“When did you become such an adventurous eater?” 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.
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