You secretly love cronuts and you're a devoted locavore, but have you participated in a carrot mob or visited a sourdough hotel? Those are just two of the 100 new vocab terms food writer Josh Friedland—best known for creating and writing @RuthBourdain, the unholy Twitter mash-up of food personalities Ruth Reichl and Anthony Bourdain—dug up while researching his new book Eatymology (out November 2015), which bills itself as "the dictionary of modern gastronomy." What kind of terms made the list? We had Friedland school us on a few new ones you'll need to cement your food geek street cred.
"This one has a really cool literary metaphor: Moby Dick. There's this entire world of beer trading I wasn't familiar with. People who are seriously into beer go online and trade rare beers. And then the most elusive beers are what they call white whales. The subsidiary, the rarest of the rare beers, are actually called 'ghost whales.'"
"Christine [Muhlke, BA's executive editor] actually coined that one in the New York Times. A brocavore is the uber-hipster male food obsessive. For the book, she actually gave me a really fun list of 'habitats' where you can find these brocavores," he says. On that list? "Pricing cleverly named sausage at the vegan-owned butcher shop; fingering axes at the Best Made Company store; at any restaurant, coffee shop, or bar with '& co' in the name; buying a fermentation crock at the local 'mercantile.'" Friedland also suggests you can, of course, spot them roaming cities like Portland, Oakland, Brooklyn, Asheville, and Nashville.
"It's related to the idea of 'reverse boycott,'" says Friedland. In this case, social media is used "to pull people together to support and buy from a business that's doing something green. For example, let's say there's a business promising to do something specific in their shop to improve energy efficiency, so you encourage people to come out this weekend and support. This started circa 2008 and the first one was in San Francisco [at K&D Market, where 300 shoppers assembled at a prearranged time]."
Originally coined by Hazel Cills and Gabrielle Noon on The Hairpin in 2014, Friedland described snack wave as "an internet trend among young women and teenage girls who incorporate an obsession with snack products and fast foods into their online personas." As in, not just eating cheeseburgers, but wearing a matching patterned set covered in them. (See: small, fashionable dog illustrated above).
"I originally saw a **New York Post article about this, and it seemed ridiculous. Then there was an exhaustive two-part study with surveys on Sprudge.com that found it's actually a huge problem for baristas, who get repetitive stress injuries from working in coffee shops. Now coffee shops have made these efforts to change counter height or to bring in yoga teachers that encourage preventative work. That was one of those where I thought it would be goofy and fun, but it's actually a serious issue."
"Let's say you're seriously into baking bread. You need to feed the sourdough more flour everyday to maintain it," Friedland says. "So, if you're going on vacation for two weeks, your culture's not going to be alive when you get back. You can bring it to a sourdough hotel, and they'll give it a daily feeding for you. They generally house over 30 jars of starter, and the top shelf is labeled penthouse." The first was in Stockholm at the Urban Deli, where customers would pay three hundred Swedish krona (~$35) for each week of sourdough starter-sitting.
