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Foodies Who Hate Being Called Foodies Spend All Their Money On Food
By
Garth Johnston
Published Mar 26, 2012
Modified Mar 26, 2012
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By
Garth Johnston
Published Mar 26, 2012
Modified Mar 26, 2012
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Back in 2009, Joe Pompeo at the New York Observer coined the term "Foodiot" to better describe the food fanatics who increasingly fill our fine metropolis's restaurants and watering holes with their cameraphones and social networked tips. But since then they haven't gone away. Instead, they've just gotten worse. And this week, in an epic piece appropriately titled "When Did Young People Start Spending 25% of Their Paychecks on Pickled Lamb’s Tongues?" New York magazine provides the world with an anthropological status update on the subset of humanity that really cares about every morsel that passes through their lips. Oh, to be young and...full?
To write the piece, author Michael Idov spends quite a bit of time with 27-year-old Diane Chang, a woman who makes $70,000 a year, lives in Park Slope and, besides the $1,100 she spends on rent, says she spends all of her dough "on food." She also has a blog in which she pairs meals she's recently eaten with music (Beetz N' Jamz). But don't call her a foodie! "It's like when my boss says, 'Oh, you're such a foodie,'" she says. "'I'm like, Oh God. When I hear the word foodie, I think of Yelp. I don't want to be lumped in with Yelp.'"
Though he mostly spends his article listing Chang's dining habits, the core insight that Idov makes about our current foodiocracy is that dealing with these people is oddly akin to dealing with the music snobs who used to work at Tower Records. He constantly compares the way kids these days talk about food to music, and it works. For example:
- "Lately, Casey has been championing the theory that mediocre food is better than good, the equivalent of a jaded indie kid extolling the virtues of Barry Manilow."
- Regarding his choice of Eleven Madison Park as his favorite restaurant: "On the food-as-indie-rock matrix, I have just accidentally confessed to loving the Dave Matthews Band."
- "'Remember when [David Chang] just made burritos?' she asks, sighing, the culinary equivalent of claiming R.E.M. sold out after Chronic Town."
- And just to prove the point, regarding last year's "It" restaurant, M. Wells, Chang uses the quintessential rock snob excuse for not loving it: "I just don't want to believe the hype."
So yeah. Foodiots, rock snobs, same difference! Meanwhile, we're still trying to catch our breath from the sheer number of restaurants name dropped in this one story. We started counting them at the beginning but after the alphabetical list in the first paragraph we realized that we just didn't care.
Tagged
diane chang
foodie
foodies
foodiot
foodiots
new york magazine
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Garth Johnston
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