Don’t Call Me a Foodie.
Foodies consume to be consumed. They eat to be seen.
I sat on his bed, and he called me a foodie. My shoulders reflexively crept up to my ears, and my chin checked back into my neck. I told him, “No. Don’t ever call me a foodie.”
The new-age term “foodie” gives me nightmarish visions. I get visions of phones eating first over crunchy cornflake french toast and overly saturated Instagram posts enticing me to try rainbow-colored bagels. Foodies consume to be consumed. They eat to be seen.
I don’t mean to put on “holier than thou” airs because I’ve been guilty of this behavior too. I’ve spent hours on Yelp researching cafes with outlets and snapped pictures at Sqirl and Republique. When I first started to eat out with friends in high school or go out for drinks in college, I remember snapping pictures because of the experience’s adultish novelty.
But as dining out became normal, social human adult behaviors, the original thrill has grown stale. I’ve divested from these behaviors that origin from publicity’s sake. Because rather than some adultish life achievement, dining out became a means to connect and reconnect with friends over a meal. I now treat my camera roll as a journal of experiences. I might pull my phone out to take pictures, but it is to document the food as tangibles that remind me of temporal conversations and space. I’ve started to romanticize the feeling of being traceless and holding memories for myself.
These moments now most often never get aired. But if I now do share publicly, it’s truly a transcendental yolk break or Levain cookie pull. I’m not snapping food as my own paparazzi—telling everyone who I’m with and what and where I’m eating—but I’m sharing dining experiences as a conduit for its physical sensuality. I want others to relish in the same feelings I feel as liquid gold oozes out of a porcelain orb or as chocolate capsules break and stretch.
I’ll scroll back through my camera roll so that I too am transported to a sensuous, past life. Especially in the past nine months in quarantine, my camera roll has become an archive not only of a past life but also of a foreign one. In the current Covid-19 climate, I personally cannot comprehend dining out. Today, I can neither justify any air travel. So, as my thumbs swipe listlessly from bottom to top, I’ve found evidence of alien life—autonomous and intelligent.
She indulges in a turmeric tea cake and latte, attempting to signal to fellow cafe-goers that she has time to read midday for pleasure. It’s actually for class. She finds the only vegan joint in a city-centre with a single-runway airport: it’s a laughable portion of fries and a burger with an off-putting, off-colored bacon alternative. She orders a lox platter…not on her first trip to the City but on her first trip to the South. She tells herself that it’s decent until two months later she devours her first NYC lox and scallion cream cheese bagel. She inhales a tofu bun bowl alongside Dorian Gray, her only companion, and realizes it’s Valentine’s Day.
Don’t worry, this extraterrestrial exhibits social behaviors too. On February 15th, she manifests a coffee date with her T.A. over a back-and-forth 5 a.m. email thread. She’s had practice sending cold messages now in a new city alone. A month prior, she asked cooler-than-cool friend-of-a-friend, someone with whom she desperately wants to befriend: two newcomers’s brunch plans turn into dinner that same day as well.
While I don’t recognize this girl in my camera roll, I can confirm that she is not a foodie. Foodies consume to be consumed by some voyeuristic gaze. She consumes to be consumed by her senses and memories. I understand foodie’s connotation varies based on digital consumption and generational slang. But to me, eating out is not an opportunistic means—using food quickly to publicize my life—but a commensalist one. Eating out gives me an occasion to immortalize memories, ones that I can look back to when life feels so out of touch.
But what does foodie mean to you? I would love to know here.
