The whole “bacon in everything” trend started because the pork industry promoted it:
I remember reading an article years ago that pork bellies were only traded on the commodity exchange in the summers, because that’s when demand spiked for BLT sandwiches. (Unlike today, when bacon is in everything.)
BTW, if you’re wondering why many once exotic fruit or vegetable were suddenly widely available in American supermarkets, the answer is often Frieda Caplan. She operated a produce company in Southern California and introduced Americans to kiwifruit, starfruit, mushrooms, new varieties of potatoes, and so forth.
You bite, I’ll barf. Cilantro is vile and tastes like stinkbugs smell. That’s the nicest thing I can say about it.
I used to think I didn’t like avocado since I hated guac. Turns out it’s the cilantro in it that ruins it.
I assume you heard of the genetic basis for that? Some people taste soapiness when tasting cilantro.
You mean next week?
And some, like me, taste the soapiness, but get used to it and eventually it just becomes an acceptable and even desirable flavor (as in my case.) There is definitely a genetic marker that has to do with the perceived flavor interpretation of cilantro, but it’s also something many people get used to (after all, it is one of the most popular herbs in the world.) So it is a mix of genetics and environment (like many things.)
Why would I try to get used to it? That’s just Stockholm Syndrome for the taste buds and olfactory receptors.
At least chicken thighs and leg quarters haven’t become trendy, sending up the prices! Thighs are the prime rib of the chicken!
I first had cilantro eating Georgian* bean salad. I couldn’t pin down what it was, but I knew I liked the flavor.
I remember Szechuan cuisine becoming trendy in the late '70s. Of course, this was in Minnesota, where Chinese food was traditionally ground pork stewed in a green mush that was mostly celery.
*The country, not the state.
Name change.
Prior to that time period it was known as “red roughy”, “deep sea perch”, and “slimehead”. Good marketing decision. They are vulnerable to overfishing and some people have stopped buying them because of that.
^ “Hey, Mom, it’s Friday, could we have some Slimehead for supper?”
Yes, good marketing decision. Definitely.
Nope. Spotted pumpkin spice something-or-other at Kroger two days ago.
Mentions of Orange Roughy reminded me of Patagonian Toothfish
I was just joking about Big Sweet Potato making sweet potato fries a thing. But the bacon reference and chilean sea bass things make me wonder.
I can pretty well narrow it down to somewhere about 1997-9. A coworker/friend was seeing a guy who worked in the South Loop of Chicago and reported that a grocery store near there had sushi, right there in a cooler at the Dominick’s (large area grocer at the time). We couldn’t believe it so we piled into a car (or maybe 2, there was a group of us) and got some. I can also remember that the guy was obsessed with the Honda S2000 which was either about or had just been released into the US market.
We had a Weird Al tape in the minivan that us kids listened to time & again. Looking it up now, I see it was his self titled debut album “Weird Al” Yankovic which came out in 1983 but we were listening probably five years later. In the song I’ll Be Mellow When I’m Dead, Al notes that “You won’t catch me sipping Perrier down in some sushi bar” after saying he hates organic and health food. He goes on to remark that he isn’t interested in designer jeans, incense, self-awareness, redwood hot tubs or the vegetarian scene.
Some time later, I had a lightbulb moment when digging around the soft drink cooler during a family party a few states away. I held up a bottle and asked what it was. “Oh, that’s Perrier, mineral water. You wouldn’t like it.” Of course, tweenaged me wouldn’t have know how Parry-yay was spelled or meant but that part of the song suddenly made sense. I don’t think I had sushi until some years later. Our household wasn’t much for Perrier or sushi.
My wife takes chocolate chips and bananas in her pancakes, and smears so much peanut butter on the top, it would stick to the ceiling indefinitely if you tossed it up there (and don’t think I haven’t considered it).
Save yourselves.
Maybe if there were some prototypes before that programme started in 2001. In the UK Thai food, often, weirdly, connected to pubs which had never previously sold any food other than crisps and pork scratchings, became common in the late 80s/early 90s. And I mean really common, after being virtually unknown beforehand. The pub versions died out about fifteen years ago; there are still lots of Thai restaurants (and a few in pubs), but no more than most cuisines.
Same as the US timeframe ChockFullofHeadyGoodness mentioned.
When I was growing up, my dad took me and my brother to IHOP quite a bit. Still, I don’t remember ever hearing about Belgian waffles until I had one at the New York World’s Fair in 1964. After that, it seemed they were everywhere!
I’d have to search for a cite, but I recall reading somewhere that sweet potato fries were created as way to use “ugly” sweet potatoes that aren’t likely to sell in a grocery store produce section. So you might actually be right.
I actually suspect a lot of food trends we assume happened organically were actually the result of some food industry working to market a specific food. I’ve mentioned before that Brussels sprouts have become more popular because a couple of decades ago they had their bitterness bred out of them. But in order to convince people to start eating them, the people who worked on breeding them had to get chefs to start using them, which of course involved a lot of marketing.
That squares with my observations. I worked at a grocery store the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college. On my first day of new employee training one of the other trainees bought a tray of sushi from the store to eat during our break. That would have been in 1999.
My first time trying it was my freshman year of college, when the RA took some of the people from the dorm out for sushi, so that would have been fall 1998.
I’ll sea(ha!) you your orange roughies and chilean sea bass and raise you “the poor man’s lobster”, the monkfish. Did anyone ordering monkfish know what they looked like?
Not according to my Facebook feed. Some people are positively hopping up & down in anticipation.