What Does It Mean to Be a ‘Foodie’ Now?

“When did you become such an adventurous ?” my mom often asks me, after I’ve squealed about some meal involving jamón ibérico or numbing spices. The answer is, I don’t know, but I can think of moments throughout my life where food erupted as more than a mere meal: My cousin and his Ivy League rowing team hand-making pumpkin ravioli for me at Thanksgiving. Going to the pre-Amazon Whole Foods and giddily deciding to buy bison bacon for breakfast sandwiches assembled in a dorm kitchen. Eating paneer for the first time in India. Slurping a raw oyster in New Orleans.

What made me even want to try a raw oyster in 2004, despite everything about an oyster telling me NO, was an entire culture emerging promising me I’d be better for it. Food, I was beginning to understand from TV and magazines and whatever blogs existed then, was important. It could be an expression of culture or creativity or cachet, folk art or surrealism or science, but it was something to pay attention to. Mostly, I gleaned that to reject foodieism was to give up on a new and powerful form of social currency. I would, then, become a foodie.

To be a foodie in the mid-aughts meant it wasn’t enough to enjoy French wines and Michelin-starred restaurants. The pursuit of the “best” food, with the broadest definition possible, became a defining trait: a pastry deserving of a two-hour wait, an international trip worth taking just for a bowl of noodles. Knowing the name of a restaurant’s chef was good, but knowing the last four places he’d worked at was better — like knowing the specs of Prince’s guitars. This knowledge was meant to be shared. Foodies traded in Yelp reviews and Chowhound posts, offering tips on the most authentic tortillas and treatises on ramps. Ultimately, we foodies were fans, gleefully devoted to our subculture.

Which inevitably leads to some problems, when, say, the celebrities the subculture has put on a pedestal are revealed to be less-than-honorable actors, or when values like authenticity and craft are inevitably challenged. What it’s historically meant to be a foodie, a fan, has shifted and cracked and been reborn.

And ultimately, it has died. Or at least the term has. To be called a “foodie” now is the equivalent of being hit with an “Okay, boomer.” But while the slang may have changed, the ideals the foodie embodied have been absorbed into all aspects of American culture. There may be different words now, or no words at all, but the story of American food over the past 20 years is one of a speedrun of cultural importance. At this point, who isn’t a foodie?

Once upon a time, there was the gourmand, which even in 1825, lawyer and self-proclaimed gourmand Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin felt was misunderstood. “There is a perpetual confusion of gourmandism in its proper connotation with gluttony and voracity,” he writes in his seminal The Physiology of Taste. Gourmandism was not about mere excess, but about appreciation. It was “an impassioned, considered, and habitual preference for whatever pleases the taste,” he writes, a love of delicacies and an “enemy of overindulgence.”

As for who can be a gourmand, Brillat-Savarin posits, in the scientific fashion of the time, that some are chosen by nature to have a heightened sense of taste. And although anyone may be born a gourmand, just as anyone may be born blind or blond, to take advantage of that innate sense requires capital. Being rich doesn’t automatically give one good taste, but “anyone who can pile up a great deal of money easily is almost forced, willy-nilly, to be a gourmand.”

For the next centuries, things mostly stayed that way. It was the wealthy who spent on the finest wines and meats, and in the public imagination, to be a gourmand was in many ways to perform wealth and flaunt access. This was true in a lot of places, whether it was a royal Chinese banquet or through the development of Mughal cuisine, though Brillat-Savarin was speaking squarely from a European stage.

As gourmandism crossed the ocean from Brillat-Savarin in 1800s France to 20th-century America, it was often limited to fine dining and French cuisine; finding joy in the offerings of Grandma’s pot or the Automat did not earn you a culinary title. But in the later 20th century, the purviews of American gourmands were changing, as both access to fine ingredients and knowledge about their preparation became more populist. Craig Claiborne turned restaurant reviews into sites of true arts criticism, and Julia Child and James Beard insisted that the greatest food was completely achievable in your own kitchen, often using humble ingredients. Alice Waters celebrated the fruits of California, and Ruth Reichl championed places like New York Noodletown, a Chinatown spot that she described as “a bare, bright, loud restaurant where the only music was the sound of noodles being slurped at tables all around.”

The scope was widening. But “the thing that makes food both challenging and interesting as a cultural vector is that food is not a mechanically reproducible experience,” says Helen Rosner, food critic at the New Yorker. You still had to be physically in those locations, or have those ingredients in your own kitchen, for it to work. It seemed absurd for someone to care what Chez Panisse was like if they never even had a chance of going. So while new technologies had made other cultural products — music, film, television — easier and cheaper to engage with than ever, allowing new communities to form over their shared interests, food was still a more localized obsession. “If I have an opinion about a movie and I live in Los Angeles, my opinion is still relevant to somebody who lives in Toronto,” says Rosner. “If I have an opinion about bagels and I live in Queens, my opinion is barely relevant to someone who lives more than 10 blocks from my apartment.”

And yet, at the turn of the last century, two platforms developed in food culture that shifted it from an individual identity to a shared one, turning food from culture to pop culture: food television, and the internet.

Chef Hubert Keller looks skeptically at contestant Ken Lee’s pan-seared halibut. The two pieces rest against each other over a soybean puree, encircled by tomato compote and a ring of fig gastrique, like a glamorous mandala. But during Top Chef’s first-ever Quickfire Challenge, Lee has already gotten into trouble by tasting a sauce with his fingers, and arguing after being told that was unsanitary. The cast has turned against him, questioning his hubris in the face of bland fish. Later that episode, he becomes the show’s first chef asked to pack his knives and go.

Top Chef, which premiered in 2006, immersed viewers in the world of the professional kitchen. Chefs use “plate” as a verb, hand things off to the “pass,” don their “whites.” I probably didn’t even need to put those words in quotes, as you already know what they mean. They’re part of our cultural vocabulary now.

How did we get to chefs-holding-squeeze-bottles as entertainment? The 1984 Cable Communications Policy Act deregulated the industry, and by 1992, more than 60 percent of American households had a cable subscription. Food Network launched in 1993, and compared to Julia Child or Joyce Chen drawing adoring viewers on public broadcasting programs, the channel was all killer, no filler, with shows for every mood. By the early 2000s, you could geek out with Alton Brown on Good Eats, experience Italian sensuality with Molto Mario or Everyday Italian, fantasize about a richer life with Barefoot Contessa, or have fun in your busy suburban kitchen with 30 Minute Meals. Anthony Bourdain’s A Cook’s Tour gave viewers an initial taste of his particular brand of smart-alecky wonder, and there were even competition shows, like the Japanese import Iron Chef.

The premiere of 2005’s The Next Food Network Star, which later gave us Guy Fieri, baron of the big bite, was the network’s first admission that we were ready to think of food shows in terms of entertainment, not just instruction and education. But Food Network was still a food network. The mid-aughts brought the revelation that food programming didn’t have to live just there, but could be popular primetime television — when that was an actual time and not just a saying.

Then came Top Chef, inspired by the success of Bravo’s other reality competition series, Project Runway. There is no overstating Top Chef’s lasting influence on food entertainment, but off the bat it did one thing that further cemented foodieism as a bona fide subculture: Its air of professionalism gave people a vocabulary. “The real pushback from the network was but the viewers can’t taste the food,” says Lauren Zalaznick, president of Bravo at the time. But just like the experts on Project Runway could explain good draping to someone who didn’t know how to sew, Top Chef “committed to telling the story of the food in such a way that it would become attainable no matter where you were,” she says.

This gave viewers a shared language to speak about food in their own lives. Now, people who would never taste these dishes had a visual and linguistic reference for molecular gastronomy, and could speculate about Marcel Vigneron’s foams. If you didn’t know what a scallop was, you learned, as Top Chef was awash in them. Yes, you could hear Tom Colicchio critique a classic beurre blanc, but also poke, al pastor, and laksa, and now that language was yours too. And you could hear chefs speak about their own influences and inspirations, learning why exactly they thought to pair watermelon and gnocchi.

The food scene then “was more bifurcated,” says Evan Kleiman, chef and longtime host of KCRW’s Good Food. “There were super-high-end restaurants that were expensive, maybe exclusive, and for the most part represented European cuisines. And then what was called ‘ethnic food’ was often relegated to casual, family-run kind of spots.” Top Chef may have been entertainment for the upwardly mobile foodie, but in 2005, Bourdain’s No Reservations premiered on the Travel Channel, similarly emphasizing storytelling and narrative. In his hands, the best meals often didn’t even require a plate. His was a romantic appreciation of the authentic, the hole-in-the-wall, the kind of stuff that would never be served in a dining room. It set off an entire generation of (often less respectful, less considered) foodie adventurism.

“No Reservations is what got me interested in the culture of eating,” says Elazar Sontag, currently the restaurant editor at Bon Appétit. Because it was about food as culture, not as profession. But there was programming for it all. Also in 2005, Hell’s Kitchen premiered on Fox, with an amped-up recreation of a dinner service in each night’s challenge. “Hell’s Kitchen’s high-octane, insane, intense environment of a restaurant kitchen is actually what made me think, when I was maybe 12 or 13, that I want to work in restaurants,” says Sontag.

All these shows were first and foremost about gathering knowledge, whether it was what, indeed, a gastrique was, or the history of boat noodles in Thailand. It didn’t matter if you’d ever been there. The point was that you knew. “Food was becoming a different kind of cultural currency,” says Sontag. “I didn’t clock that shift happening at the time, but it’s very much continued.”

Language is meant to be spoken; knowledge is meant to be shared. Now that everyone knew there were multiple styles of ramen, there was no better place to flex about it than with a new tool: the social internet. Online, “talking about restaurants and going to restaurants became something that people could have a shared identity about,” says Rosner. “There was this perfect storm of a national explosion of gastronomic vocabulary and a platform on which everybody could show off how much they knew, learn from each other, and engage in this discovery together.” Your opinion about your corner bagel shop suddenly had a much wider relevance.

Sites like Chowhound and eGullet launched in 1997 and 2001, respectively, and became ever more popular hubs for people seeking out interesting food, and homes for seminal food writers like Jonathan Gold and Robert Sietsema. If you were in college in 2004, you might have already been on (the) Facebook; more crucially, that was the year Yelp launched, which allowed users to review local businesses. Almost immediately, it became restaurant-centric. And anyone could start a blog to document their own food opinions.

In 2005, Michelin released its first guide to an American city (New York), and a few years before, The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list declared that anyone who was anyone had better be dining at El Bulli in Spain. But while anyone online could review high-end restaurants like French Laundry and Gramercy Tavern if they wanted to, they’d likely be competing with experienced, professional reviewers. Where the foodies of the internet shined was in highlighting “ethnic food,” following in Bourdain’s worn boots to champion casual places that may not have traditionally gotten mainstream media attention.

In 2006, Zach Brooks was in his 30s, living in Manhattan, and like plenty of other office workers with disposable income, was “stuck in Midtown for lunch,” he says. So in the vein of food blogs he read like Chowhound and, yes, Eater, he began documenting his meals. “To me, lunch hour is sacred- and I’m not going to waste it in some generic overpriced ‘deli,’” he wrote on his blog, Midtown Lunch. Instead, he was dedicated to finding “gems” like the best taco trucks and halal carts in a sea of mediocrity. “There were just so many different immigrant groups, so you had access to so many different kinds of food, and I think there’s a natural curiosity,” says Brooks. Like many early food bloggers, he was white, and took an almost explorational attitude toward his mission, traipsing to the carts and counters of Midtown like points on a globe. “Like, why wouldn’t you want to try everything?”

It might sound obvious now, but the internet allowed you to find opinions and experiences outside of your immediate social circle; your coworker might not have known where to go for lunch, but some guy online knew where you could get a plate of Ecuadorian food three blocks away. And the enthusiasm with which bloggers began to share and review “lowbrow” meals created a culture in which those meals began to rise in value. “I think what came out of this time period was that it wasn’t just about the fine dining world anymore,” says chef Sam Yoo. “It was cool to go to Jackson Heights or Flushing, and find hole-in-the-wall momos.”

Because the 2008 recession made it even harder for most people to experience fine dining, food trucks and cheap eats moved closer to the center of the culinary world, such that a chef like Roy Choi could open his Kogi BBQ truck that year and be named Bon Appétit’s Best New Chef for it shortly after. This shift was also happening as social media began to be ever more convenient (the iPhone came out in 2007) and visual (the first YouTube video was uploaded in 2005; Instagram launched in 2010). All this further flattened the culinary landscape of the internet. You could now, for the first time ever, take a photo of what you were eating and upload it to the internet before you even took a bite. A $3 taco and a plate of duck at Momofuku Ko would show up the same size on an Instagram grid — and could get the same number of likes.

Ultimately, the internet fueled a great democratization of knowledge and experience around food. “Your access to information is so much easier than it was before,” says Kleiman. “You don’t need to get on a plane and fly to Switzerland to learn about some dish, or even to try and make it in your home. All you have to do is look at your phone and click on it.” Through television and the internet, you could become well-informed about Indian cuisine without ever having been to the country, and then debate with strangers which restaurant in your city has the best tandoori. You could learn how to make sushi on YouTube, or just watch one of Epic Meal Time’s videos of bacon-covered monstrosities for a laugh. There wasn’t just Top Chef, but Top Chef recap blogs and cooking parties, subreddits where fans developed parasocial relationships with the stars of the Bon Appétit test kitchen, drama in Yelp Elite circles, and food festivals. Everyone started a food blog, and one of them was turned into a movie, Julie & Julia. Everyone posted photos of their lunch.

“Once upon a time, food was about where you came from,” wrote John Lancaster for the New Yorker in 2014. “Now, for many of us, it is about where we want to go — about who we want to be, how we choose to live.” The gourmand was dead. The foodie had been born.

The greatest innovation of food in the 21st century is that diners aren’t just diners anymore, they are fans. Literally, by definition. “There are three essential components of something that is a fandom,” says Mel Stanfill, an associate professor at the University of Central Florida who studies media and fandom. “There is an emotional attachment. It’s something that’s being interpreted. And there is a community, so you’re doing that interpretation in relation to each other.” This is how Marvel characters went from being the purview of nerds to the subject of mainstream action films, how Fifty Shades of Grey went from Twilight fanfic to best-seller, and how food went from something you enjoyed to something you consumed with every part of your life, not just your mouth.

Foodieism checks all the boxes of fandom: You absorb the stories being told on TV, you iterate on recipes in your own kitchen, and you post online about what you eat to a wider community. But when any fandom explodes into wider visibility, gathering new fans and bigger communities, there are always conflicts, often stemming from newer participants bringing a critical eye to how things have been done. And with foodieism, there was plenty to criticize.

Foodie culture, at its start, was bolstered largely by white bloggers and chefs who, perhaps admirably, wanted to break out from Euronormativity and geek out over other cultures. “It was an incredible expansion of the white gaze, but it was, nevertheless, the gaze,” says Rosner. “Authenticity” was the bar to meet, a very real concern when plenty of Americans equated Mexican cuisine with Old El Paso, and every day it seemed like another white person was opening an “Asian” restaurant while at the same time disparaging Asian traditions.

People of color have been part of this conversation from the jump. But the devotion to authenticity, often by people who came from the outside to the cultures they were defending, started to feel like a trap, like we had to live up to others’ expectations instead of our own. The rise of third-culture cooking — multicultural cuisine often done by members of a diaspora who meld family tradition with wider influences — is in part a reaction to the white foodie’s feverish classifications, a way to say we will define our cuisine, or invent an entirely new one, for ourselves, thank you very much.

There was also the machoness of it all, the fawning over the badass, boys’ club, rock-star chef who gives no fucks and makes no menu substitutions. There was a fetishization of the tough world of the kitchen, the yelling and punishment and hedonism it seemed to require. In hindsight it was perhaps predictable that many of the chefs lauded as the hardest and brashest turned out to be accused of abuse, racism, or sexual misconduct in the kitchen.

There were genuine attempts to improve the industry, both the professional kitchen and the media that surrounds it. There were widespread conversations about the white gaze’s role in food culture, and how often white voices and tastes were elevated over others. Chefs spoke out more about mental health struggles and discrimination. And for a moment, it looked like there could be a reckoning in the role of the foodie, too. Should we really be fans of such fallible people? Was there a better way to engage?

When the locus of a fandom falls from grace, “people experience that something has been taken away from them, something they used to like,” says Stanfill. But instead of pulling back on the intensity of fandom, usually something else just fills the hole. The internet allows foodies to find community and engage in fandom together, but also find new people to fixate on. And as the social internet grew, everyone could become their own content creator.

“There was no plan, because back then, there was no such thing as an ‘influencer’ or ‘content creator.’ Those words didn’t exist yet,” says Mike Chau, who since 2013 has been operating his food account, @foodbabyny. Chau, who still has a full-time job, says he started and continues just for the fun of trying new things with his family around New York, with the occasional perk of an invitation to a restaurant opening. But more recently he’s noticed shifts, from the paid opportunities available for influencers to the increased opportunity for “virality,” as Instagram and TikTok algorithms can give anyone, no matter their following, their 15 minutes of fame. In Chau’s opinion, this has altered the way influencers do business (namely that they are doing business at all) by focusing on engagement rather than their own enjoyment of the food at the center of their content. “Talking to other influencers, you hear them say, I’ve got to go here, this place would do well on my page. I think that’s the main driving force,” he says.

“We live and die by our superlatives in a way that I think speaks less to the whims of food media leaders and more to the state of the internet,” says Sontag. If the initial draw of being a foodie is that being a part of this culture will enrich your life in some way, the algorithm has made that enrichment a matter of the “best” places to go. “I think that has created a significant shift in food culture, the need for everything to be a promise of a superior experience,” says Sontag.

What was once the promise that food could be a source of knowledge, culture, and joy now feels more like the pressure that every meal must be the best one, that the risk of trying something unvetted — once the whole point — is too great. “You have this exploration, and then these loud and charismatic people declare that actually we found everything, and these are the best, you can stop looking,” says Rosner. The world of fandom whittled down to a checklist.

“You have to try the mouthfeel of the mignonette,” Tyler gushes at his date, Margot. He won’t stop saying things like this. It’s awful. He cries over scallops and scolds Margot for smoking, which he says will ruin her palate. You want him to die, which, luckily, he does.

The Menu is a movie about a chef so fed up with simpering, obsessive foodies like Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) that he’s willing to destroy himself and everything he’s ever created just to get back at them for ruining his profession. As part of this punishment, chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) invites Tyler into the kitchen, insisting that if he’s so knowledgeable, why doesn’t he cook dinner himself? Tyler fumbles, asking for ingredients and equipment he does not know how to wield. “Shallots for the great foodie!” mocks Slowik, before tasting Tyler’s creation and spitting it out. “You are why the mystery has been drained from our art.”

Who would wanna be like that guy? Tyler’s supposed superior knowledge and appreciation of food doesn’t make him a great critic or thinker. It just makes him annoying, and crucially, isolates him from any community he could seek through it. (He spends half the meal sneering at other diners for being unworthy — the narcissism of small differences.) He doesn’t want to connect over food, he wants to brag. This is where “foodie” has landed. At worst, it’s an insult that marks you as a melodramatic know-it-all who turns every meal into a lesson.

It’s also plain outdated. To call anyone a “foodie” with any sincerity in 2025 is like asking a “metrosexual” about the “truthiness” of his “blog.” You’d sound ridiculous. That’s because there’s no real need anymore to name the idea that one should be stimulated by and curious about food, and no point in making it your entire personality. Because in a fifth of the time it took, say, film, to achieve the same results, being “into” food went from niche interest to a fandom to mass culture. This is just what we do now. “Now when people say that they’re a foodie, I’m like, yeah, you, me, and my uncle,” says Sontag.

Maybe it’s easy to think we’ve grown beyond whoever we were in 2009, drinking bacon-washed cocktails out of mason jars and demanding to know which farm exactly the pig came from. But the undercurrent of foodieism — food as culture, worthy of active engagement — thrives, even if the title has died. Enough people are familiar with the inner workings of the brigade system such that movies like Ratatouille and The Menu, or a TV show like The Bear, can be not just legible, but successes. There’s Thai curry sauce at the Buffalo Wild Wings. People magazine wrote an article about “tomato girls.”

Even so, I find myself nostalgic for the era when “foodie” was a badge of honor, as every restaurant opening seems to be a steakhouse, as Gen Z opts for suburban chains like Chili’s over anything new and independent, and as tariffs threaten access to spices and other global ingredients, especially from non-European origins. I get the desire for the safety of the known, especially when even the most mediocre meal can set you back in rent payments. But I miss when the coolest thing you could do was geek out over where your food came from, who was making it, and what made it special. “A term like foodie was an indicator that you put in some level of legwork,” says Sontag.

But just because that legwork is now part of the cultural fabric, and just because it’s easier to do, doesn’t mean it’s not still work. You can watch a million TikToks, but to engage, you still need to go to the hot bakery. You still need to actually make the ramen you saw on YouTube. You still need to get the reservation, and then your taste buds have to wrap themselves around a chutney pizza made by a second-generation chef and open themselves up to what is happening. To paraphrase a modern poet, no one else can taste it for you. Hell, you still need to watch the TikToks. There is no outsourcing this. And as the past 20 years have cemented, even if we could, few would want to. We’re foodies through and through. Even if we don’t want to say it.

Julia Dufossé is an Austin-based illustrator specializing in surreal and atmospheric illustrations.