“Racist Sandwich,” now 68 episodes strong, is pausing operations while Ho takes up a job as restaurant critic at The San Francisco Chronicle. Faustin spoke derisively of the arcana surrounding winemaking: the weird neckties vintners wear, the sense that the process of turning grapes into alcohol is ineffably magical, the monopoly that white people hold on that “magic.” Wine is not a potion conjured by druids, Faustin pointed out: “It’s chemistry.” But wine is so swaddled in norms about how its enthusiasts should look, act, and speak that the industry has effectively shut out people of color.

Being a foodie now, in 2019, requires thinking with more than your tongue.īertony Faustin has a pithy assessment of the mystique that surrounds wine-making: “It’s bullshit.” Faustin, Oregon’s first black vintner, made the comment to chef Soleil Ho and reporter Zahir Janmohamed in 2016, on their podcast “ Racist Sandwich ,” which explores the intersection of food culture with race, gender, and class. But from the outside looking in, it’s clear that foodie culture is roiling with a new awareness of social politics, undermining some of that culture’s unspoken tenets: that taste and pleasure are neutral, universal concepts that the kitchen is an apolitical zone. I don’t even know the difference between a meuniere and a mirepoix. And I’m talking, of course, about the #MeToo movement and how it has brought down erstwhile paragons of the foodie community like Mario Batali. I’m talking about the fact that you can still find “oriental Chicken salad” on the menu at Applebee’s, long after the outdated term was eviscerated in the Times. I’m talking about Summerhill, the restaurant that opened in 2017 in Crown Heights riddled with fake “bullet holes,” and the rosé and now water sold in bottles meant to resemble 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor. And this is why it has also been buffeted by the kinds of public controversies that traditionally played out beyond the confines of the kitchen.

“Foodie-ism” more than ever describes a special area in our culture, politics, and economy. But even though, 35 years on from Levy and Barr’s book, the foodie is ubiquitous, she has never been harder to define. A light goes on and you see the phenomenon everywhere. Looking back in 2007, Levy wrote that he knew the word would hit the culture like a “cocktail stick applied to a raw nerve.” People like to be seen, and neologisms like “foodie” give us a way to name what was previously unnameable. Mind, mouth, soul: This is where the foodie lives. The foodie eats to meet the demands of her body from the neck up, not the neck down.

She is not a gourmand, either, since she need not possess a pathological appetite. In 1984 they published The Official Foodie Handbook, a lighthearted tome that explains that the foodie is not a gourmet, since she need not be a snob, a professional, or a man. New York writer Gael Greene first used the term in a restaurant review, but it was Ann Barr and Paul Levy of England’s Harper’s and Queen who popularized it. The foodie-as a word, a concept, a person-began life in the early 1980s.

Foodie definition