Reason 9,999,999 to hate foodies:"Bowl food"
Bowls have a lot going for them — they're nice to look at, they rarely shatter, and they're uniquely adept at holding chocolate pudding.
It is the nature of the foodie community, however, to destroy good things and replace them with something inferior. Take the latest food trend, "bowl food." What is bowl food? It is food thrown into a bowl, perhaps with the addition of some sauce to make it a meal.
Despite the simplicity of that, the food elite — which includes the British royal family and 80% of my neighbors in Brooklyn — have now elevated bowl food into something it's most definitively not: good.
The BBC has defined bowl food as "larger than a canapé and around a quarter of the size of a main course ... served in miniature or hand-sized bowls and comes ready to eat with a small fork ... healthy."
In other words, bowl food can be defined as:
Bowl
+
food
=
Bowl Food
I wish I could pretend this trend doesn't exist. But it does, and it's clouding my Twitter timeline, which I like to save for breaking boner jam updates about the Mueller investigation.
Take a look at what they served at the royal wedding this past weekend. All of this was categorized as "bowl food:"
Fricassee of free-range chicken with morel mushrooms and young leeks
Pea and mint risotto with pea shoots, truffle oil, and Parmesan crisps
10-hour slow-roasted Windsor pork belly with apple compote and crackling
The only thing that differentiates bowl food from plate food is that it is served in a bowl. That's it.
In Brooklyn, the situation is much more dire. I cannot tell you the number of New York Times-approved restaurants in my neighborhood that rose to fame because of bowl food.
A typical bowl menu includes a "Choose-Your-Own-Bowl-Adventure" where you get to select from such exciting ingredients as:
One egg, typically for $10
One avocado, typically for $15
Something green you don't want
That's it.
I like bowls. I even enjoy food in bowls, if only because it reduces the chance of spilling. But "bowl food" feels like something rich people invented to make themselves sound humble and pure and in touch with their "healthy food roots," whatever the hell that means. They're utterly unlike us low-class rapacious heathens, who prefer to consume a pile of processed Cheez-Its from a plate, the natural way.
It's like when rich people rediscovered hot dogs and turned them into $15 "sustainable" meat monstrosities.
Can you tell the difference between bowl food and food that's in a bowl? Let's do a quick test.
Bowl food or food in a bowl?
A: Food in a bowl. Cereal is something middle-class people eat, which disqualifies it from bowl food status.
Food in a bowl or bowl food?
A: BOWL FOOD. It has quinoa, a staple ingredient in bowl food.
Food in a bowl or bowl food or salad?
A. Bowl food. There is no salad now. Salad is an inferior fad that has passed and been replaced with bowl food.
Rest in power, salad.
If you're a person who cares about bowls, be a friend. There is no such thing as bowl food, in the same way there is no such thing as plate food. Announce to the world that bowls were worthy of love even before we started throwing broccoli in them. It's the least you can do for bowls, humanity's most loyal dishware.
Heather was the Web Trends reporter at Mashable NYC. Prior to joining Mashable, Heather wrote regularly for UPROXX and GOOD Magazine, was published in The Daily Dot and VICE, and had her work featured in Entertainment Weekly, Jezebel, Mic, and Gawker. She loves small terrible dogs and responsible driving. Follow her on Twitter @wear_a_helmet.
