‘Foodies’ don’t exist
By: María Silvia Aguirre
Tags: Foodie, Food Writing, Food, Opinion

Let’s talk about “foodies.” To whom exactly are we referring to when we say “foodie”?

The word is all over Instagram. It’s all over the captions of perfect burger pictures. It’s on featured ads. People say it often, and many identify themselves with it and include it in their profile bios along with a food emoji.

2020 started and there are still people believing that in order to be a foodie, they should meet certain standards and requirements.

I don’t believe there is such a thing as a foodie. The definition of the word has become vague and that is a consequence of its overuse. It has lost its meaning and value. It has lost all the flavor.

As The Washington Post notes, the term first appeared in a 1980 New York magazine column by American restaurant critic Gael Greene, but it took a while for the term to catch on. It later got very popular when “The Official Foodie Handbook,” written by journalists Ann Barr and Paul Levy, was published in 1984 and it described a foodie as “a person who is very, very, very interested in food.”

But really, what does it mean to be “very, very, very interested in food?” How do you measure interest?

The first time I heard the term was at the beginning of my career back in 2017. I was working in advertising as a copywriter back in Guayaquil, Ecuador. I clearly remember a very special — and delicious — project. A credit card company wanted its cardholders to go out to eat more. That’s right: encourage them to swipe their cards more often in restaurants.

As Marketing 101 states, we first identified our proper client. It had to be the so-called foodies.

As my team and I began developing strategies, we discovered the appealing world of foodies. Later, we realized that none of us — me, the creative director or the client — knew what a foodie was. Market research could not give us an answer either.

I used to consider myself one of them. I thought if I was interested in food. I write about food, that makes me a foodie, doesn’t it?

It wasn’t until I started hearing comments like “How can you call yourself a foodie if you have a healthy lifestyle?” that I started asking more questions. Are people relating being a foodie to gluttony? I wondered.

Do these selected groups of people have unique and unstoppable stomachs? Are they really a selected group of people? Who decides who is a foodie?

With such a vague meaning, I realized that the word foodie was just a well-crafted marketing word that sounds great on Instagram but lacks clarity. It looks great on recipe newsletters and in advertising pitches, but it’s exactly that: a marketing weapon that few have stopped to think what it means.

Going through this reflection once made me re-think what type of stories I want to tell around food (Spoiler alert: I left copywriting and ended up in journalism school).

It’s because of how advertising has attributed the word to the habit of eating lots of food and sometimes having expensive experiences, opinions like this pop up in The Independent:

… this term conjures up the image of the most insufferable person. They turn their nose up at anything that isn’t superlative. They demand the best coffee, the highest quality meat, and to know exactly where their food is procured from.

The author, lifestyle writer Kashmira Gander, relates the word to pretentious and self-centered people. She is worried that people who call themselves foodies in the U.K. don’t know that they are living in a place “where millions of people can’t identify vegetables, and where people on tight budgets have little choice but to eat poor quality food.”

If we really are so interested in food, we should be more conscious about the relationship we have with it.

In Forbes site, environmental writer Daphne Ewing-Chow wrote a list of resolutions “to be a foodie in 2020.” In this, she points out that “the new foodie thinks critically about the food that they eat.”

I agreed with Ewing-Chow when she said that eating should be more than just eating, but actually caring about where the food in our plate is coming from. People eat to satisfy their body, mind, and conscience. But, I don't agree with her in calling those people foodies. They are just humans that care.

American food journalist Mark Bittman once wrote in The New York Times that he wished there was a “stronger, less demeaning-sounding word than ‘foodie’ for someone who cares about good food.” Bittman said that being interested in food, like he is, is also about questioning the food system that surrounds us. Food is about the environment, animal exploitation and health. It’s more than what marketing or the internet tells us.

Sadly, there are more words in the food world that have lost their meaning through marketing efforts, like “guilt-free” or “sustainable,” according to what writer and critic Juan Vidal points out The Daily Beast. He also agrees that foodie has become overused, reason the Lake Superior State University in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, included it in their 2015 annual List of Banished Words.

There even was a Lake Superior State University student, Steve Szilagyi, who thought like me: “ … Sounds like ‘foodie’ is a synonym for everybody. Foodies around the world agree, let’s banish this term.”

I prefer not to catalog people and their relationship with food. The one simple conclusion is: everyone needs food to survive and everyone enjoys food in a different way. Foodies don’t exist, they are just humans … and all humans eat.