As a kid, I used to wonder where all the major popular food recipes came from — not “grandma’s lasagna”, but “lasagna” itself. Having grown up in a different country, even things like mac and cheese were novel, and I wasn’t exposed to it until the school lunch program had it one day (now that was a glorious day). Same for everything from pizza to banh mi to croque monsieurs.
I take it a lot of foods, particularly traditional/cultural ones, were discovered/invented/scienced the shit out of way back in antiquity, for some definition of antiquity? Then there are later fusion items, like burritos and banh mi and General Tso’s chicken, that combined different cultural traditions into new delicacies.
What about more modern inventions? Are there still foods being invented somewhere that then spread to worldwide popularity, to be made in homes and restaurants everywhere? (I don’t mean manufactured foods/brands factory-made for export, but recipes that anyone can prepare out of normal, relatively common ingredients.)
Avocado toast? Acai bowls? Boba tea? Soup dumplings? Those were novel to me at one point, as a millennial.
What fanciful noms do the TikTok generations obsess about? Fads count too, I suppose, as long as they stick around for at least a few months or years.
For me, growing up in the 70’s, there was one kind of salad. Iceberg lettuce with some carrot and radish…maybe a tomato and egg thrown in to fancy it up. Spinach salad was also a thing with hot bacon dressing. A Caesar salad was a real treat and rare to find. (I’m not counting coleslaw or potato salad or jello salad (urgh) as salads for this.)
Where did argula and romaine and kale and all the rest come from?
I love salad and am happy for the variety but they sorta magicked themselves outta nowhere in my mind.
Living in western NY, the obvious one is Buffalo chicken wings. Those little “wings” used to be considered to be too small to serve; they were either tossed out or maybe used in stock.
Guacamole is another one that came to mind. I know it was technically invented by the Aztecs in like the 1500s, but for 95% of the population in the US at least, it was unknown before the mid 1990s.
That’s just it… as far as I can tell, there’s nothing really new that people are eating/drinking lately, but rather more obscure foods and ethnic dishes are coming to the forefront.
Like poutine, coconut water, or in decades past, stuff like fajitas or Cajun food. Hell, even “light beer” wasn’t new in the mid 1970s- it was developed by another brewery in the 1960s, but it took a decade and the marketing muscle of Miller to make it work.
Mostly what we see these days are sort of expansions of existing things (“Ranch” everything for example), or various sorts of fusions- Vietnamese crawfish, boudin kolaches, bulgogi tacos, and so forth.
I don’t know if that’s true; guacamole’s always been a thing in border states I suspect. I mean, I grew up in a very white family in Texas, and my father knew how to make guacamole. And it was a common Tex-Mex thing in the 80s. I mean, fajitas were always served with guacamole, cheese, sour cream, and pico de gallo. And they became popular in the early-mid 80s.
I’d say it’s a natural progression. Step 1 is for something to be invented. Step 2 is to become an obscure ethnic dish. Step 3 is to become a worldwide fad.
The jump from 1 to 3 is not often done in a few years, or even a decade.
Depending on your definition of “recent”, Brussels sprouts surged in popularity in the past 20 years ago. Brussels sprouts always existed, of course, but when I was a kid they were the butt of jokes. They were that gross vegetable that kids everywhere hated, but their moms forced them to eat. Then apparently some horticulturists were able to breed out the bitter flavors, and now everyone loves Brussels sprouts.
I just recently learned that the reason iceberg was at one time the “standard” lettuce in America was because it was the first type of lettuce that could withstand being shipped across the country. It was literally packed in a crate of ice (hence the name) and shipped to grocery stores around the country. Before iceberg lettuce was developed, salads (at least salads as we think of them today, with lettuce in them) were kind of a luxury, or something you could only have if you happened to live near where the lettuce was grown (or you grew it yourself).
I assume we must have either: bred forms of other greens that can stand up to shipping as well as iceberg; or developed better, faster means of shipping; or grow other greens more places now (or some combination of the above), allowing more variety than just iceberg lettuce in your local stores.
I suspect a lot of food trends have more marketing behind them when we realize. The aforementioned Brussels sprouts didn’t just organically become popular once once the bitter flavor was bred out; the scientists who developed them lobbied chefs to promote them in their restaurants in order to popularize them. The trend of putting bacon in everything didn’t happen organically, either; it was due to marketing by the pork industry. And remember in late 1990s when Thai food suddenly became the hot new ethnic food trend? That was because the Thai government was actually promoting it.
I would be shocked if anything mentioned in this thread poofed into existence in the last 40 years (counting only a singular item and not a new recipe). Doubtless all this stuff existed looong before me but I just never saw it (for whatever reason…maybe my mom didn’t like it).
After the Food Network and celebrity chefs proved popular, trendy ideas became a dime a dozen and quickly diffused to smaller cities.
Don’t know how one defines recent, and foods well known to one culture or region may be new to those unfamiliar with them, but not to locals.
Recent? Gochujang and other Korean flavours in fried chicken, barbecue and snacks.
Nothing new about Italian meats, but ‘nduja (spreadable sausage) and guacinale became trendy and widely available (though not cheap).
Bahn mi sandwiches were popular in Vietnam and Asian grocers, but did not have designated chains serving mainly that.
Szechuan food has always been great, but even my small (studenty) city has several specific Szechuan restaurants. It had just one in the outskirts forty years ago and it is where my father always took us. My parents loved and cooked spicy food when few Canadian families were familiar with vindaloo or many types of chile.
Grocery stores today stock seven times as many products as they did just twenty years ago. So there must be many examples. Look at how easy it is to buy jerk or oyster or fish sauce, chimichurri or harissa or soy-ginger marinade, za’atar or five spice or epazote, Marmite or giardinera, soursop or arepas.
Ethnic cookbooks from the 70s had a list of specialty suppliers who would mail you staples now easily obtainable in very small towns. The list of generic stuff still hard to find is small… (Canada has a thing about importing granary malt flour for bread baking?).
We rarely ate Brie growing up. It became trendy to bake it in small domes and serve with fruit and crackers. Since this is awesome, it is a shame one sees it less (along with a dearth of After Eight mints and escargots with garlic butter). No more cheese plates or bread baskets - too fattening?
While on business trips a couple of years ago, some co-workers introduced me to Korean barbecue. Now there’s even a Korean BBQ and hot pot restaurant in the little Connecticut town where I grew up.
