Washington - In late 1984, The New York Times published a piece that was, at least indirectly, about a word I could do without.
The story covered the release of The Official Foodie Handbook by journalists Ann Barr and Paul Levy, which chronicled, among other things, the lives of food lovers around the world. They were food adventure seekers, culinary addicts who were interested in all food experiences, refined and not.
“A foodie,” the authors wrote, “is a person who is very, very, very interested in food.”
The two weren't the first to utter the term - that appears to have been Gael Greene, who used it in a 1980 column for New York Magazine, according to etymologist Barry Popik. Nor, as it happened, were they the last.
But for years, the word was used sparingly. A populist food critic might have been described as a “foodie.” A gustatory pleasure seeker with the time and money to invest in obscure cooking methods, niche coffee roasting techniques, and not-to-be-missed meals might have earned the distinction too. It wasn't a compliment, it was just a descriptor. It was an unpretentious way to categorise a growing but still relatively small group of people.
And then it wasn't.
A look at Google Ngram, which tracks the frequency of words in digitised books, shows the word was nonexistent until it appeared in the early 1980s, but its use grew quickly shortly after the publication of Barr and Levy's book.
A peek at Google Trends, which tracks the relative frequency with which people search for various things, tells a similar story. Interest in the word “foodie,” which seems to have piqued popular interest in late 2006, is trending at its highest ever. People are typing it in and pressing go.
Over time, the word has undergone an all-too-familiar transformation, bubbling up to a point of ubiquity that has stripped the word of any semblance of meaning. On a good day - or bad, depending on how you look at it - most people would qualify as a “foodie” to someone. The net the word casts is just too wide.
When asked about the word in 2012, Philipino restaurateur Elbert Cuenca had this to say: “It has come to the point of being bastardised. The word 'foodie,' which is nothing more than a modern-day casual substitute for 'gourmet,' has been relegated to mean anyone who likes food and/or eats out a lot. But who doesn't like food? Who doesn't eat out a lot?”
The answer, on the off chance there is any doubt, is not that many people.
There's nothing wrong with food populism. It's this very trend, after all, that has helped buoy the food movement, which is slowly reversing how disconnected we have all become from the production of our food. But some things have clearly been lost in the collective trek toward announcing whenever possible how much we like to eat.
Washington Post