The Tastemakers Read online

  Copyright © 2014 by David Sax

  Published simultaneously in the United States by PublicAffairs™, a Member of the Perseus Books Group.

  Signal is an imprint of McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Sax, David, author

  The tastemakers : why we’re crazy for cupcakes but fed up with fondue / David

  Sax.

  ISBN 978-0-7710-7912-2 (bound). – eBook ISBN 978-0-7710-7941-2 (html)

  1. Food in popular culture. 2. Food – Social aspects. 3. Food preferences. 4. Food – Marketing. I. Title.

  TX357.S29 2014 641.3 C2013-906885-6

  C2013-906886-4

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House Company

  www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  TO LAUREN,

  MY ENDURING TREND,

  AND NOA,

  THE SWEET CUPCAKE

  FROM YOUR OVEN.

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Part I: The Four Types of Trends

  1 The Cultural Trend: Sex Appeal

  2 Agriculture: The Slow Boat to China Black

  3 Chefs: A Ceviche in Every Pot

  4 Health: Take Two Chia Seeds and Call Me in the Morning

  Part II: How Trends Break Out

  5 Sales: Awards Night

  6 Data: The Trendwatchers

  7 Marketing: Someday My Red Prince Will Come

  Part III: Why Food Trends Matter

  8 Ethnic Foods: As American as Chicken Tikka Masala

  9 Food Politics: The Taco Truck March on Washington

  10 Money: Baconomics 101

  11 Aftermath: Fondue Retires to Florida

  Epilogue: A Cronut at the End of the Rainbow

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Bibliography

  About the Author

  The On Location Tours bus parked in the shadow of New York’s Plaza hotel, idling in the damp January chill as its passengers trickled in from nearby sights. They ranged in age from their early twenties to late fifties, coming from as close as Long Island and as far away as Sweden. With the exception of two of their husbands and myself, the thirty-odd passengers were exclusively women. Some came with friends, others in large groups. All were here for the same reasons as everyone else on this bus: Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha, the four leads from the HBO television series Sex and the City, which aired from 1998 to 2004 along with two subsequent films. To the ladies seated around me, these were not only TV characters but also the hallowed names of prophets: icons of feminine identity, sexual liberators, and symbols of everything the Big Apple had to offer.

  “All right, ladies!” said Staci Jacobs, practically singing into the microphone as the doors closed and the bus started to roll down Fifth Avenue. “Welcome to the Sex and the City Hotspots Tour!” Jacobs, who wouldn’t divulge her age but is “old enough to have watched the show” (she was likely in her early thirties, like me), had been leading the tour twice a day, every day, since 2005. A stylish redhead in tight jeans and knee-high boots (think Charlotte with Miranda’s coloring), Jacobs had passed the same sights thousands of times, unleashing practiced anecdotes at each location.

  “Remember Ed?” Jacobs asked outside the Plaza hotel, where Samantha once met her elderly fling for a drink in season two. “He had a saggy ass, am I right, ladies?” The bus exploded in knowing laughter.

  “If you thought this was a PG-rated tour, you’re on the wrong fucking bus!” Jacobs said. “Can I get a ‘Fuck yeah’?”

  “Fuck yeah!” the bus shouted back as Jacobs tossed her strawberry mane to the side with a devilish smile that’s oh-so-Samantha. On we went downtown, past the library where Carrie—spoiler alert!—fled her lavish wedding and the church where the good-looking monk known as Friar Fuck worked. Two stops and a dozen video clips of the show later, the tour bus parked at the corner of Bleecker and West Eleventh Street, in the heart of the West Village, the picturesque, boutique-laden sun at the center of Sex and the City’s glittering solar system. The show had turned the leafy, bohemian neighborhood into a paradise of quaint cafés, high-end clothing shops, and giant handbags, drawing hundreds of thousands of fans a year to wander the narrow streets in awed disbelief, like medieval pilgrims in Jerusalem.

  As we stepped off the bus, Jacobs instructed everyone that we had the better part of an hour to take in the neighborhood. “And when you come back to me I’ll have cupcakes,” Jacobs said, singing the last word with a cooing sort of siren call, her voice rising to a crescendo on “cakes.” Oohs, ahhs, and giggles of anticipation greeted this news, but the show’s seasoned fans already expected this.

  “Are they Magnolia cupcakes?” one woman, from Alabama, asked hopefully, looking out her window at Magnolia Bakery, kitty corner from where the bus parked.

  “No,” Jacobs said, with a tense smile, “but they’re just as good.”

  Alix Galey and Emily Pavlin, a pair of friends in their early twenties from Melbourne, Australia, exited the bus, and like most of the people on the tour, they made a beeline for Magnolia, where they purchased a pair of the bakery’s signature red velvet cupcakes. “I’m obsessed with the show,” said Pavlin between bites. “I’ve seen each episode five times.” It was a gray, cold day, and the heat and moisture inside the bakery had fogged up all the windows so all you could see from the street were hazy round shapes, muted pastel colors, and the outlines of different magazine and newspaper articles taped to the glass.

  Just by the door, barely visible through the condensation, was a small framed photograph of two women sitting on a bench in front of Magnolia. To the left sat Cynthia Nixon, the actress who played Miranda, and to the right was Sarah Jessica Parker, who starred as Carrie Bradshaw. Their legs were crossed, shopping bags at their feet, and they were looking directly at the camera. Each of them was holding a cupcake. At the bottom of the frame was a narrow piece of paper, which read, “Magnolia Bakery is featured on Sex and the City Season 3.”

  Thousands of years in the future, when archaeologists are combing through the artifacts of our age, what will happen when they excavate this photograph and the site around it? Will they have any idea what Sex and the City was or how it captivated the hopes and dreams of millions of women globally? Will they know that these two females in the photo were not just revered actresses but actually symbols of modern woman’s sexual and social empowerment?

  Will the archaeologists recognize cupcakes?

  Will they know that in the first decade of the twenty-first century there were cakes baked in cups, cakes of every imaginable flavor and combination; that these cakes were covered in sweet frosting, in everything from simple vanilla creams to elaborate artistic 3-D creations; that for more than ten years these little cakes were a subject of great power and fascination all over the world; and that all of that, from the global tribes of devoted bakers to the chroniclers of the phenomenon to the multibillion-dollar cupcake economy, all began here, on this sacred corner of Manhattan, at this small bakery, with these two women and a twenty-second scene of a television show that, once upon a time, changed the way we ate d
essert?

  When I tell people I am writing a book about food trends, they usually just scratch their heads. Then I say the word cupcakes, and instantly their eyes open wide, their heads nod, and a torrent of passionate opinion pours forth from the depths of their soul. They love cupcakes. They hate cupcakes. They eat cupcakes every day. They avoid cupcakes like the plague. Cupcakes are everything they love about life. Cupcakes are everything wrong with the modern world.

  Cupcakes, cupcakes, cupcakes. Glorious, cursed, beautiful, wretched, god-help-us, god-love-us … cupcakes!

  As a child of North America, I am no stranger to the charm of cupcakes. In one of my earliest memories, right before my third birthday, I am standing in the kitchen with my mother, first tossing eggs on the floor and then hysterically crying at the results as she desperately tried to bake chocolate cupcakes for my party that afternoon. In later years my mother brought cupcakes to my school from Health Bread, a long-departed bakery near our house in Toronto. The whole class sat in hushed silence as they were carried from the doorway to our teacher’s desk, twenty-five sets of little eyes locked like heat-seeking missiles on that pale blue box.

  When our teacher untied the butcher’s string and opened the box, it revealed the happiest sight on earth: row upon row of chocolate cupcakes nestled tightly in their accordion paper wrappers, frosted with a thin veneer of mocha-colored icing, and covered with a tasteful shower of rainbow sprinkles. We’d patiently wait in line, receive our ration, then head back to our desks, cradling the cupcake like a small bird in our hands. The girls would peel the paper off carefully, examining the best angle to approach the first bite, but not us boys. We’d tear into them with the senseless chomps of competitors in an apple-bobbing contest. Within seconds our faces and mouths would be painted in chocolate, our white shirts and sweat pants smeared with streaks of brown. What we didn’t ingest, we figured, we’d simply absorb through the skin by osmosis. Within thirty seconds the classroom was a mess of crumbs, wrappers, and bubbling hyperactivity. Cupcakes were childhood at its peak.

  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?

  The 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.