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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF THE AMERICAN FOODIE  
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Jaya Saxena
September 24, 2025
Eater
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_ When food culture became pop culture, a new national persona was
born. We regret to inform you, it’s probably you. _

Craig Claiborne in his kitchen; Julia Child on the Boston set of her
cooking show. , Claiborne, Arthur Schatz/Getty Images; Child,
Fairchild Archive/Penske Media via Getty Images.

 

 

“When did you become such an adventurous eater?” my mom often asks
me, after I’ve squealed about some meal involving jamón ibérico or
numbing spices. The answer is, I don’t know, but I can think of
moments throughout my life where food erupted as more than a mere
meal: My cousin and his Ivy League rowing team hand-making pumpkin
ravioli for me at Thanksgiving. Going to the pre-Amazon Whole Foods
and giddily deciding to buy bison bacon for breakfast sandwiches
assembled in a dorm kitchen. Eating paneer for the first time in
India. Slurping a raw oyster in New Orleans.

What made me even want to try a raw oyster in 2004, despite everything
about an oyster telling me NO, was an entire culture emerging
promising me I’d be better for it. Food, I was beginning to
understand from TV and magazines and whatever blogs existed then, was
important. It could be an expression of culture or creativity or
cachet, folk art or surrealism or science, but it was something to pay
attention to. Mostly, I gleaned that to reject foodieism was to give
up on a new and powerful form of social currency. I would, then,
become a foodie.

 

To be a foodie in the mid-aughts meant it wasn’t enough to enjoy
French wines and Michelin-starred restaurants. The pursuit of the
“best” food, with the broadest definition possible, became a
defining trait: a pastry deserving of a two-hour wait, an
international trip worth taking just for a bowl of noodles. Knowing
the name of a restaurant’s chef was good, but knowing the last four
places he’d worked at was better — like knowing the specs of
Prince’s guitars. This knowledge was meant to be shared. Foodies
traded in Yelp reviews and Chowhound posts, offering tips on the most
authentic tortillas and treatises on ramps. Ultimately, we foodies
were fans, gleefully devoted to our subculture.

Which inevitably leads to some problems, when, say, the celebrities
the subculture has put on a pedestal are revealed to be
less-than-honorable actors, or when values like authenticity and craft
are inevitably challenged. What it’s historically meant to be a
foodie, a fan, has shifted and cracked and been reborn.

 

And ultimately, it has died. Or at least the term has. To be called a
“foodie” now is the equivalent of being hit with an “Okay,
boomer.” But while the slang may have changed, the ideals the foodie
embodied have been absorbed into all aspects of American culture.
There may be different words now, or no words at all, but the story of
American food over the past 20 years is one of a speedrun of cultural
importance. At this point, who isn’t a foodie?

ONCE UPON A TIME, there was the gourmand, which even in 1825, lawyer
and self-proclaimed gourmand Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin felt was
misunderstood. “There is a perpetual confusion of gourmandism in its
proper connotation with gluttony and voracity,” he writes in his
seminal _The Physiology of Taste_. Gourmandism was not about mere
excess, but about appreciation. It was “an impassioned, considered,
and habitual preference for whatever pleases the taste,” he writes,
a love of delicacies and an “enemy of overindulgence.”

As for who can be a gourmand, Brillat-Savarin posits, in the
scientific fashion of the time, that some are chosen by nature to have
a heightened sense of taste. And although anyone may be born a
gourmand, just as anyone may be born blind or blond, to take advantage
of that innate sense requires capital. Being rich doesn’t
automatically give one good taste, but “anyone who can pile up a
great deal of money easily is almost forced, willy-nilly, to be a
gourmand.”

For the next centuries, things mostly stayed that way. It was the
wealthy who spent on the finest wines and meats, and in the public
imagination, to be a gourmand was in many ways to perform wealth and
flaunt access. This was true in a lot of places, whether it was a
royal Chinese banquet or through the development of Mughal cuisine,
though Brillat-Savarin was speaking squarely from a European stage.

As gourmandism crossed the ocean from Brillat-Savarin in 1800s France
to 20th-century America, it was often limited to fine dining and
French cuisine; finding joy in the offerings of Grandma’s pot or the
Automat did not earn you a culinary title. But in the later 20th
century, the purviews of American gourmands were changing, as both
access to fine ingredients and knowledge about their preparation
became more populist. Craig Claiborne turned restaurant reviews
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into sites of true arts criticism, and Julia Child and James Beard
insisted that the greatest food was completely achievable in your own
kitchen, often using humble ingredients. Alice Waters celebrated the
fruits of California, and Ruth Reichl championed places like New York
Noodletown, a Chinatown spot that she described as “a bare, bright,
loud restaurant where the only music was the sound of noodles being
slurped at tables all around.”

The scope was widening. But “the thing that makes food both
challenging and interesting as a cultural vector is that food is not a
mechanically reproducible experience,” says Helen Rosner, food
critic at the New Yorker. You still had to be physically in those
locations, or have those ingredients in your own kitchen, for it to
work. It seemed absurd for someone to care what Chez Panisse was like
if they never even had a chance of going. So while new technologies
had made other cultural products — music, film, television —
easier and cheaper to engage with than ever, allowing new communities
to form over their shared interests, food was still a more localized
obsession. “If I have an opinion about a movie and I live in Los
Angeles, my opinion is still relevant to somebody who lives in
Toronto,” says Rosner. “If I have an opinion about bagels and I
live in Queens, my opinion is barely relevant to someone who lives
more than 10 blocks from my apartment.”

 

And yet, at the turn of the last century, two platforms developed in
food culture that shifted it from an individual identity to a shared
one, turning food from culture to pop culture: food television, and
the internet.

Chef Hubert Keller looks skeptically at contestant Ken Lee’s
pan-seared halibut. The two pieces rest against each other over a
soybean puree, encircled by tomato compote and a ring of fig
gastrique, like a glamorous mandala. But during Top Chef’s
first-ever Quickfire Challenge, Lee has already gotten into trouble by
tasting a sauce with his fingers, and arguing after being told that
was unsanitary. The cast has turned against him, questioning his
hubris in the face of bland fish. Later that episode, he becomes the
show’s first chef asked to pack his knives and go.

 

Top Chef, which premiered in 2006, immersed viewers in the world of
the professional kitchen. Chefs use “plate” as a verb, hand things
off to the “pass,” don their “whites.” I probably didn’t
even need to put those words in quotes, as you already know what they
mean. They’re part of our cultural vocabulary now.

How did we get to chefs-holding-squeeze-bottles as entertainment? The
1984 Cable Communications Policy Act deregulated the industry, and by
1992, more than 60 percent of American households had a cable
subscription. Food Network launched in 1993, and compared to Julia
Child or Joyce Chen drawing adoring viewers on public broadcasting
programs, the channel was all killer, no filler, with shows for every
mood. By the early 2000s, you could geek out with Alton Brown on _Good
Eats_, experience Italian sensuality with _Molto Mario_ or _Everyday
Italian_, fantasize about a richer life with _Barefoot Contessa_, or
have fun in your busy suburban kitchen with _30 Minute Meals_. Anthony
Bourdain’s _A Cook’s Tour _gave viewers an initial taste of his
particular brand of smart-alecky wonder, and there were even
competition shows, like the Japanese import_ Iron Chef_.

The premiere of 2005’s _The Next Food Network Star_, which later
gave us Guy Fieri, baron of the big bite, was the network’s first
admission that we were ready to think of food shows in terms of
entertainment, not just instruction and education. But Food Network
was still a food network. The mid-aughts brought the revelation that
food programming didn’t have to live just there, but could be
popular primetime television — when that was an actual time and not
just a saying.

Then came _Top Chef,_ inspired by the success of Bravo’s other
reality competition series,_ Project Runway_. There is no overstating
_Top Chef_’s lasting influence on food entertainment
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bat it did one thing that further cemented foodieism as a bona fide
subculture: Its air of professionalism gave people a vocabulary.
“The real pushback from the network was _but the viewers can’t
taste the food,” _says Lauren Zalaznick, president of Bravo at the
time. But just like the experts on _Project Runway_ could explain good
draping to someone who didn’t know how to sew, _Top Chef_
“committed to telling the story of the food in such a way that it
would become attainable no matter where you were,” she says.

This gave viewers a shared language to speak about food in their own
lives. Now, people who would never taste these dishes had a visual and
linguistic reference for molecular gastronomy, and could speculate
about Marcel Vigneron’s foams. If you didn’t know what a scallop
was, you learned, as _Top Chef_ was awash in them. Yes, you could hear
Tom Colicchio critique a classic beurre blanc, but also poke, al
pastor, and laksa, and now that language was yours too. And you could
hear chefs speak about their own influences and inspirations, learning
why exactly they thought to pair watermelon and gnocchi.

The food scene then “was more bifurcated,” says Evan Kleiman, chef
and longtime host of KCRW’s _Good Food_
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restaurants that were expensive, maybe exclusive, and for the most
part represented European cuisines. And then what was called ‘ethnic
food’ was often relegated to casual, family-run kind of spots.”
_Top Chef _may have been entertainment for the upwardly mobile
foodie, but in 2005, Bourdain’s _No Reservations_ premiered on the
Travel Channel, similarly emphasizing storytelling and narrative. In
his hands, the best meals often didn’t even require a plate. His was
a romantic appreciation of the authentic, the hole-in-the-wall, the
kind of stuff that would never be served in a dining room. It set off
an entire generation of (often less respectful, less considered)
foodie adventurism.

_“No Reservations_ is what got me interested in the culture of
eating,” says Elazar Sontag, currently the restaurant editor at _Bon
Appétit_. Because it was about food as culture, not as profession.
But there was programming for it all. Also in 2005,_Hell’s Kitchen_
premiered on Fox, with an amped-up recreation of a dinner service in
each night’s challenge. “_Hell’s Kitchen_’s high-octane,
insane, intense environment of a restaurant kitchen is actually what
made me think, when I was maybe 12 or 13, that I want to work in
restaurants,” says Sontag.

All these shows were first and foremost about gathering knowledge,
whether it was what, indeed, a gastrique was, or the history of boat
noodles in Thailand. It didn’t matter if you’d ever been there.
The point was that you knew. “Food was becoming a different kind of
cultural currency,” says Sontag. “I didn’t clock that shift
happening at the time, but it’s very much continued.”

LANGUAGE IS MEANT TO BE SPOKEN; knowledge is meant to be shared. Now
that everyone knew there were multiple styles of ramen, there was no
better place to flex about it than with a new tool: the social
internet. Online, “talking about restaurants and going to
restaurants became something that people could have a shared identity
about,” says Rosner. “There was this perfect storm of a national
explosion of gastronomic vocabulary and a platform on which everybody
could show off how much they knew, learn from each other, and engage
in this discovery together.” Your opinion about your corner bagel
shop suddenly had a much wider relevance.

Sites like Chowhound and eGullet launched in 1997 and 2001,
respectively, and became ever more popular hubs for people seeking out
interesting food, and homes for seminal food writers like Jonathan
Gold and Robert Sietsema. If you were in college in 2004, you might
have already been on (the) Facebook; more crucially, that was the year
Yelp launched
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which allowed users to review local businesses. Almost immediately, it
became restaurant-centric. And anyone could start a blog to document
their own food opinions.

In 2005, Michelin released its first guide to an American city
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(New York), and a few years before, The World’s 50 Best Restaurants
list [[link removed]] declared that anyone who
was anyone had better be dining at El Bulli in Spain. But while anyone
online could review high-end restaurants like French Laundry and
Gramercy Tavern if they wanted to, they’d likely be competing with
experienced, professional reviewers. Where the foodies of the internet
shined was in highlighting “ethnic food,” following in
Bourdain’s worn boots to champion casual places that may not have
traditionally gotten mainstream media attention.

In 2006, Zach Brooks was in his 30s, living in Manhattan, and like
plenty of other office workers with disposable income, was “stuck in
Midtown for lunch,” he says. So in the vein of food blogs he read
like Chowhound and, yes, Eater, he began documenting his meals. “To
me, lunch hour is sacred- and I’m not going to waste it in some
generic overpriced ‘deli,’” he wrote on his blog, Midtown Lunch
[[link removed]]. Instead, he was dedicated to
finding “gems” like the best taco trucks and halal carts in a sea
of mediocrity. “There were just so many different immigrant groups,
so you had access to so many different kinds of food, and I think
there’s a natural curiosity,” says Brooks. Like many early food
bloggers, he was white, and took an almost explorational attitude
toward his mission, traipsing to the carts and counters of Midtown
like points on a globe. “Like, why _wouldn’t_ you want to try
everything?”

It might sound obvious now, but the internet allowed you to find
opinions and experiences outside of your immediate social circle; your
coworker might not have known where to go for lunch, but some guy
online knew where you could get a plate of Ecuadorian food three
blocks away. And the enthusiasm with which bloggers began to share and
review “lowbrow” meals created a culture in which those meals
began to rise in value. “I think what came out of this time period
was that it wasn’t just about the fine dining world anymore,” says
chef Sam Yoo
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“It was cool to go to Jackson Heights or Flushing, and find
hole-in-the-wall momos.”

Because the 2008 recession made it even harder for most people to
experience fine dining, food trucks and cheap eats moved closer to the
center of the culinary world, such that a chef like Roy Choi could
open his Kogi BBQ truck that year and be named _Bon Appétit_’s Best
New Chef for it shortly after. This shift was also happening as social
media began to be ever more convenient (the iPhone came out in 2007)
and visual (the first YouTube video was uploaded in 2005; Instagram
launched in 2010). All this further flattened the culinary landscape
of the internet. You could now, for the first time ever, take a photo
of what you were eating and upload it to the internet before you even
took a bite. A $3 taco and a plate of duck at Momofuku Ko would show
up the same size on an Instagram grid — and could get the same
number of likes.

Ultimately, the internet fueled a great democratization of knowledge
and experience around food. “Your access to information is so much
easier than it was before,” says Kleiman. “You don’t need to get
on a plane and fly to Switzerland to learn about some dish, or even to
try and make it in your home. All you have to do is look at your phone
and click on it.” Through television and the internet, you could
become well-informed about Indian cuisine without ever having been to
the country, and then debate with strangers which restaurant in your
city has the best tandoori. You could learn how to make sushi on
YouTube, or just watch one of Epic Meal Time’s videos of
bacon-covered monstrosities
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wasn’t just _Top Chef_, but _Top Chef_ recap blogs and cooking
parties, subreddits where fans developed parasocial relationships with
the stars of the_ Bon Appétit_ test kitchen, drama in Yelp Elite
circles, and food festivals. Everyone started a food blog, and one of
them was turned into a movie
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_Julie & Julia_. Everyone posted photos of their lunch.

“Once upon a time, food was about where you came from,” wrote John
Lancaster for the _New Yorker_ in 2014
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many of us, it is about where we want to go — about who we want to
be, how we choose to live.” The gourmand was dead. The foodie had
been born.

THE GREATEST INNOVATION OF FOOD in the 21st century is that diners
aren’t just diners anymore, they are fans. Literally, by definition.
“There are three essential components of something that is a
fandom,” says Mel Stanfill [[link removed]], an associate
professor at the University of Central Florida who studies media and
fandom. “There is an emotional attachment. It’s something that’s
being interpreted. And there is a community, so you’re doing that
interpretation in relation to each other.” This is how Marvel
characters went from being the purview of nerds to the subject of
mainstream action films, how _Fifty Shades of Grey_ went from
_Twilight_ fanfic to best-seller, and how food went from something you
enjoyed to something you consumed with every part of your life, not
just your mouth.

Foodieism checks all the boxes of fandom: You absorb the stories being
told on TV, you iterate on recipes in your own kitchen, and you post
online about what you eat to a wider community. But when any fandom
explodes into wider visibility, gathering new fans and bigger
communities, there are always conflicts, often stemming from newer
participants bringing a critical eye to how things have been done. And
with foodieism, there was plenty to criticize.

Foodie culture, at its start, was bolstered largely by white bloggers
and chefs who, perhaps admirably, wanted to break out from
Euronormativity and geek out over other cultures. “It was an
incredible expansion of the white gaze, but it was, nevertheless, the
gaze,” says Rosner. “Authenticity” was the bar to meet, a very
real concern when plenty of Americans equated Mexican cuisine with Old
El Paso, and every day it seemed like another white person was opening
an “Asian”
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while at the same time disparaging Asian traditions.

People of color have been part of this conversation from the jump. But
the devotion to authenticity, often by people who came from the
outside to the cultures they were defending, started to feel like a
trap
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like we had to live up to others’ expectations instead of our own.
The rise of third-culture cooking — multicultural cuisine often done
by members of a diaspora who meld family tradition with wider
influences — is in part a reaction to the white foodie’s feverish
classifications, a way to say we will define our cuisine, or invent an
entirely new one, for ourselves, thank you very much.

There was also the machoness of it all, the fawning over the badass,
boys’ club, rock-star chef who gives no fucks and makes no menu
substitutions. There was a fetishization of the tough world of the
kitchen, the yelling and punishment and hedonism it seemed to require.
In hindsight it was perhaps predictable that many of the chefs lauded
as the hardest and brashest turned out to be accused of abuse
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racism, or sexual misconduct
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in the kitchen
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There were genuine attempts to improve the industry, both the
professional kitchen and the media that surrounds it. There were
widespread conversations about the white gaze’s role in food
culture, and how often white voices and tastes were elevated over
others
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Chefs spoke out more about mental health struggles and discrimination.
And for a moment, it looked like there could be a reckoning in the
role of the foodie, too. Should we really be _fans_ of such fallible
people? Was there a better way to engage?

When the locus of a fandom falls from grace, “people experience that
something has been taken away from them, something they used to
like,” says Stanfill. But instead of pulling back on the intensity
of fandom, usually something else just fills the hole. The internet
allows foodies to find community and engage in fandom together, but
also find new people to fixate on. And as the social internet grew,
everyone could become their own content creator.

“There was no plan, because back then, there was no such thing as an
‘influencer’ or ‘content creator.’ Those words didn’t exist
yet,” says Mike Chau, who since 2013 has been operating his food
account, @foodbabyny [[link removed]]. Chau,
who still has a full-time job, says he started and continues just for
the fun of trying new things with his family around New York, with the
occasional perk of an invitation to a restaurant opening. But more
recently he’s noticed shifts, from the paid opportunities available
for influencers to the increased opportunity for “virality,” as
Instagram and TikTok algorithms can give anyone, no matter their
following, their 15 minutes of fame. In Chau’s opinion, this has
altered the way influencers do business (namely that they are doing
business at all) by focusing on engagement rather than their own
enjoyment of the food at the center of their content. “Talking to
other influencers, you hear them say,_ I’ve got to go here, this
place would do well on my page_. I think that’s the main driving
force,” he says.

“We live and die by our superlatives in a way that I think speaks
less to the whims of food media leaders and more to the state of the
internet,” says Sontag. If the initial draw of being a foodie is
that being a part of this culture will enrich your life in some way,
the algorithm has made that enrichment a matter of the “best”
places to go. “I think that has created a significant shift in food
culture, the need for everything to be a promise of a superior
experience,” says Sontag.

What was once the promise that food could be a source of knowledge,
culture, and joy now feels more like the pressure that every meal must
be the best one, that the risk of trying something unvetted — once
the whole point — is too great. “You have this exploration, and
then these loud and charismatic people declare that actually we found
everything, and these are the best, you can stop looking,” says
Rosner. The world of fandom whittled down to a checklist.

“YOU HAVE TO TRY THE MOUTHFEEL OF THE MIGNONETTE,” Tyler gushes at
his date, Margot. He won’t stop saying things like this. It’s
awful. He cries over scallops and scolds Margot for smoking, which he
says will ruin her palate. You want him to die, which, luckily, he
does.

_The Menu _is a movie about a chef so fed up with simpering,
obsessive foodies like Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) that he’s willing to
destroy himself and everything he’s ever created just to get back at
them for ruining his profession. As part of this punishment, chef
Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) invites Tyler into the kitchen, insisting that
if he’s so knowledgeable, why doesn’t he cook dinner himself?
Tyler fumbles, asking for ingredients and equipment he does not know
how to wield. “Shallots for the great foodie!” mocks Slowik,
before tasting Tyler’s creation and spitting it out. “You are why
the mystery has been drained from our art.”

Who would wanna be like that guy? Tyler’s supposed superior
knowledge and appreciation of food doesn’t make him a great critic
or thinker. It just makes him annoying, and crucially, isolates him
from any community he could seek through it. (He spends half the meal
sneering at other diners for being unworthy — the narcissism of
small differences.) He doesn’t want to connect over food, he wants
to brag. This is where “foodie” has landed. At worst, it’s an
insult that marks you as a melodramatic know-it-all who turns every
meal into a lesson.

It’s also plain outdated. To call anyone a “foodie” with any
sincerity in 2025 is like asking a “metrosexual” about the
“truthiness” of his “blog.” You’d sound ridiculous. That’s
because there’s no real need anymore to name the idea that one
should be stimulated by and curious about food, and no point in making
it your entire personality. Because in a fifth of the time it took,
say, film, to achieve the same results, being “into” food went
from niche interest to a fandom to mass culture. This is just what we
do now. “Now when people say that they’re a foodie, I’m like,
yeah, you, me, and my uncle,” says Sontag.

Maybe it’s easy to think we’ve grown beyond whoever we were in
2009, drinking bacon-washed cocktails out of mason jars and demanding
to know which farm exactly the pig came from. But the undercurrent of
foodieism — food as culture, worthy of active engagement —
thrives, even if the title has died. Enough people are familiar with
the inner workings of the brigade system such that movies like
_Ratatouille_ and _The Menu,_ or a TV show like _The Bear,_ can be not
just legible, but successes. There’s Thai curry sauce at the Buffalo
Wild Wings. _People_ magazine wrote an article about “tomato
girls.”

Even so, I find myself nostalgic for the era when “foodie” was a
badge of honor, as every restaurant opening seems to be a steakhouse,
as Gen Z opts for suburban chains like Chili’s
[[link removed]]
over anything new and independent, and as tariffs threaten access to
spices and other global ingredients, especially from non-European
origins. I get the desire for the safety of the known, especially when
even the most mediocre meal can set you back in rent payments. But I
miss when the coolest thing you could do was geek out over where your
food came from, who was making it, and what made it special. “A term
like foodie was an indicator that you put in some level of legwork,”
says Sontag.

But just because that legwork is now part of the cultural fabric, and
just because it’s easier to do, doesn’t mean it’s not still
work. You can watch a million TikToks, but to engage, you still need
to _go_ to the hot bakery. You still need to actually make the ramen
you saw on YouTube. You still need to get the reservation, and then
your taste buds have to wrap themselves around a chutney pizza made by
a second-generation chef and open themselves up to what is happening.
To paraphrase a modern poet, no one else can taste it for you. Hell,
you still need to watch the TikToks. There is no outsourcing this. And
as the past 20 years have cemented, even if we could, few would want
to. We’re foodies through and through. Even if we don’t want to
say it.

* foodie
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* food culture
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* culinary history
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*
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*
*
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