Eatymology: The Dictionary of Modern Gastronomy

by Josh Friedland

Carnism was coined by Melanie Joy, PhD, a social psychologist and author of Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows.

The first cat café to open in the United States, the Cat Town Café in Oakland, California, launched in 2014.

While the turducken, a twentieth-century creation consisting of a chicken stuffed inside a duck stuffed inside a turkey, may be the most popular example of the technique,

COF·FEE NAME (noun): An alias given when ordering a coffee drink when one’s real name is too difficult for the barista to pronounce and/or transcribe on a coffee cup.

The website Starbucksspelling.tumblr.com collects photos of coffee cups emblazoned with the misspelled names that prompt so many customers to invent a coffee name.

He blamed the Internet and the rise of social media for the emergence of this new class of foodie with an unending appetite for public display of food fanaticism: “We see it in the meticulous record-keeping of eating habits on personal blogs. The ubiquitous Facebook updates and tweets about subscribers’ most recent meals. (Surely you also have those five or so friends whose feeds are 90 percent food-consumption-related?) The requisite iPhone pic before a certain kind of diner—let’s call him a foodiot—ravages his plate.”

“Behind every foodie, there is probably a foodiot. We all have our own inner foodiots. You just have to stamp them down.”

Jeff Volek, a professor in the Department of Human Sciences at Ohio State University in Columbus and an advocate of high-fat diets, argues that humans evolved to eat fat over carbohydrates: “Early humans, the hunter-gatherers, who were quite physically active, primarily ate fat. It’s been the main fuel for active humans far longer than carbohydrates have been.” To gain the benefits of fat as a fuel for better sports performance, Volek recommends a diet close to 85 percent fat and almost no carbohydrates. Such a diet leads to a condition called ketosis, where the body creates molecules called ketones that will be burned as fuel when the blood lacks sugar.

2011 study by researchers at Yale University concluded that “foods, particularly hyperpalatable ones, demonstrate similarities with addictive drugs.” Moreover, a 2013 study at Connecticut College found that Oreo cookies were more addictive to lab rats than cocaine. The researchers found that Oreos activated more neurons in the nucleus accumbens (the brain’s “pleasure center”) than drugs.

ICE CHEF (noun): A bar worker whose responsibility is to oversee the freezing and cutting of numerous types and shapes of ice tailored for use in specific cocktails.

LA·ZY FOODS (noun): Precut vegetables and other semiprepared foods sold as culinary shortcuts for harried home cooks.

“These ready-prepared ingredients have produced lazy cooks—they think they don’t have the time to make real food. But cooking is a bit of ritual, it’s a process to start from the beginning with ingredients you prepare yourself. Preparation is an important part of cooking. You get a feel for what you are making. And food tastes better when it’s made from scratch.”

MOM WINES (noun): Wines that appeal to busy mothers for their ready availability, familiarity, and modest prices.

PREG·OREX·IA (noun): Eating disorder behaviors experienced by women while pregnant such as extreme dieting, obsessive exercise, and bingeing and purging.

Coined by Mark Bitterman, author of Salted: A Manifesto on the World’s Most Essential Mineral, with Recipes and owner of the Meadow, a gourmet shop in Portland, Oregon, that specializes in salt, selmelier is a mash-up of sel, the French word for salt, and sommelier, a wine steward.

“snackification of everything,” from the ubiquity of snack-size foods to texting to bite-sized online journalism. “We gravitate toward snacks because they’re fast, easy, and require little commitment,” wrote Akst. “They also taste good. Online, snackable items are easily digested by grazing readers, and just as easily shared—the way we once shared meals. In keeping with our demand for flexibility and immediate gratification, snacks are always available, require little investment, and can be consumed without the time and consideration that used to go into more primitive forms of nourishment, such as sitdown dinners or books.”

The researchers collected data on how the placement of certain items in school cafeterias affected food choices by students. They found that sweet treats were less popular on days when bananas and green beans were served in the cafeteria line but more popular on days when celery, applesauce, and fruit cocktail were available. For example, the presence of bananas made ice cream 11 to 16 percent less popular, and the presence of fruit cocktail made Little Debbie snacks 7 to 9 percent more popular.

TWEC·I·PES (noun): Extremely abbreviated recipes, published via Twitter, that provide cooking instructions in no more than 140 characters.

“It may not be the case, as an editor told me, that Twitter is the first great recipe innovation in 200 years. But it doesn’t have to be. Unpacking tweets for an hour or so in the kitchen is surprisingly challenging. It forces the mind to think harder, to fill gaps, to innovate and improvise. It re-introduces risk and discovery to cooking, which puts you only a short distance from delight.”

The opposite of ugly fruit can be found at the Tokyo shop Sembikiya, which specializes in selling the most flawless, picture-perfect fruits—displayed like high-end jewelry—as gifts. There, you can find twenty-five-dollar apples, strawberries that fetch eighty-three dollars per dozen, and melons that cost more than one hundred dollars apiece.

“Let’s start with coffee. Well, you might say, I like my coffee strong. There’s barely any water in there at all. Maybe… But what if I told you that in your tiny espresso there is 140 litres of water. Yes—140 litres. You might think I was slightly deranged. But that is the virtual water hidden in the coffee. That is the amount of water used in growing, producing, packaging, and shipping the beans that make the coffee.”

WALK·AWAYS (noun): Supermarket customers who leave without completing their purchases due to frustration with checkout lines.