The Tastemakers (2 page)

But something happened to cupcakes over the past decade and a half. They became trendy. In fact, they became so trendy that the cupcake became the defining food trend of the age of food trends that we now find ourselves living in. When people talk about cupcakes today they don't talk about their sweetness, the colors and
flavors they're made in, or any aspect that's inherent to how a cupcake tastes (you know how a cupcake tastes—it tastes like a small cake); instead, cupcakes are a lightning rod, drawing in the energy and emotion surrounding the complicated and rapidly expanding world of food trends, a world that has come to shape nearly everything we eat.

In truth, food trends are nothing new. They're a natural by-product of civilization's evolution from hunter-gatherers, who ate whatever they could track down, to farmers, merchants, and traders, who had some choice in the matter. No one chased a woolly mammoth with a spear because the head of their tribe declared mammoth to be the hot protein in the Paleolithic era (back then the Paleo diet was the only option), but once we developed the economic means to select from a variety of foods, certain ones inevitably became more popular than others. Food became a fashion item, a status symbol, and a means of exerting power. It was a growing taste for exotic spices that drove explorers from Europe out into the unknown Atlantic, the prize of coriander, turmeric, and other edible Indian treasures as enticing as the gold and silk waiting across the void. Coffee spread from an obscure crop in Ethiopia to a global food trend that now anchors the morning of nearly half the planet and is grown wherever it can be cultivated.

In my three-plus decades on this earth I have witnessed the cyclical nature of food trends, including the chicken finger boom of my youth, the dismal Atkins diet years, and a bull market for fajitas during high school. I was born as sushi made its way to American shores as a rare delicacy alongside Japan's rising business culture, and I witnessed its transformation into a cheap takeout dinner for the masses, available at convenience stores and gas stations. I have read about trends that exist only in history books (the Roman royal habit of stuffing as many animals into each other for roasting as possible, like deboned matryoshka dolls or a turducken) and personally witnessed once-strong trends fade as they were usurped by competitors (those same fajitas and sushi platters giving way first to burritos and ramen soups and then to fish tacos and izakayas), while trends like espresso coffee have assumed a permanent role in my diet.

I've also seen heavily hyped trends vanish as suddenly as they have appeared, like thin snow hitting the ground. Watching Superbowl XXVII in 1993, I, like millions of others, was spellbound by the halftime commercial for Crystal Pepsi, with its new-age messages saying, “Right now, the future is ahead of you,” set to the tune of Van Halen's “Right Now.” Suddenly all the soda companies were rushing out with clear drinks of their own, eager to catch the transparent momentum. I remember going on a lunch break from high school with a group of friends to the nearest convenience store, literally lining up ten deep to buy our first bottle of Crystal Pepsi. We hustled to a nearby park, sat in a circle, and cracked open the bottle, passing it from one to another like hoboes around a campfire. Instead of ushering in a new era of transparent refreshment, however, my first eagerly awaited sip of Crystal Pepsi was a disappointing dram of uninspired sugar water.

Everywhere I look these days I see food trends, and what I see are trends springing up quicker and growing faster than they ever did before. Once the province of a few rich gourmands, they are now a mainstay of popular culture. Food trend news, reviews, and top-ten lists are splashed across the pages and screens of the media in an endless, incessant loop. We are living in a gold rush of food trends, mined with ladles and saucepans instead of pickaxes and dynamite. Each new trend I have witnessed in recent years left me to wonder how this whole ecosystem functioned. Why were certain items colonizing restaurant menus suddenly (fried chicken, pork belly, bourbon), while others, like paninis, seemingly disappeared after setting the trend just years before?

One day I craved a fish taco and could only find it in a single restaurant in Toronto. A year later my city was crawling with them, from a dozen dedicated fish taquerias that sprang up overnight to really bad fish tacos served in faux British pubs. How did this happen? I wondered why my father was suddenly eating pomegranate seeds with every meal and why my wife's best friend spent thirty dollars to attend a food truck event, lining up for an hour to get in, only to line up for another hour to buy a lobster roll, which sold out right before she finally reached it. Meanwhile the Sri Lankan samosa
vendor twelve feet away sat and wondered why no one wanted what he was selling. Why was one food more popular than another? Both the lobster roll and samosa were delicious, and both cost around the same amount of money—so why the discrepancy in demand?

What made a diet healthy one week, then unhealthy the next? How did everyone crave hamburgers all of a sudden, simply because some blogger proclaimed it Burger Week? And do we really think, as eaters, that it is a good idea to infuse bacon into
everything
?

At its worst, when you've eaten your fifth mediocre fish taco in a week, you realize that this onslaught of food trends can be relentless, vapid, and exhausting. Why does food have to be trendy? Why can't it just taste good on its own merits? I often find myself just wanting to be given a grilled cheese and then left alone. Not “artisanal” aged cheese, mind you, or ancient grain bread. Just cheese. And bread.

Of course, I realize that my complaints are futile. Unless we all move to the woods and forage for our meals, it is inevitable that food trends will shape what we eat on a day-to-day basis (in fact, foraging is a big trend with chefs these days). Besides, I'm as guilty as any one of them. For all the times I may gripe about the invasion of ramen bars or the Greeks' colonization of the yogurt section, I am also the first to line up for a proper bowl of springy ramen noodles in a rich broth, and I haven't bought non-Hellenic yogurt since I first bought a tub of Fage in 2008. Not once.

If food trends are overtaking our thinking about the what, where, when, how, and even why of eating, then surely there must be something to them. I wanted to find out what drove these trends and made them such a potent force in our daily lives. First, how did they start, and who were the tastemakers behind them who took an idea, cultivated it, and changed the way we ate? (A tastemaker, in this book, is anyone with the economic or cultural power to create and influence food trends.) What did different types of trends have in common? How was a trend that a farmer started different from one credited with a chef or a diet guru, and where did they intersect? Second, who were the people and forces in the food business who took a food and grew it into a widespread trend? Who tracked
and predicted trends? Who had the ability to market a food into a popular cultural moment? And where did a different set of tastemakers encounter these foods and bring them to a wider stage? Third, I wanted to understand just why food trends mattered. What impact did they have economically, culturally, politically, and socially? Were food trends a force for anything besides an excuse to eat more of one thing and not another? What happened to trends once they were no longer trendy? Did they leave a legacy or simply vanish into history, like the fondue set gathering dust in my parent's basement?

Finally, I wanted to come to terms with my own complex relationship with food trends. Were they indeed nothing more than a series of passing fads, a product of hype and bandwagon jumping that had corrupted our dinnertime? Or were they a force for good, opening minds and cultural opportunities, broadening our understanding of what we eat, cook, and grow?

Could I put aside my prejudices, tamp down my emotions, and once again stuff my face with cupcakes?

T
he earliest cookbook references to cupcakes (or, rather, “cup cakes”) reportedly date back to the late eighteenth century, though it's likely that miniature cakes, in some form or another, arose at the same time as, well, big cakes. On the Food Timeline, an online resource of food history, they are referred to as cupcakes, Vienna cakes, Queen cakes, fairy cakes, and Charlotte Russe, which was a simple sponge cake in cardboard, covered in whipped cream. The twentieth century saw cupcakes rise to their current form thanks to innovations in food processing technology, which allowed for packaged cake mixes and a rainbow of colored icing options. Months after World War I ended, Hostess launched its plastic-wrapped chocolate cupcake, with its iconic loopy spine of white decorative icing, and the corporate cupcake era officially began, bringing them to grocery stores across the country. Betty Crocker and Duncan Hines mixes followed, along with the Easy-Bake Oven, making the process so simple that cupcakes were often the first foods children made themselves.

For most of the latter half of the twentieth century cupcakes were a North American bakery fixture along with cookies, brownies, and other sweets occupying space in the display case. They came in vanilla and chocolate and were iced in the same two
flavors, though the icing, which could be buttercream, ganache, or some processed variation, rarely amounted to more than 20 percent of the whole cake. Often they were topped with sprinkles, either chocolate or rainbow, or sometimes those silver-coated sugar ball bearings, called dragée, that rip through your molars like a diamond drill and are legally considered inedible by the Food and Drug Administration.

During the 1970s and 1980s muffins, not cupcakes, were the star of the bakery business, spurned by the high-fiber diet trend, which was believed to combat heart disease and other ailments. Bran muffins were a fixture atop diner counters and coffee shops everywhere, along with their cohorts, blueberry, banana, carrot, and chocolate chip. There were sugar-free muffins and frozen muffins, miniature muffins and giant muffins, muffin mixes and muffin franchises, including my personal favorite, mmmuffins, a Toronto bakery chain where the crisp top of the muffin was the size of a portobello mmmushroom. Every bakery worth their oven was into muffins, and Ann Warren, in New York City, was no exception.

“We actually opened up doing homemade-style donuts,” recalled Warren, “but it was really part of the muffin thing when we opened in 1987. Muffins were very, very big. I mean literally. People were into very large muffins.” She made these muffins to sell to other cafés and restaurants, but when a retail space opened up in their Chelsea neighborhood a year later, Warren and her husband figured that selling directly to the public might be an easier way to approach baking. They sold coffee and donuts, muffins, pies, and cakes, and because there was so much cake batter and an abundance of empty muffin pans in the afternoon, they made cupcakes as well. They called the bakery Cupcake Café.

“We weren't even trying to be a cupcake café,” said Warren by phone, speaking between baking shifts at the Cupcake Café. “We just came up with the name, really, because we liked the association between cake and a cup of coffee,” not, she insists, because they were bullish on cupcakes. As the realization emerged among customers that most muffins, even if they were made with bran and raisins, were in fact no healthier than the stick of butter they were
made from, the muffin trend quickly faded. In response, Warren increasingly filled those vacant muffin tins with batter for cupcakes, which, she calculated, were less of a caloric indulgence than even a bagel and cream cheese.

Warren's cupcakes were comforting, pretty affairs—a moist cake base with a thin ganache frosting and a small buttercream flower on top—but they never kicked off any significant uptick in cupcake buying. Sure, she had a steady stream of clients, some of whom bought cupcakes, but people mostly came to the Cupcake Café for coffee and other baked goods. Cupcakes were popular there, but like most other bakeries, Cupcake Café largely sold them to children or for birthday parties. One customer who frequented Cupcake Café in the early nineties was the actress Sarah Jessica Parker, who was starring in a Broadway play nearby. “She used to come in, sit at the back table with my daughter, and have her coffee,” recalls Warren, though she can't specifically remember Parker eating a cupcake. It's easy to imagine Parker, sipping her coffee and reading the newspaper as Warren walked by her with a freshly iced tray of cupcakes, neither of them realizing the significance of the moment as a future trend and its tastemaker passed unknown.