Young Foodies More Exhibitionist, Less Highbrow

Young people immersed in food culture today are as likely to praise a fish taco from a food truck as filet mignon from a four-star restaurant.

They didn’t read Gourmet magazine - the longtime bible of highbrow culinary taste stopped printing last year. But they do follow blogs and websites that feature everything from straight recipes to goofy fusions to bite-by-bite dispatches about last night’s dinner. And many young connoisseurs are kitchen amateurs.

“The twentysomethings right now are probably one of the most educated food generations ever. And by that I mean they can talk to you about foie gras or cooking sous vide or the flavor profile of a Bordeaux,” said Cheryl Brown, editorial director of the popular website Slashfood.

“But what they can’t do is truss a chicken or cook a pot roast. So there’s this funny balance of having an amazing breadth of food knowledge but not having the kitchen basics to back it up,” she said.

Try to imagine a young Julia Child showing viewers how to make awesome 2-minute sashimi burgers or Robert Parker blogging about Red Bull and reisling for an idea of how attitudes have changed. Whether this amounts to a refreshing democratization of hoity-toity food culture or an invasion of “foodiots” depends on your point of view.

But it’s clear that Internet culture, with its tendency to knock down old-guard authority, continues to be the driving force. Source: Kansas City.com