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Americas 8 worst food trend’s
by Larry Olmsted on “Forbes”
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Having covered food, wine and spirits for more than 15 years, I’ve seen a lot of trends come and go. Some recent developments have been great, like the increased availability and usage of natural meats and grass fed beefs, and the increased reliance on seasonality, rather than using bland out of season fruits and vegetables that are shipped vast distances and bred to have long shelf lives.

But not every food trend is good, and not every food trend lasts. I remember the rise and fall of nouvelle cuisine, and the short but rabid preoccupation among chefs with food layered into towers on the plate.

The changing face of media has made food trends more pronounced than ever, for better or worse. This includes the bevy of food-related television shows, and the new need to fill specialized channels with hours of vapid programming. Ditto for social media that brings other people’s meals to your phones and desktops and the dramatic rise of food blogs and chat rooms dissecting every aspect of food culture. Nonetheless, despite increased attention to what, where, and how we eat, and increased social criticism, some astonishingly stupid trends have thrived. Here are the worst offenders:

1. Food Trucks: There is nothing wrong with the individual food truck per se, but the overall trend is both ridiculous and in some cases, morally reprehensible. The food media continues to treat these as a new form of cuisine and some sort of breakthrough invention when they are nothing more than a way to deliver food to consumers, akin to the “invention” of home delivery, takeout containers or the drive through.  When grouped together in lots, as is the case in Austin and Portland, food trucks become an outdoor version of a longstanding American culinary tradition – the shopping mall food court, and nothing more. Food-wise, there is nothing new about trucks, which serve foods you can already get in countless restaurants, albeit it with much more limited menus. People act as if tacos, dumplings, or brick oven pizza have somehow been “discovered” by food truck cooks. One major magazine recently suggested that food trucks had brought affordable ethnic cuisine to the people of Los Angeles – seriously? LA has always had hundreds of brick and mortar eateries serving exactly this kind of ………….
Read more HERE

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Some artisanal house cured meats, like these from Salume Beddu in St. Louis, are delicious. But most are not.
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