 What do we think will be the US-American millennial equivalent of like.... liver and onions? What I mean is when I was growing up that was a food that was on a lot of restaurant menus but understood to be for Old People Tastes. You don't see it on menus so much these days now that those particular old people are dead. So what food tastes good to my millennial cohort that is going to be seen as gross to kids and young adults in like... 2050? 30 comments | Expand all CWs
  I think a lot of the older ones that have fallen out of favor now where foods invented for that generation ("chop suey") or based on foods that were economically foisted upon them ("liver and onions"). Based on the first, vast swaths of engineered food might go away. Based on the second, not sure. But meat may fall out of economically favored if climate impact is weighed in.  One of my favorite things to do is read culinary and food history. You read enough of this you start to notice that "traditional" foods, even the ones that people swear up and down have Always Been The Food of Our People, are almost universally not much older than the grandparents of the oldest people currently alive. I grew up on "traditional" Iranian food. I read primary historic sources on this stuff & most of what is claimed to be long-standing tradition was invented after 1900 @darius in much the same way that some people believe the vikings made it to atlantic canada, i believe italy made it to the americas thousands of years ago and have been eating tomatoes ever since @dequbed I encourage you to look into the actual history (I haven't even looked at your bio to see what those cultures might be, this is just a recommendation I make to everyone who thinks their food lineage is ancient. Even religious stuff, there's like, major translation and meaning changes over time, it's all interpretation that shifts) @darius Venezuelan food (specifically Arepas) are considered to be the oldest recipe still cooked in more or less unchanged form last I checked, so I'm pretty good on that front. ;)  Here sometimes there are "medieval reenactments" where they prepare potatoes and tomatoes 🤣  @darius Ooh, my sister wrote a book all about this as it pertains to New England: https://www.amazon.com/Truth-about-Baked-Beans-Washington/dp/1479882763  @darius huh. growing up in the US midwest in the 80s/90s so completely inside the blast radius of post-war food science and the ongoing depopulation of rural ag areas conditioned me to think of my people as uniquely cut off from legacy food culture, but maybe this is a way more global thing than i think.     @darius I wonder if it'll be the inauthentic global foods changed for American tastes in the 20th century Hard shell tacos, orange chicken, spaghetti and meatballs. I could see future generations saying "this isn't real [location] food, but my grandma loves it because she doesn't know any better"  I could essay on about this for hours but genuinely I think Julia Child introducing Americans to real home cooking changed the dynamics of the kind of cultural irrelevance pipeline you’re talking about. We don’t really have a contemporary to “steak diane” and whatnot because we basically do not craft dishes that way anymore. @darius Peanuts. It seems like everyone I know with kids has someone in their classroom with a severe allergy to them  @darius air fryer and sous vide recipes will go the way of the aspic, since they're all people trying to figure out new technology and making crimes in the process  @darius I would guess some “mid-century” microwave cuisine/freezer foods would be easy places to watch. TV Dinners have mostly already changed forms and the “classics” are disappearing/only remain for nostalgia; I’ve seen frozen Salisbury steak “patties” directly on hipster menus like liver and onions used to show up/our generation’s shared frozen foods childhood meatloaf nightmare; maybe even some “big” things like pizza rolls or Pop Tarts don’t survive long term. |
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@darius those super tall gastropub burgers