Thursday, 02 July 2009

• 2000s Food Fads: The Delicious and the Dubious

  In my last post, I commented on some of the food fads of the 90's that we all miss (Dunkaroos, anyone?). Though the 2000s aren't quite over, we've certainly see our share of millennial food fads that have either caught on like the iPhone, or crashed and burned like Von Dutch trucker hats. Here are some of our faves:

  Cosmopolitans

  

  Sex and the City inspired so many fashion trends: Fendi baguettes, Manolos, ginormous flower pins. But Carrie & Co. did gift the foodie world with one fashionable power drink: the cosmo. The pink-filled martini glass was as ubiquitous on SATC as the bad dates, and sent ingenues everywhere scurrying to the bar for their fruity libations. Cosmos set off the flavored martini craze, inspiring bars everywhere to add a special list of appletinis, chocotinis and espresso-tinis to their menus. Though today it's passe to order up a cosmo, they were the girly cocktail of the 2000s.

  The Atkins Diet

  

  Around the turn of the millennium, Dr. Atkins published a series of books explaining his new weight loss plan, named the Atkins diet, or, informally, eating low carb. The diet caught on like wildfire as Americans starting shunning bread and flour and gorging on meat, eggs and cheese. Restaurants featured low-carb menus and grocery stores exploded with low-carb products as everyone tried to cash in on the new idea that carbohydrates were the true cause behind American obesity.

  The problem is that the diet is hard to sustain (and arguably unhealthy in the long term), and as soon as you re-introduced cereal into your diet, the 40 pounds came flying back on. The Atkins foundation started by Dr. Atkins eventually filed for bankruptcy in 2005, and Wonder Bread and Cheez-Its are, for better or for worse, no longer villianized.

  Chai Tea

  

  "Chai tea" is actually redundant, because chai is a tea. But semantics aside, chai is amazing; it tastes like pumpkin pie and warms your stomach with its spicy goodness. Chai actually originated in India as masala chai, a potent blend of cardamom, cinnamon, star anise, ginger, peppercorn and cloves. Once Americans got ahold of it, we paired it with whole milk and turned it into a creamy, if fattening, latte. Today, chai remains the most popular non-coffee beverage at Starbucks. Let's keep this tasty tea treat around for a lot longer.

  Splenda

  

  Nutrasweet and Equal (i.e., the pink packet and the blue packet) were never darlings of the media. We heard constantly about the detrimental health effects of artificial sweetener throughout the 80s and 90s, until a "natural" new alternative emerged in 1999: Splenda. Say it with me now: "Made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar!" Splenda, aka sucralose, is made by chlorinating table sugar, but it's not as natural as the company would have you believe; in 2006, Equal sued the company, saying its claim of being "natural" was misleading. Currently the company uses the slogan, "It starts with sugar. It tastes like sugar. But it's not sugar." Stevia has become the natural sweetener du jour, but we say, at least the yellow packet tastes better than the pink or blue.

  Red Bull and energy drinks

  

  Red Bull's marketers claim it "gives you wings," sounding scarily like a hallucenogenic drug. One can of this chartreuse, lightly carbonated beverage will indeed perk you up (ginseng and taurine are the active ingredients), but it also tastes like vitamin-y cough syrup. Since Red Bull trailblazed the energy drink craze, dozens of other companys have jumped on the jumpy juice bandwagon. Can you even count all the energy products on the shelves these days? We like to stick to time-tested coffee for our all-nighters.

  Cupcakes

  

  my own photo of an "Elvis" cupcake (peanut butter w/banana) from Crumbs Bakery in New York

  Cupcakes from NYC's Magnolia Bakery were the first to inspire the cupcake craze, and these days everyone, including us at IReallyLikeFood, has caught the cupcake crazies. Forget about plain old vanilla and sprinkles: you can now get PB&J cupcakes, Twinkie cupcakes, tomato soup cupcakes and chocolate bacon cupcakes. These aren't the Betty Crocker cupcakes your mom brought into school for your tenth birthday party, and we're enjoying the hubub while it lasts. The New York Times has called the next dessert craze to be whoopie pies, but only sweet time will tell.

  Which of these foods do you still eat? What 2000s trends did I miss?

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