Food for Thought
By: Gina Puzzanghera
Raising the Bar
I’m not sure when it happened, but it seems like in the past ten years, American consumers have wised up to the culinary field. Regular, middle of the county dinners have turned from meat and potatoes to Asparagus sprouts and steak tartar. Little kids stopped asking for chocolate shakes and started asking for an iced smoothy chocolate milk in a chilled glass, please. Even babies are in on this. They are eating organic, gourmet baby food.
I don’t know if it is the huge popularity of Food Network or the deluge of specialty chain restaurants, but one thing is for sure: the pallet of ordinary Americans is changing into a weird mix of Frasier Crane complexities and John Wayne simplicity. There was a need for something different and some marketing genius said " if we cook it they will come", and they did. Now on any given day you can head to a Cosco or a Sam’s Club and pick up some interesting products that just years ago would have been a special order. Most everyone eats Chinese food, Mexican, Indian, Etc..., heck, last night my grandmother offered to take me out for some curry!
Somewhere a long the line, people stopped saying, " EEEww, I’m not eating that," and have instead been saying things like, " yeah that sounds good, lets give it a try!". This gourmet food market has been demystified and the whining of fussy eaters has been replaced by the sound of the cash register.
These new customers are a little yin and yang. The usual razzle dazzle won’t thrill these guys and gals, but on the other hand, we now have a base that wants interesting cuisine that gives us a blank check to go wild creatively. This new global market of cuisine is a fresh frontier for the culinary world and I, for one, am proud to be a pioneer.
Chef2Chef News Desk