Who Was the Foodie?

Two books that landed on shelves this fall attempt to change this dynamic, rounding up the foodie troops and bringing rigor and research back to the fore. In All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now, Ruby Tandoh, former star of The Great British Bake Off, embraces the “we” of her subtitle to explain that “we” have all had our tastes controlled by media, whether traditional or social, to push “us” toward various trends in home and restaurant cooking. At the opposite end of the spectrum, in What to Eat Now, a newly updated version of her 2006 classic, Marion Nestle—author of Food Politics and originator of New York University’s Food Studies program—writes about how corporate consolidation, a government susceptible to industry lobbying, and poor economic conditions across the country drive people’s choices more than anything we see on our screens.

Taken together, these books model what we’ve lost and point toward reclaiming it. They go far beyond the globe-trotting travel and food porn we’ve come to scroll to ask deeper questions, such as why, despite food’s popularity on social media, on shows like The Bear, our understanding of where it comes from, and how it reaches our tables, is at an all-time low.

this narrowing of attention—pleasure without context—marks a stark departure from the origins of foodie culture itself. The idea of a food lover used to carry a different meaning. In 1968, Nora Ephron interviewed many of that time’s biggest food names for an essay called “The Food Establishment: Life in the Land of the Rising Soufflé (Or Is It the Rising Meringue?).” The essay presented the food elite as a tiny group of petty gossips who were obsessed with fine distinctions in taste and reputation—and wielded outsize power to influence how America ate. In her essay, she noted that the food world was more fraught than the music or theater sphere, as those pastimes had existed for centuries. “People in the food world are riding the crest of a trend that began less than twenty years ago,” she wrote.

The “food establishment” emerged alongside the development of counterculture cuisine—the rejection of processed foods in favor of wholesome, organic ingredients—which developed within the antiwar movement of the 1960s and with the publication of Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet in 1971. In that book, Lappé examined data around land use to show that dependence on meat in the affluent West helped drive worldwide hunger by creating a “protein factory in reverse,” using global farmland to grow grain that feeds livestock rather than people. That same year, Alice Waters opened her revolutionary restaurant, Chez Panisse; her approach to food demonstrated how these counterculture influences could come to the table through the use of local, seasonal ingredients. Here was a foodie framework insisting that pleasure and politics were inseparable—that you couldn’t celebrate the dish without understanding the system that produced it.

Ephron didn’t have the word foodie while she was writing, and neither did Alexander Cockburn when he wrote “Gastro-Porn” for The New York Review of Books in 1977. Yet both essays signaled its imminent invention: something was brewing around gastronomy that was different than Child’s studied Francophile nature of gourmandism or the Jell-O-entranced housewives of the 1950s—something marked by an interest in the high and lowbrow alike, by what philosopher Lisa Heldke called “food adventuring.” It was and continues to be exemplified by an eagerness to consume the “best” in food, whether that means going to a hole-in-the-wall if it serves the best Thai food in town, dining at a three-Michelin-star restaurant under the helm of a chef trained by Paul Bocuse in Lyon, or teaching yourself the art of soufflé at home. (This approach later met its flesh-and-blood incarnation in Bourdain.)

In the early 1980s, foodie made its print debut in Harper’s & Queen magazine and then with the publication of The Official Foodie Handbook, by Paul Levy and Ann Barr, following other satirical handbooks for preppies and yuppies. (New York magazine’s Gael Greene is co-credited with coining the term.) Levy and Barr cheekily posited that the discerning foodie was invented to expand marketplace options: “The supermarket chains were selling all the ordinary food there were stomachs for; the food industry needed Foodies to create new tastes for others to follow.” The regular shopper could choose what kind of consumer they wanted to be: Pick up a can of Maxwell House, or grind and brew a rare-bean coffee (shelling out more money to adopt that persona)?

While the tone of this book is silly, the moniker was adopted with gusto. In 1984, Ruth Reichl, prior to her tenure as editor in chief of Gourmet, wrote for the Los Angeles Times of “restaurant junkies” called “Foodies” who rattled off a chef’s creds like sports fans recounting a player’s stats. In 1985, the Chicago Tribune covered “foodism” as a religion, with restaurants becoming sacred spaces.

In 1993, the Food Network hit the airwaves, bringing both chefs and domestic goddesses into living rooms, carving out more space to create the stars of the foodie world. Whereas Child on PBS would have been educating her viewers on proper omelet techniques, these shows were more about entertainment. “The biggest thing you have to teach most chefs is that it’s not about the food. It’s really about everything else that you want to say,” media trainer Lou Ekus told Grub Street in 2017, establishing the clear terms of these shows. This was the original sin of food television: divorcing food from its context, turning it into a vehicle for personality and spectacle. From there, the gap between aesthetic foodies and political foodies became a chasm.

Television also helped Bourdain truly emerge onto the scene. Although his memoir, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, came out in 2000 to breakout success, it was through his shows—first A Cook’s Tour, then Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations and Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown—that he became a global phenomenon. By having decades of restaurant experience and a middle-class upbringing, he was able to straddle the worlds of media executives and line cooks, endearing himself to a demographic that was less interested in the domesticity of a food doyenne like Ina Garten. His travel show stood in direct contrast to preexisting food television, using food as a means toward conversations on culture, politics, and human connection. Bourdain’s genius lay in being the foodie who cared about knife skills and farming in Latin America, who could gush about ramen and talk about kitchen exploitation.

The success of Bourdain’s best-selling book likely cleared a path for massive public interest in Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (2001); Nestle’s debut book, Food Politics (2002); and later Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Marion Nestle’s What to Eat, both of which came out in 2006. With these ingredients for a smarter food consciousness assembled, the foodie could be aesthete and activist at once.

by then, Americans were ready for a guide like Nestle. Her Food Studies program took a holistic approach to nutrition, teaching students to examine it in relation to culture, politics, and economics. Through her books Food Politics and Soda Politics, she became known for her exposés on how corporate money controls nutrition guidelines and what consumables people buy. What to Eat Now examines the power structures and science behind widely available foods. It also shows readers how big food conglomerates affect their everyday grocery shopping.

Some might argue that What to Eat Now isn’t a foodie book, as it digs into historical and financial influence. It lifts the veil on the fun. Nestle educates rather than entertains. But that ignores that really caring about food in an aesthetic manner requires expertise on the ingredients themselves. The book is over six hundred pages, chock-full of charts, and quite serious, if also approachable, thanks to its plain writing. Twice in the text, Nestle characterizes herself as a foodie, with caveats. “To me, food means plants grown in the ground or on bushes or trees, and animals that walk, swim, or fly—collectively, ‘real’ foods,” she writes, distinguishing her definition of food from one that might include ultraprocessed fare or lab-grown meats.

Nestle is focused on dollars, including the fact that food companies do a third or more of their business with Walmart, where many Americans do their shopping. Can you be a foodie at Walmart? In her hefty book, Nestle sees and reveals the ways in which a consumer’s relationship to food is mediated by corporate and politico-economic forces taking advantage of a tired populace that needs to feed itself. She’s also driven by an appetite for a nice meal, and that is why she has broad appeal: you believe her because you know she’s as interested in a delicious dinner as she is in who’s lobbying for which industrial agriculture subsidies.

If Nestle represents the political conscience of foodie culture, Tandoh examines its emotional and social dimensions. Tandoh is a more traditional member of the food establishment: She came to fame as a contestant on The Great British Bake Off, winning fans on the show at just twenty-one years old. She parlayed that attention into becoming a columnist and cookbook author, and now she is establishing herself as a cultural critic. Her perspective on food has been affected by struggles with eating disorders and conflicts with the bigwigs in British cooking who have taken what she’s called a “privileged” perspective on food that leaves the pleasures and tastes of the working classes out of the conversation. She lifts the veil on fun in a more millennial way than Nestle does. They are of different generations, and while Nestle is guided by nutrition and science, Tandoh leans on identity politics and social media.

In some ways, Tandoh’s path mirrors that of other contemporary food voices who have used video to build their platforms. Padma Lakshmi had Top Chef and Taste the Nation with Padma Lakshmi. Samin Nosrat’s debut cookbook, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, benefited from adaptation into a Netflix special of the same name. Even Alison Roman, someone with a rather traditional chef-to-food-writer trajectory, has used YouTube to really connect with her audience. Each of these writers has a new cookbook out this fall; I’m sure all of them will promote it through vertical video. It seems like there’s still no other way into the food establishment.

But where those figures built their audiences through performance and personality, Tandoh uses her platform to interrogate the cultural apparatus itself. All Consuming is a book for the reader who still uses foodie, with both fondness and a big dollop of mockery, even if it’s gone a bit out of fashion. These are the original foodies’ kids, who like to put on a dinner party for the sheer fun of it, not just to create content. They have disposable income but need not be wealthy to indulge. It’s more about a sensibility remade for a new generation, one filled with young people who don’t know whether they’ll ever be able to buy a house yet still have to eat. They might watch Tucci’s show out of curiosity, head over to the hot new restaurant, or try a viral strawberry trend for kicks. As a word, foodie comes up eleven times in the book, typically as a neutral marker of someone who shares Tandoh’s concerns—the reader included in Tandoh’s “we”:

This breathless exuberance infuses the tone of the text, and the joy becomes so infectious that one nearly forgets to ask: Is this true? So many of us have come to see our social media feeds dominated by food. But the book’s accessibility and charm might get more readers thinking about just how powerful these forces are. That’s precisely what Nestle’s broader goals are as well—to get readers to see the corporate and political forces that impact what’s on their plates, from lobbying that influences nutrition guidelines to the handful of firms controlling global agriculture. In conversation with each other, these books offer a complete understanding of food today; a foodie, if they are to use their trend-establishing powers for good, must hold the entire picture in view.

there’s a fundamental tension at the heart of foodie culture: everyone must eat, making food more universal than music or theater—yet class inequities shape how we do it, turning appetite into a marker of status. This is precisely why the term matters. Unlike other cultural identities, the foodie sits at the intersection of necessity and privilege, with the potential to bridge this divide—or to further entrench it.

Books like Tandoh’s and Nestle’s point toward closing that divide. They recognize that food can’t be detangled from industry and profit—that’s how it reaches our tables—but insist we look at the whole system. Behind the perfect peaches on social media feeds puppeteered by corporate algorithms are exploited farmworkers passing out from heatstroke. Behind every foodie is someone who just needs to eat, especially now that the federal government is fighting about SNAP. The question is whether those realities can coexist in our consciousness, or whether our fractured landscape will keep them separate.

For more than forty years, the word foodie has functioned as an inescapable shorthand for “someone who cares about food.” The shape that care takes is the real question. Nestle and Tandoh are arguing for rigorous care but in different ways: these books ask readers to remember the corporate and political power behind every option at the supermarket, and to be conscious of how various kinds of media are selling us certain sorts of gastronomic pleasure. Read in tandem, they ask us to be active participants in our daily meals beyond mere procurement. The first step toward a more conscientious foodie might be reclaiming the idea that our relationship to food exists not solely through recipes and memes but through power structures and systemic inequities that govern how food is grown, sold, and shared. A foodie’s appetite must have room for both pleasure and responsibility.