The Tastemakers (45 page)

That same summer a Japanese chef and blogger named Keizo Shimamoto invented a ramen burger at his pop-up noodle stand in Brooklyn. This dish, a hamburger set between two buns made from fried ramen noodles, was to some the high-water mark of food trend memes, the edible equivalent of a double rainbow video gone viral. Of course the lines began forming immediately, and of course the ramen burger attracted the scorn of many who had never even tasted it, but as one article pointed out, the ramen burger, in all its insanity, proved by its very existence what was great about our society. In Japan, where the food is delicious but governed by strict conventions and traditions, the ramen burger would be a blasphemy that would never see the light of day. The same could be said about cronuts, which would never fly in Paris, the city where Dominique Ansel was born. But here in North America we embraced food trends and allowed them to thrive. Kara Nielsen, the trendologist I spoke with in San Francisco, saw this as one of our greatest strengths. Food trends, she felt, were as powerful an example of the creative, democratic North American spirit than anything else out there in our culture. They represented the same force of entrepreneurship, fresh beginnings, and boundless destiny that drew immigrants to our shores with dreams in their eyes.

At their worst, food trends can be annoyingly shallow. They may start out as individual expressions of imagination, but ultimately they become victims of a herd mentality. One day everyone in your life is eating Greek yogurt, and you're not sure how it happened. In the case of trends like the cronut they literally attract stampeding herds of humans. It is easy to view the culture of trends as the vapid expression of a society obsessed with materialism, as insubstantial fads. We dine out for entertainment, watch hours of food being cooked and eaten on television, and plan road trips to taste the latest hot meal. Food has become fashion, chefs are hailed as rock stars, and photos of the latest dishes are our art. At the same time we live in a world where millions are starving or malnourished, and not just in distant poor countries but also within walking distance of our homes. In the United States alone more than 16 million children don't have reliable access to food. They've never
heard of cronuts or chia seeds or the latest ceviche from Ricardo Zarate's kitchen, and they don't give a shit that you just posted a review of the top-twenty hottest food trucks in DC on your blog. These people wait in lines and dig through the trash for their next meal, not for some sense of culinary thrill-seeking.

It is hard to contemplate this reality when you're walking the halls of the Fancy Food Show, having so many culinary creations thrust at you that you can hardly swallow them fast enough. While writing this book I was often tempted to blame the ramen burger, the bacon explosion, or the chia-flavored Greek yogurt crookie for the sad absurdity of this problem, not to mention the much pettier but sometimes compelling problem: I was tired of hearing about new trends.

But somewhere in the midst of my year of decadent cupcakes, food truck festivals, and $2,000 worth of creamy, nutty black rice, it occurred to me how lucky I was—to be able to do this for a living, to live in a country that not only supported but encouraged these sometimes quixotic innovations, to have grown up in a time when food was so tasty and plentiful that we could sneer at steak and potatoes. It is a wonderful time to be eating.

Food trends bring us happiness. You can groan all you want about how cupcakes are “over” as a trend, but if I placed a cupcake in front of you, you would still peel back the folds of its paper cup with the same eager anticipation you had when you were a kid at a birthday party. You would chomp down on the sweet moist cake and the creamy icing with a single, ferocious bite and then lick the remnants from your sticky fingers until every last crumb is gone. For the same reason people will continue to eat Ricardo Zarate's food—not because it is cool and trendy but because it is fundamentally delicious and the experience of enjoying his uniquely composed causas and tiraditos brings diners a joy they cannot experience in other restaurants. Chefs like Roy Choi, David Chang, and Sang Yoon may have become known for a particular dish or a flavor profile that grew into a trend, but that was because that Korean taco, pork bun, or hamburger they created brought great happiness to the people eating it, and still does. The trends those chefs
launched spread smiles to millions of diners everywhere, and this is why other chefs and other diners sought them out in their own cities and homes, where that happiness only grew.

Food trends are for everyone. They may originate as specialty items, available only in select cities for a high price and long wait, but eventually the nature of all food trends is democratic. The creation of a brilliant chef or a small food company will quickly be adapted, reinvented, and reborn in countless different ways at all different price points. Products and tastes that make their debut at the Fancy Food Show as rare, expensive indulgences will trickle down to the average supermarket buyer through the process of a trend's evolution, which is why goat's milk caramels may one day be as commonplace in our pantries as Hershey's chocolate. We now have a vastly greater selection of foods at our fingertips than we did a generation ago.

Food trends can also deepen and expand our culture beyond the plate. The success of Anson Mills grains has done more to further Glenn Roberts's goal of preserving the Carolina Rice Kitchen than any political campaign or charitable plea ever could. The quality and flavor of his grits and rice may propel their trendiness, but their ultimate cultural impact has resulted in a revived interest in southern history, traditional cooking, heritage ingredients, and farming practices that are spreading across the South and around the world. Trends also bring the kitchens of that world together. The years Sushil Malhotra, Sukhi Singh, and Hemant Bhagwani have spent trying to make Indian food popular in North America will soon pay off, as naan bread and chicken tikka masala become lunch staples in more homes, workplaces, and restaurants, and as fears about Indian food give way to an expanding curiosity and hunger, both for Indian cuisine and the greater culture it comes from. Our food isn't a static thing. It doesn't belong in a museum, hermetically sealed and unalterable. It shifts and changes to reflect our values, enriching us in innumerable ways as it does. Trends are what push it forward.

All of these trends created economic growth. The Botden family staked millions of dollars on the Red Prince apple because they knew that only a new, innovative apple could set them apart on the grocer's shelves. Their success will drive others to find and breed
new apples, bringing greater diversity to what is available for us to eat while also increasing the fortunes of farmers and everyone who works with them, just as bacon's revival lifted the fortunes of the pork industry, buoyed restaurant profits, and helped farmers get more for their pigs. Chia created a global market for a seed that previously was sold only as a novelty item. The poor Argentinean farmers that Wayne Coates initially introduced to chia are now rich because of its growth as a health trend. Each cupcake shop, aspiring Indian restaurant, food truck, or small company winning a sofi award at the Fancy Food Show represents the hopes of several entrepreneurs, each of whom can possibly create hundreds or even thousands of jobs on the strength of their food trends. These are jobs in farms, offices, restaurants, and warehouses, jobs for highly educated individuals and for those who need steady entry-level work at a decent wage. Food trends represent capitalism at its finest: a good idea that the market rewards with dollars, creating jobs, tax revenues, and economies of scale as they expand.

With that economic might, too, comes the possibility of even more change. If enough people get behind a way of eating, policy will eventually follow. People had been crying about the lack of street food options for decades in North American cities and nothing happened. Only when gourmet food trucks became a trend did change actually occur and work its way into law. Within just a handful of years North American cities went from places where selling food on the street was illegal and the most you could hope for was a stale hot dog, to a roving smorgasbord of edible options that spurned innovation and new models of commerce that were legally available thanks to the political efforts of the food truck associations and the trend they rode in on.

Over the last few decades most of the food sold to us has become more processed, giving rise to particularly devastating health consequences such as obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, around 17 percent of American children are now obese, and as many as a third are overweight. Those numbers have tripled in the past three decades and are now showing up in developing countries like China, India,
and Brazil, where health problems related to overeating were entirely unknown twenty years ago. This shift, unfortunately, is also a food trend, and it is a hell of a lot more impactful than any hot pastry of the moment. Trends like these aren't easily diverted or slowed down; they are powerful and change the way we eat on a biological level. You cannot litigate them out of existence. They require a shift in the opposite direction with equal momentum and force to unseat them. The only thing that can do that is a countertrend.

Two years ago I found myself in the gymnasium of the Barrow Street Nursery School, a wealthy private school in New York's Greenwich Village, where Radha Agrawal was busy running around with a pack of shrieking three-year-olds. Agrawal, who was then thirty-three, was there to put on a puppet show with the Super Sprowtz, a posse of talking, singing vegetable superheroes that she had created years before. Formed after lightning strikes a New York City rooftop greenhouse, the Super Sprowtz use the power of their health benefits—Brian Broccoli is super-strong, Colby Carrot has super-sight, Suzy Sweetpea is super-speedy, Sammy Spinach is super-stretchy, and so forth—to fight their nemesis, Pompous Pollution and his unhealthy henchmen Greasy, Junk, and Processa, who hatch schemes tailor-made to rouse the ire of Whole Foods–shopping parents, like sending exploding grease carts into the Union Square farmer's market. Take the Justice League, infuse it with Dr. Oz's antioxidant gospel, wrap it in cuddly felt faces, and you've got Super Sprowtz.

Once the teachers seated all the school's children in front of a makeshift stage, Agrawal, who barely stood five feet, bounded out in front of them.

“So do you want to meet some of the Super Sprowtz today?” she asked the children.

“Yes!!!” the kids shouted.

“I can't hear you!”

“YESSSS!!!!!!” they shouted louder.

“I still can't hear you!”

Colby Carrot, the main hero of the Super Sprowtz, who wore a yellow eye mask, popped up from the stage. Screams erupted.

“Hi kids! I'm Colby Carrot! I heard all the yelling, and I came up here to see what that was all about! Let's cheer again if you like carrots!”

The kids went wild.

The Super Sprowtz began in 2006, when Agrawal created the cartoon vegetables for the kids menu at her twin sister Miki's organic pizza restaurant, Slice. Kids reacted by requesting those same vegetables on their pizzas, and Agrawal felt she was on to something. Over the next four years she wrote a backstory and hired artists to develop the Super Sprowtz characters, which she turned into a series of four self-published books. Eventually she quit her job in advertising to develop the Super Sprowtz into a kids educational nutrition and entertainment company with global ambitions. So far Super Sprowtz has produced plush toys and books, put on an interactive exhibit at the Children's Museum of Manhattan, shot a short television series that aired in the back of New York taxicabs, and performed hundreds of shows at schools, parks, zoos, and other venues, where the Super Sprowtz have appeared on the same bill as marquee kids' brands like Dora the Explorer and Olivia the Pig.

When I spoke with Agrawal in early 2013 the company was on the cusp of big things. It would soon secure a $2.5 million investment from one of the owners of the Century 21 department store chain, and talks were underway with merchandise licensers, book publishers, supermarket chains, and
Amazon.com
to take the Super Sprowtz characters and bring them all over the United States and the world. Improving childhood nutrition was a major cultural trend, and it was only growing. First Lady Michelle Obama had dedicated tremendous time and funds to raise awareness around it, and Agrawal had the support of her administration—even bringing Colby Carrot to the White House. “The first lady believes that the vibrancy and future of our country is truly at stake,” said White House Chef Sam Kass when we spoke about Super Sprowtz. The dire scope of the problem translated into a potential market, complete with institutional support for people with potential solutions. “A lot of innovation is happening in this space,” said Kass, “and Super Sprowtz is doing something that's very exciting.”

Agrawal's hope was that the Super Sprowtz would eventually land a big TV deal. She pictured their show airing in every family's living room, with an Erica Eggplant puppet in every child's toy chest. Using the same aggressive marketing techniques that big food companies employ to get children to eat sugary cereals, Super Sprowtz would hook kids on vegetables, making carrots and spinach into a pint-sized food trend in the way the Vidalia onion farmers had done with Shrek. “It's not hard to get kids to eat vegetables if you start them young,” Agrawal said. “But the only way to get that knowledge to a child is via strong and culturally relevant material.” Agrawal was full of anecdotal tales of how this had already happened—of the little girl's father who wrote to her after the show, telling her about how his daughter suddenly couldn't get enough eggplant, or the investor who saw the company's future when his grandson began eating broccoli after a Super Sprowtz performance. If these individual successes could be replicated on a larger scale, to millions of children instead of thousands, imagine the potential trend it could unleash: kids tossing aside sugary cereals and soft drinks in favor of carrots and kale smoothies, eating healthier and better, and starting to reverse, however slowly, the decades' long trend in the other direction. A doctor at Columbia University was studying the potential effects of the Super Sprowtz on kids' food choices, and Agrawal had recently partnered with Cornell University to launch Super Sprowtz–branded salad bars in several New York schools.