Food fads: instant irritation

Whether people are cutting carbs, attempting to eat healthily or on a plight to be ‘quirky,’ food fads constantly change and I find myself frustrated at the newest trends lingering on everyone’s taste buds. So what’s in right now and what’s wrong with it?

Frozen yoghurt. Nothing in this world irritates me more than those two words followed by an Instagrammed photo of a cold dessert splashed with an array of average chocolate and fruit. Realistically, you’re just eating fruit and ice cream: no one cares.

Another trend frequently blogged about are the world’s most expensive foods. This week, £1000 coq au vin was launched in Le Coq d’Argent restaurant. Paying this price is a joke, right? What makes life worse is that fancy food looks nice, causing feelings of envy and misery in the average soul.

Hand-in-hand with costly prices are tiny portions. In critically acclaimed restaurants, you pay as much money for as little food as possible. Where’s the logic? Out go traditional hearty meals and in come measly morsels of food. Even programs like Master Chef seem to promote this inane policy, which is just plain sad.

Everything’s organic at the moment. After a bloated Christmas and a depressing January, people think that throwing together exotic fruit and vegetables in a blender will solve all their health problems. In actual fact, studies have shown that the health benefits of organic produce are negligible, not to mention that the huge pastoral exclusion zones and ridiculous importation costs of organic are not only damaging the environment but our financial well-being. The most useless food fads are almost always created by celebrities. Miley Cyrus won’t eat gluten, Miranda Kerr lives off fruit juice and Christina Aguilera swears by the ‘colourful’ diet (don’t ask). Not to be patronising, but these diets are ridiculous. Just because celebrities promote absurd healthy living, food fads (and tweet about it) doesn’t mean normal people need to follow them… the chances are they probably don’t do much good.

Despite my rant, some good has come out of recent food trends. Considering we’re constantly bombarded with recession panic, food prices have not changed drastically. Instead, people buy more supermarket brands and the standard of non-labelled foods has increased. Moreover, with small portions of very expensive food becoming a new tendency, less meat is consumed. This saves money, helps the environment and – unlike blended-fruit drinks which apparently slow our metabolisms by 9000 percent – improves our health.

A solution: pay more attention to what you eat. Don’t buy into trends just because they’re popular with celebrities or cost money. Although, I guess my argument is pretty irrelevant in light of horse-meat-burger-gate – perhaps a more pressing food issue than health-freaks and instagram.