Question of the Day: When did you first realize you really loved food?
For lack of a better word, when did you know you were a "foodie"? (Yeah, we don't like the term, either.)
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16 Comments:
I guess I realized I was a foodie, when I moved to the East Coast and realized there was such a moniker. I grew up in Texas, San Antonio specifically, so food was ALWAYS central at every family or friendly gathering.
My grandparents were always cooking up something interesting on the weekends that we visited. So, when I moved over here, and these things were hard to find and generally unavailable or not the same. I realized I had a serious interest in getting those memories, taste and otherwise, back.
Now, today, I'm a professional cook with a serious interest in food from all neck of the woods. I think my wife, formerly girlfriend, though is really to blame and to thank for my current "foodie" status and hard-core interest in food today. She's Asian-American, and well, I'm not, so the foods that she grew up with are drastically different. Through exposure to her and her family and the foods they all grew up with I've come to have a profound respect for the varieties of flavors that appeal to different cultures and have begun to cultivate a body of cultural knowledge because of it.
As for the term itself, foodie, I hear it slung around more in a derogatory manner than in a positive one. Especially since Whole Foods expanded all over the U.S. map, more and more I hear people deride others for their interest in food. I guess it is like every change in this country first it's met with shock and startled interest, then the backlash forms, then it weaves its way into our culture and we forget that it never was.
With the spread of "organics" and "locally and sustainably" raised foods, into our supermarkets, especially chains like Whole Foods and Trader Joe's or H.E.B. in Texas, people, quite reasonably so have become more skeptical of all this new found interest in food. What is funny though, is that we should have always been interested in WHAT we were eating and where it came from, somehow, eh hem (advertising), it all slipped through the cracks and got buried over the years. So, yea, I give a damn about where my food comes from, who touched it, and how good it tastes an is for me, and if that means I'm a "foodie", well, I'm a foodie. ;)
angrywayne at 10:59AM on 02/20/07
Um, I believe in high school. I'd always had an appreciation for food beforehand and I'd never really had bad food until I learned to cook myself and I was aweful. That's where home ec came in. We learned to make food from different cultures (besides my own danish, english and american food.) I learned how to do stuff (don't grill sandwiches on high heat). From there I'd had a lot of interest in baking. So while baking, I lost interest in cooking. Lost all my cooking knowledge until I moved out of my parents house and had to start all over again (don't make grilled cheese sandwiches over high heat!!!) So, started watching food network with Jamie Oliver and I've been a food loving, appreciating and cooking machine ever since.
A foodie if you will. We really need to get a better name.
jenki at 12:03PM on 02/20/07
AngryWayne- Good post!
I think I realized just how truly passionate I was about food after I got into culinary school. The atmosphere and people around me fueled it and now I'm dying to get into the foodservice business full time. Crazy, I know, but there is just something about being able to make something truly beautiful and satisfying. Anyone can 'cook', but not everyone can create something amazing with food. They lack the passion and drive to go beyond just making something to eat so their stomach stops rumbling.
AuntJone at 12:07PM on 02/20/07
I don't think I had a "moment." I read my mother's cookbook (yes, just the one) for pleasure at around age eight, and took over the majority of food shopping and cooking by age twelve. Come to think of it, my moment might have been grossing out my parents (I was probably ten) by ordering fried clams at Howard Johnson's, because I knew at that moment that food defined me in a way that it didn't them.
Barbara Hanson at 1:55PM on 02/20/07
I've always liked cooking and eating, but it wasn't until I got to college that I discovered that some people just didn't care what they ate. So I guess it was less a realization about myself, and more a realization about the world around me. My roommate used to complain about the fact that I would find something wrong with every meal I ate in the cafeteria.
segalbraith at 5:06PM on 02/20/07
I'm Italian and I think I was born loving food. I was truly lucky to have two grandmothers who were great cooks, two grandfathers who were great gardeners and a mom who is still a great cook to learn from. Really it doesn't take much more than that. I have a 13 year old son who has been in the kitchen with me since he could sit on the counter and stir. Now he makes great cookies and meals on his own.
swimmom at 6:39PM on 02/20/07
When I moved from Singapore to Melbourne, got homesick for food, and found myself scavenging the Asian groceries and farmers markets for fresh authentic ingredients to make all the foods I loved...
Then I started exploring other cooking methods and cuisines and found myself ranting and raving at/with friends and family about food. I'm now the go-to person for general kitchen information!
turkiyaki at 7:42PM on 02/20/07
Angrywayne wrote:
"I grew up in Texas, San Antonio specifically, so food was ALWAYS central at every family or friendly gathering."
I think that's pretty common. Yes, there are families that don't know anything about food or cooking beyond filling that empty space so it stops growling at them, but that's pretty rare.
In my family holidays were always a special time that were defined by the foods we ate. Thanksgiving was turkey and dressing, Christmas was Dungeness crab salad and cinnamon apples, Easter was ham and asparagus and the Fourth of July was grilled burgers, hot dogs, potato salad, sliced tomatoes and watermelon. Whatever the holiday, there were always ten or fifteen items and upwards of twenty people to eat it all.
The cooking was always handled by the women, but there were never many men around, anyway. They either died off or couldn't handle our female-centric family. Some of the best memories I have are sitting in the kitchen cleaning crab, peeling apples, potatoes and hard-boiled eggs or canning tomatoes and peaches and laughing like a bunch of mad women. I really miss that.
Now, it's just my son, his girlfriend and me. My mother is still around and healthy, but she thinks Thanksgiving dinner should be had at the buffet at the Indian casino down the road from her house. I don't look forward to holiday meals anymore because it's so mediocre. I do keep up with some of the family food ways, but for just the three of us, I can't see making ten or fifteen items.
Calichef at 8:52PM on 02/20/07
Oh, duh, I guess I could have answered the question. :-S
I didn't know there was a name for it, of course, but I think I knew I was a foodie sometime between eating poached eggs on buttered toast in my high chair and running from parent to grandparent to great-grandparent and being fed peeled, seeded muscat grapes as a toddler. Those same grapes were some of the first foods that I ever actually cooked by myself on my mother's toy stove. The little griddle on that stove got HOT! I don't know how many burnt fingertips I got grilling halved grapes on that thing! A few years later I made miniature grilled cheese sandwiches on it, too.
Calichef at 9:23PM on 02/20/07
It was when I was in Germany in high school. My host family took me to a restaurant and I ordered a pasta dish, black & white linguini with roasted garlic and crispy sage. It was revolutionary. Nothing I had ever eaten in my entire life could compare. I came back to New York and tried to re-create it for my family. That was it, that was my time... I was hooked.
Ann at 11:36PM on 02/20/07
Rather late, in 1995, when visiting Toulouse, France: my boyfriend (now husband, from Toulouse) bought some smelly (well, stinky...) cheese from a famous cheese shop, Betty. Until then I haven't realized how good can be a small piece of smelly and melting cheese on a piece of baguette followed by a drop of red wine...
Sara - Piperita at 2:07AM on 02/21/07
When I was 4 years old, my sister was born and my parents decided we had to keep kosher, taking away my beloved ham. Since then I've had a need to always eat out and try new pork products that I was missing a home. Although I guess I wasn't a real foodie back than, it must have made a big influence in my love for bbq and ham (and most other things not kosher) that I have now.
josh! at 9:04AM on 02/21/07
Josh!, we might be related --
Me: 9 months old
First word: DaDa
Second word: Ham!
ejvalentine at 11:34AM on 02/21/07
i don't think it was a moment per se, just looking back on my childhood- all my significant memories revolve around food. that continues to this day.
gk at 11:40AM on 02/21/07
ejvalentine - Haha! I still can't get over my parents taking ham away from me. It's downright child torture.
josh! at 1:09PM on 02/21/07
When I was 8, I was told that I would be making cookies for my sick great-aunt. I realized while reading the recipe that cooking was what I loved and what I'm good at.
My passion kind of stayed subdued until about my sophmore year of high school when I went to NYC for the first time and discovered an entirely different world relating to food.
Ash at 2:42AM on 02/22/07