Trends I Pray Will Fall Out Of Fashion

Written by Mona Awad | 21 July 2009

Remember, reader, when we were all eating ostrich? Or when we sipped oolong tea in teeny tiny cups? Or how we added sundried tomatoes hither and thither to all things edible for the better part of the 1980s and 1990s? From rooibos to panko breadcrumbs to bullshit martinis, culinary trends, as all we foodies know, can be fickle, inexplicable, and sometimes spectacularly impractical. At times even laughably absurd. But what with the current financial crunch, trend experts predict that we will be seeing fewer frills and more function in the kitchen. Cheap, comforting soul food promises to be the culinary equivalent of the new black. Affordable stews. Everything-but-the-kitchen-sink casseroles. Liquor and lots of it.

Of course it won’t be all baked pasta shells and lentil soup. Foodie dalliances in Peruvian, Moroccan, Indian and Spanish cuisine will continue. Ditto for forays into exotic flavourings (look out for persimmon, lavender and garam masala). And though fancy-shmancy restaurants will take a dive, ‘underground’ restaurants — held in warehouses, open for one night only — will surface. Indeed, trend-wise, 2009 promises to reflect both that last belch of extravagance that comes at the tail end of an economic boom as well as the pragmatism that bespeaks a sense of tough times ahead. The good news? That pragmatism may mark the death of the more insufferably lavish trends born in the boom’s zenith and usher in an appreciation for more moderate and down-to-earth delights. So, in honour of what I hope will be the triumph of the practical over the pretentious, I have compiled a list of trends I pray will get the axe in 2009, hopefully to be replaced with my own wish list of Next Big Things.

bottled water with bling

According to Forbes Magazine, Madonna spends $10,000 a month on water blessed by Kabbalah rabbis. While she may be the only one to take agua to such spiritual and ludicrous heights, high dollar bottled water was all the rage for a time. Bling, a Tennessee company, boasts ‘limited edition spring water’ in cork-stoppered bottles, a logo encrusted with Swavorski crystals, and runs at $36 a bottle (Paris was seen feeding some to her pooch). Think only the Americans could be so ostentatious? Alas, we Canucks are not immune to the couture water craze. 10,000 BC, a variety drawn from melted glacial British Columbia ice, is not only served at the Las Vegas Hilton but at the Prime Minister’s table and costs up to $45 a bottle. And Veen — a brand lifted from the Konisaajo spring in the Finnish Lapland, and encased in extra flint glass whose Da Vinci-inspired design earned architectural awards — still awaits US distribution. Indeed, for a while, bottled water, said Forbes, was the next wine. Let’s hope the crunch brings us all skulking back to our Britas.

eating a philosophy

It’s one thing to go green and sustainable, to cook with a conscience (which, by the by, will be über-big this year). It’s quite another to reduce one’s carbon footprint with a bar of TerraPass’s ‘Climate Change Chocolate.’ Or to shovel in sunflower oil-slicked vegetarian mulch at cafes with names like One World. This sort of mingling of morality and food is not only dangerous (and dubious), but is literally hard to swallow. Instead of trying to be ‘ethical’ by buying a bottle of Ethos from Starbucks or ‘spiritual’ by dining in a pseudo-Asian restaurant festooned with Buddha statues and bamboo trees, let’s just eat and drink what we like with a little more care and a little more grace.

food as extreme sport

When celebrity chef and writer Anthony Bourdain infamously swallowed the still-beating heart of a cobra while in Vietnam on his hit series A Cook’s Tour, he spawned a new trend, nay genre, in television: the food-based adventure travel show. Bourdain does more organ swilling on his new show No Reservations while Andrew Zimmern of Bizarre Foods waxes philosophical about the ‘textural’ properties of pig’s testicle in a Tokyo bar called Morning Erection. And then there’s Man vs. Food, starring Adam Richman, a portly young man with a stomach of steel who travels across America eating hamburgers bigger than his own head and chicken wings hotter than the surface of the sun. Treating food as feats of strength, an opportunity to prove masculine virility, these men fashion themselves as the new explorers. Much as I admire their culinary gonads — Bourdain’s especially — the trend of using a fork as a flagpole is beginning to wear thin.

suggested selling

When my Starbucks barista smilingly asks me, as she has each morning for over a year, if I wouldn’t care for a rock-hard scone or a granny smith apple purse along with my short Americano, I really don’t mind. When she makes me aware, as she does each morning, that for only 25 cents more I can make my Americano a tall, I’m annoyed. But when she looks at me like I’m sad for not giving into her pushy smile, her textbook pitch, I’m frankly insulted. One’s coffee, especially one’s morning coffee, as I’m sure all my fellow caffeine fiends appreciate, is an intensely specific, personal choice. And suggested selling is perhaps one of the most insidious and insufferable trends to surface in a boom economy. My hope is that the crunch will make companies like Starbucks wake up and smell their own sludge. Instead of pushing me into buying bigger, be grateful that my crack-like addiction keeps me coming back at all.