I recently returned from a girls’ trip to New York City with three of my friends. (You can read about my last trip to the Big Apple here and why I'd rather live in a place that serves cheese with its soft pretzels as a default.) I spent a lot of quality time with these lovely ladies, during which I discovered some profound differences between us: two of them were foodies. Like, I sort of knew this about them, but until I traveled with them and shared living quarters and meals with them for days in a row, I did not realize the extent to which they fooded.
I am a decided non-foodie. Maybe this just means I’m unsophisticated. I generally don’t do fancy or weird ingredients. I do not get any joy from cooking. After much angst, I only in the past few years have figured out a way to effectively make wholesome and healthyish meals for our family on a regular basis, thanks to a freezer meal prep program offered at a local grocery store. I don’t know if you can work full time, have little kids and still be a foodie, but I’m sure those super-parents are out there somewhere and I hate them. I’m lucky to get pubes cleaned out of the shower on a bi-monthly basis. I’m not left with a lot of time to reduce sauces. Anyway, here are the key differences I noticed between foodies and me, the non-foodie:
Foodies consume foodie media
* They watch cooking shows - Throughout the trip, my foodie friends were often referencing the shows they watched, and they set aside large chunks of the trip to go to the restaurants of chefs they saw on these shows. One was called Milkbar and featured ice cream made from milk that had had cereal soaking in it. (Them: “This is some of the best ice cream I’ve ever consumed!” Me: “Not so much, but look at how it’s made the millennials line up around the block! It’s like they’re giving away free rent money or skinny pants.”) The only cooking show I’ve ever watched without being bored to tears is Master Chef Junior, and I end up feeling ashamed most of the time because there are 8-year-old kids on there who are hand-making gnocchi and putting it in a brown-butter sage sauce, and I’m in my mid-30s and am still too scared to use my broiler. (I technically don’t know where it is in my oven, but I think it’s in the part where I store my pans.)
* They read foodie magazines and blogs - My friend was kind enough to let me peruse her new cooking magazine while I answered nature’s call. There were like 1,000 words of text for each recipe. How can you opine about shallots for four paragraphs?! I consistently read one cooking magazine, and it’s a subscription to Taste of Home that was purchased for me by my grandmother, who passed away a few years ago. I’m not sure how the subscription is funded from beyond the grave, but I’m going to ride this free magazine train for as long as it lasts. Anyway, most of the recipes in Taste of Home are preceded by just a few sentences along the lines of, “Everyone at the church potluck ate this.” That’s all I need. Same with blogs. As a non-foodie, I am uninterested in the life story that led to you creating a burger featuring feta cheese. I just need to see if it has anything gross in it and whether I can prepare and cook it in less than 30 minutes on a weeknight.
Foodies make food a destination
I was content to alternate between hot dogs and salads for our entire trip to New York: Basically just enough food to give me the energy to walk the miles we did everyday with enough roughage to fend off traveler’s constipation. While we were in NYC, I wanted to see exhibits and museums and parks and shows. My foodie friends wanted to go to restaurants, like as destinations. This was weird to me. One was apparently the restaurant that started the resurgence of ramen as a gourmet food. Another was an Italian restaurant that charged us $55 for a pitcher of sangria, which we were not aware of until the bill came. The food there was amazingly good, but I could buy close to a week’s worth of Aldi groceries at that price, or close to two months’ worth of cat thyroid medicine. (In Midwestern terms, I live pretty large.)
Foodies like sweet and salty mixed together
This combination is anathema to me - so much so that you will see it in my blog bio. From what I have seen from fancy-pants foodies in general, you can’t call yourself a bona fide foodie unless you cover your meat in fruit or vice versa. Real foodies love prosciutto drizzled in honey rolled up with wilted spinach in a wrap smeared with bacon jam served with a raspberry-lime-teriyaki-salted caramel-balsamic vinaigrette dipping sauce. A nice, tomato-based savory salsa with a kick of lime juice? Ha! That’s for unsophisticated food simpletons. If you’re a real foodie, you want your salsa made with pineapples, jalapeños, capers, cherries, roasted garlic, jicama, pieces of cedar-plank-grilled salmon and marshmallows. Then instead of tortilla chips, you use homemade sweet potato chips because foodies CANNOT HAVE ENOUGH SWEET POTATOES. It is the pinnacle of their sweet-salty foodie love. (Also beets. Foodies love those brightly colored veggies that taste of soil.)
Even their desserts must mix the savory and the sweet. I envision this on a foodie blog:
“(… long story about how twisting an ankle in a childhood dance class led to the creation of) this amazing rhubarb tart with apricots and seared pork on an Oreo crust!”
Foodies like to cook
Things I would rather do than cook:
Read a book, sleep, snuggle my kids, clean bathrooms, sleep, sweep, write about how I’m not a foodie, sleep, watch TV, do laundry, work out, sleep.
Things foodies would rather do than cook:
Win money, meet celebrity chefs.
Foodies like to share their food on social media
I don’t think I have ever taken a picture of my meal. Several of the freezer meals I make end up looking a little vomity by the time they’re thawed and prepared (my husband says those are usually the tastiest, though), so that’s not going to impress anyone. I just can’t imagine anyone cares what I eat. I don’t go out to restaurants much anymore because I have little, uncivilized children to whom I’m not going to subject unsuspecting diners who just want to eat some roasted chicken in peace. If I’m going to share pictures on social media, it’s going to be either of my ridiculously adorable children or cats (which I’m absolutely certain everyone wants to see) or funny/weird stuff I encounter. I mean, if I see a chicken strip shaped like Bill Clinton, I’m taking a picture of that. But the Instagram foodies of the world with their filtered plates of bone marrow, “to-die-for risotto” and sautéed kale cannot stop themselves. #foodporn. For the record, my foodie friends on this trip never do that. Bless them.
I am glad my friends opened my eyes to the lives of foodies and gave me a first-hand glimpse into their sweet and salty world. I have loved them for years and never knew the extent to which my juvenile palate differed from their sophisticated ones. We were basically cats and dogs living together, and the world is a better place because of our harmony. I mean, if foodies and non-foodies can be besties, all of our nation’s immigration issues should work themselves out shortly. As the kids say: squad goals!
