joys of summer produce. Unfortunately, simply too grouchy to write such a post.)

Last month, you indulged me in an extended rant against "small plates" format restaurant menus. This morning, I got to thinking about what other trends in food (from restaurant to store-bought to recipes in popular magazines) really get me going. Here's what I've come up with:

Pork/Bacon Mania: Among a certain type of food-obsessed New Yorker, a cult has sprung up around an infatuation with all things pig. These are the people who noisily and frequently proclaim just how much they love pork, as if that's something really sassy and contrarian. "Anything's better with bacon!" As if they just discovered it. Chefs passive-aggressively compete with each other to see who can create a menu with the most disproportionate and borderline disgusting use of pork (this was tied between David Chang and Ryan Skeen, at last tally). I'm not in disagreement that pork is delicious, but that's just it, no one is in disagreement that pork is delicious. Not even people who are Kosher. Or probably vegetarians.

One Ingredient, Multiple Ways: For instance, an appetizer consisting of "Leeks Three Ways," in which you get something like a leek soup, a plain grilled leek, and a leek panna cotta. I can't tell whether this practice was created by Top Chef or if the show just spread it, like a pathogen, to people who had no business cooking this way. Whatever the case may be, it represents the trend towards focus on pure, single ingredients entering its Mannerist phase. It is to 2010 what deconstruction was to 2005. I look forward to the time when I can get leeks just ONE way -- GOOD.

Extreme Locavorism: I'm all in favor of supporting area farmers (coughCSAcough), but this whole thing has gotten out of hand. Forget about buying your ingredients from farms in Connecticut, New Jersey, and the Hudson Valley, if you really cared about reforming our food system you would actually be able to see your food source from the kitchen. There are now entire commercial growing operations in Brooklyn; I've heard rumors of people setting up rooftop farms in Manhattan. One of these days I fully expect to walk up to a restaurant and see a sous chef outside milking a goat tied to a bicycle rack.

Artisanal Cocktails: Everybody and their mom now employs a "mixologist" charged with whipping up a list of "signature cocktails," each containing eleven different ingredients and priced at around $14 a pop. That's actually a bargain because these drinks involve, variously, strange Asian citrus fruits, a small-batch whiskey that The Mixologist made in his Williamsburg basement, some rare flower that The Mixologist harvests annually from the Peruvian Altiplano, and ice hand-carved by specially trained seals from a glacier in Antarctica. The ingredients must be gently mixed, filtered, lit on fire, and blessed with an incantation, the dying words of a Cherokee medicine man spoken only to The Mixologist. But I ask you, in all seriousness: is anything really better than a cold, bone-dry martini?

Anything That Involves Quotation Marks: It's become fashionable to produce food that's a "take" on other food. For instance, a "BLT," which is probably nothing like a BLT. It's probably sous-vide pork belly with freeze dried lettuce and tomato jam. Likewise, "Chicken and Dumplings" isn't Chicken and Dumplings at all, it's dumpling dough in the shape of a chicken breast alongside chicken liver pate in the shape of dumplings. Apparently all the good dishes have already been taken, so chefs have decided to get cheeky on us. I do not approve.

Gluten-Free Foods: It's positively amazing how celiac disease (not to be confused with celeriac, which is a root vegetable) has spread throughout the population of America like wildfire in the past two years. Gluten-free foods are EVERYWHERE, with those naturally containing no gluten proclaiming so proudly on the label and those that do, like bread, or donuts, doing their best to get rid of it. The line of thinking here is that it must be a rare allergic reaction to gluten that is making you fat and bloated, not the 3,000 calories of pasta that you eat every night. I know a good gluten-free food: vegetables. Eat them, and then go for a run.

Well, that's about it for now. These are the things in the world of food that I wish would go back where they came from. Please feel free to join me in my Monday morning grouchiness, and add your own food trend annoyances below.