Food trends in 2009 tended toward sugar and salt, frosting and pork
By By Tori Masucci
This past year, America began once again finding comfort in comfort foods, reverting back to simple, homemade dishes that are inexpensive without sacrificing quality ingredients. "This year has marked a significant reentry into the macaroni and cheese economy," pronounces Clark Wolf, president of the Clark Wolf Company restaurant consulting firm. "The difference now is that we want really good aged cheddar and fresh noodles. Life's too hard to eat something out of a blue box."
Yet 2009 was also an indulgent and experimental year for cuisine. In the wake of a recession, when the economy squelched American dreams in every other way, the best we could do was to eat. And, moreover, eat whatever we pleased. This meant salads on pizza, Peruvian pisco sours, plenty of ginger and nougat, pink Champagne cupcakes and bacon on top of everything.
Shedding some light on this year's food trends, Wolf remarks, "I see it more as being from cupcakes to bacon. Cupcakes are more of a fad than a trend, whereas bacon is a food group." Soon after Sex and the City's Carrie took that first bite at Magnolia Bakery in New York City back in 2000, the cupcake world swelled from mini to monumental as the next fashion-forward food. Cupcakeries have popped up around the country by the masses. Sugarcoated and cultlike yet oh-so-adorable with baby pink logos, these shops continue to win over customers with enticing flavors coined with cutesy names like Southern Belle Red Velvet.
An expert on the "cupcake craze," Andrea Ballus, owner of Sift Cupcakery in Cotati and Napa—with a new store due to open next month in Santa Rosa—believes that cupcakes hold a deeper significance for customers than mere chic. They are simply, Ballus says, "the happiest food on Earth."
Cheaper than a latte, these small treats are a convenient way to reward oneself without buying a whole cake. Unpeeling that thin, fanned wrapper yields a selfish delight that takes us back to childhood, when worries did not involve mortgages. "There is definitely a nostalgic part to cupcakes, like eating Hostess or the cupcakes that your mom dropped off for your first-grade birthday, that people want to remember," Ballus says.
But 2009 was truly bacon's big year. Foodies nationwide rediscovered its savory qualities, harking back to the primal nature of eating. The meat's strong essence of smoke, alcohol, sugar, salt and fatty acid is tempting. "The thing is," Wolf says, "foods like cupcakes really aren't necessary, and most of them are a better idea than they are a food. Most of the satisfaction of a cupcake comes from when it's going toward your mouth. But bacon is a food that a wonderful animal died for. Bacon rocks. It's salt of the earth; it's sustaining."
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