Food Predictions

[talon]

As a sometimes foodie type person (no, really), I'd like to make a few predictions for food trends.

1. The "pop-up" or mobile restaurant will gain a strong foothold, beginning on the east coast, spreading to the west, and then the middle of the country, thanks to the internet where fans can follow their favorite restaurants from location to location. Chefs will use them as experiments for refining their main restaurants or to re-connect with customers or to break food rules or try out new menus or recipes.

2. Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, apps on cell phones, and various other forms of social media will track ephemeral restaurants, including the "secret supper" restaurants.

3. Secret supper restaurants will spread from the east and west coasts, with more people willing to act as chefs for friends and even strangers in impromptu, ephemeral "restaurants" set up in homes, picnic shelters, clubrooms, warehouses, basements, and other one-off places.

4. More food will be sourced from local places, both in the home and in restaurants.

5. Homeowners will be more likely to plant a few edibles among their flowers, even if they don't actually eat the food they grow. Edible landscaping is "in" and they will want to be a part of the trend.

6. Tea will eclipse coffee as the favored beverage, and will also figure strongly in recipes. Look for stews, cookies, roasts, cakes, fruits, and other dishes to contain tea. Tea sommeliers will help people pair tea with their meal.

7. More people will want to cook at home, perhaps using partially cooked and/or assembled meals from restaurants (similar to Papa Murphey's take-n-bake pizzas). These people may form cooking clubs where they learn to cook different dishes or discover cooking techniques or pantry skills.

8. Food manufacturers will try new ways of appealing to customers by making increasingly artificial "foods" enhanced with "full doses of daily vitamins" in each product (apparently, they won't be concerned with overdoses as people consume 3-5 times the daily recommended amount of vitamins from all their "vitamin-enhanced" foods), will add more sugar, salt, and soy in foods that shouldn't have them in order to "enhance" the flavor of foods, portability (turning meals into beverages), and "pre-cooked" stages (think of the pre-cooked bacon and expand from there!), and pushing weight loss and health benefits by adding calcium, vitamin C, pro-biotics, and other unproven additives.

And there you have it, my food predictions for the coming year or two.

Comments

[havocthecat]

Secret supper restaurants will spread from the east and west coasts, with more people willing to act as chefs for friends and even strangers in impromptu, ephemeral "restaurants" set up in homes, picnic shelters, clubrooms, warehouses, basements, and other one-off places.

This isn't something I've heard of before, but, wow, that's kind of intriguing.