Fashion Foods

Do you remember a time when kale was that gross green stuff your mum tried to force you to eat at Sunday lunch? A simpler time, when it hadn’t made its insidious green way into everything from smoothies to cupcakes to, for some ungodly reason, pizza dough. A time when people weren’t droning incessantly on and on about the wonders of kale, using buzzwords like ‘superfood’ and ‘antioxidant’. A time when the world made sense.

 Kale is a prime example of what I like to call a fashion food, or a food craze as they’re usually known. Crazes like the cronut or those rainbow bagels are harmless enough; they look cool on Instagram, and they probably taste pretty good. But what I’m talking about here are the 'It' ingredients; that thing you suddenly have to be cooking with.

Just... why?

Source: flickr user Arnold Gatilao. 'Healthy' Filipino smoothie, 2011.

 Quinoa is a prime example of this; there were already plenty of grains available to us, but the foodies of the world jumped onto the quinoa train as soon as it pulled into the station, spurred on by social media and the general experience of viral hipsterism. Fashionable food sounds crazy, but it’s a thing. For the last few years, kale and avocado have been the a-list of crops, for some ungodly reason, taking over lives and advertising campaigns to a bizarre and memeworthy extent. I am no exception to the fashion food frenzy, as the unopened containers of millet, bulgar wheat, and chia seeds sitting in my cupboards will attest. I do maintain that I made a mean chia pudding, just to be clear.

 The problem with quinoa, the way its popularity has led to the people who depend on it being unable to afford it, is something that has been playing on my mind since I talked about it in another post not long ago. This isn’t a long post, I just wanted to reflect on the very real and seemingly unpredictable impacts our actions can have. Ethical shopping doesn’t sound like the most exciting thing in the world, but it can really make a difference to someone else. And I just wanted to say that, if you get anything out of reading this blog, I hope it’s that you take a moment to think before you jump onto the newest fad.