Spotting new food trends as a form of food writing and television is a literary genre of its own, a genre that is accelerated by the re-use of content on the Internet and the grand fin de siècle echo chamber that is contemporary food blogging. It’s also profitable if you happen to be the in-demand Bhutanese chef, free of your newly democratic nation; usurping all of those foolish trainees that invested in the Cuisine of Nigeria classes.

Food trends tap into the neophiliac urge that lurks deep within all but the most retrogressive eater. As omnivores, people can eat anything. As food writer Michael Pollan puts it:

Indeed there is probably not a nutrient source on earth that is not eaten by a human somewhere – bugs, worms, dirt, funghi, lichen, seaweed, rotten fish; the roots, shoots, stems, bark, buds, flowers, seeds, and fruits of plants; every imaginable part of every imaginable animal, not to mention haggis, granola, and Chicken McNuggets.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that we should be eating all of these things, but given the opportunity (or lack thereof) people can digest almost anything that is placed in front of them and can’t readily outrun them. Pollan also somehow missed out on mentioning leaves.

The problem with our desire for the new is that it is all too easy to focus on the hot ingredient in absolute isolation from its cultural context or even at the simplest level, in isolation from other countervailing food trends. For example, the trend to lionise “grass-fed” beef over “grain-fed” beef on the more environmentally-conscious menus happily coexists with the growing sale of Wagyu beef, any of which that has a high degree of marbling has been cut from a cow that had spent a substantial amount of time stuffing itself with sorghum, wheat, millet, soy or corn. A high degree of intramuscular fat, the whitish lattice of lard that gives most Wagyu its distinctive, rich and creamy mouthfeel and flavour, is nigh on impossible to achieve upon pasture alone. Every richly-marbled Wagyu cow needs to do time in the feedlot before it becomes the cheeseburger of the epicurean elite.

When you expand the food trend beyond a single ingredient to a national cuisine, things fall apart. Longer term trends in migration and tourism rather than the flippant declaration of a new cuisine being so hot right now tend to drive the rise and fall of different cuisines outside of their indigenous nation. There hasn’t been a significant drive towards Bhutanese cuisine because there aren’t many Bhutanese people outside of Bhutan, hence the lack of suitably skilled chefs; and nor have there been a critical mass of tourists there to experience the cuisine for themselves. Even if I regaled you with endless tales of the depth and richness of the victuals on sale in the mountainous streets of Thimphu, it is not hugely likely that I’m going to covert people to my cause. Food trends thus tend to cycle with the predictable human tide that breaks upon our shores.

Note: The Michael Pollan quote is from The Omnivore’s Dillemma, p.290