How cauliflower took over your pizza, your kitchen, and the world – How does a food become a trend? Ask cauliflower
First came the cauliflower steaks, thick vegetal slabs, roasted and served like cruciferous T-bones. Then there was Buffalo cauliflower, breaded and fried and generally chicken-shaped.
“Cauliflower moves to the center of the plate,” declared New York magazine in 2013, crowning it “Vegetable Most Likely to Be Mistaken for a Piece of Meat.”
Then came the cauli grains — riced cauliflower, cauliflower pizza crust, cauliflower gnocchi — and eventually cauli memes. “If cauliflower can somehow become pizza…” the website Food52 said inspirationally on Instagram, “you, my friend, can do anything.”
It has been a spectacular rise for a vegetable that was previously best known in the US for being ignored on plates of crudités. If you weren’t paying attention, cauliflower seemed to rise out of nowhere — you weren’t eating it, and then you were. But to the people who track these things, both chefs and trend forecasters, the rise of cauliflower is a perfect illustration of how food trends evolve.
Suzy Badaracco, president of the trend forecasting company Culinary Tides, says she first started noticing cauliflower showing up around 2008, which means we are entering our second decade of cauliflower. You might think we would be done by now. We are not done.
The weird thing about cauliflower, though, is that while it has allies, it doesn’t really have adversaries. “Its only adversary is actually itself,” Badaracco says. The biggest strike against cauliflower: Some people don’t like it. (Also, she points out, it doesn’t work so well in desserts. “You’re probably not going to see cauliflower milkshakes.”)
See https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/9/19/17874782/cauliflower-trend-vegetarian-paleo-rice
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How does a food become a trend? Ask cauliflower. How cauliflower took over your pizza, your kitchen, and the world |