Shut your piehole, food snob

A couple years ago, I came across a hybrid pastry known as the foie gras doughnut. It was at Brooklyn’s Great Googa Mooga festival, which can be considered the Coachella of food and drink. Like neighboring stalls that drew queues of people hungry to eat differently (read: hipster foodies), a vendor called Do or Dine had provoked the crowd’s interest with its combination of haute and humble: a Dunkin-variety jelly doughnut filled with duck liver pâte. Of course I had to try it. 

It could have been marvelous, except that it wasn’t. It was awkward. As if foie gras was invited to a threesome where strawberry jam and fried dough made sweet love, but poor little rich foie was obviously out of its element, neglected in its expensive lingerie. It tasted like the gross exploitation of a delicacy, an opinion I wouldn’t have arrived at if there was no line of people craning their necks to see what the curious pastry looked like; if there was no festival that presented food like it was a carnival thrill to experience; if I hadn’t become someone who eats to explore and explores to eat. 

Fast forward to 2013, the birth of numerous other edible hybrids: the maracon ice cream sandwich, the ramen burger, and of course, the cronut. Ah, the cronut. No pastry has managed to garner as many fans and haters at the same time. Among the latter, there are the people who’ve earned their Cro-Not stance after tasting the pastry and deciding it wasn’t for them. But then there’s the opposition that’s resisted trying the cronut because either: 1) They are pastry purists who would rather partake of the original SoHo cornet, allergic as they are to culinary knock-offs; or 2) They are people who consider themselves the exception to hype, above a once-special food that’s gone absolutely mainstream. Both are symptoms of food snobbery, an orally contracted disease that affects many an indie eater. 

You can’t blame food snobs for their alam-ko-na-yan attitude. Ever since the behemoth of food culture infiltrated pop culture, many of us fashion ourselves culinary savants. Leave it to Top Chef to let the audience sit at the culinary critics table, where we’ve become adept at spotting overcooked meat and under-baked bread. Without the Food Network, we wouldn’t have learned to distinguish a jus from a roux, or to affectedly pronounce bruschetta the Ital-ee-ano way (thank you, Giada). There’s Google, of course, which has, among other things, become a cheat sheet in navigating sophisticated restaurant menus, so that the aspiring professional eater may never be misled by an item like sweetbreads. And without the vast food media that span grubstagrams to dining blogs, we wouldn’t have let hype inform us of what a goddamn cronut was, nor would New Yorkers know about the wonders of sisig.   

Based on how Sriracha tees now compete with band tees and lines in Brooklyn are longer at a ramen burger stall than a Courtney Love gig, food just might be the new rock and roll. Still, the opportunity to judge via taste isn’t as instant as judging by hearing, where your ears can intercept the latest One Direction single on the radio and a minute of listening can cause anger spasms. Amid a culture where online food reviews have made us so safe and mechanical when we order, or where a pastry can attain celebrity, we might have forgotten one important thing about food: actually going out there and trying it.   

Just as pop songs introduced the masses to dub-step, thereby inspiring an exploration of other genres, then the food trend can provoke curiosity and expand peoples’ palates. Let “it” eats like Speculoos compel a lifestyle store like Ritual to create Choc-Nut butter, a spread so clever and essential. Let the TWG macaron groupie be led to tea pastries like canelés and madeleines, or the ramen burger fiend at Wrong Ramen cultivate a craving for tantanmen and tonkotsu. More importantly, let us eat, letting smell and the sound of our teeth digging in engage our appetite. Let us have our foie gras doughnuts, wipe our mouths, and then earn the right to say, “Shit, I kind of hated that.”