I'm sorry, but there are always more. As soon as I hit save on my Army of Foodies list, I came up with another five.
While these Amuse Douchers aren't always as prominent in everyday foodie structure, they are there. Thankfully, most of them will move on in about three months to whatever the next trend is, since they came to Foodiedom after ReadyMade went defunct and the publisher started sending Better Homes and Gardens in its place. This is what happens when you no longer get photo instructions of a cute girl in skinny jeans demonstrating how to turn abandoned bikes into hanging lamps or a guy with a beard upcycling any objects with a bottom into a portable barbecue.
Shhhh, shhhh. It's almost over.
Probably.
Wine Swisher Thank heavens you are here to save me from drinking the wrong wine with the right food, a humiliating decision that will haunt me for years to come. I know, I know, it's on par with picking which one of your children shall live, but, man, sit down and take your spittoon with you. Seriously. I know enough to drink fruit punch with McDonald's and go with limeade at Chick-Fil-A, so I'm good. Besides, I'd rather pluck chin hairs than listen to you say, "Do you get that? Are you getting that? The undertones are so primitive, so dirty, it's like drinking Earth" one more time. Just go home and make your own wine labels. It's Three Buck Chuck under there, because if it was something better, you'd never cover it up, plus you haven't figured out how to make your own corks yet. I'm sure that will be covered on the "Fraudulent Vintner" in an upcoming blog entry.
Facebook Foodie Their Facebook wall is entirely devoted to nothing but food pictures and what they have eaten for three meals a day -- and sometimes snacks, if they've happened upon a midday food fair or brought banana-mallow cupcakes with lemon basil frosting in for a co-worker's birthday. Not because they like the co-worker. They actually hate the co-worker but are seizing the opportunity to impress everyone at the bodily injury claims department with the fact that when they talk about tweaking convention in the art of pastry, they know what they're talking about. (Hint to FF: If you will simply show, say, every 10th picture, a person in it aside from yourself, so many sins will be forgiven. Truly.)
But, really, the honest truth is that people care as much about your morel mushroom, saffron and farmer's cheese omelet as they do about, well, you. And I admit: I got blue eggs once from a farmers market and took a picture of them. I did. But one of them had some weird pox-like calcium deposit on it, so there's your hook. Tag it as "Oddities." I've taken pictures of my pot pies, too, but only because I estimated them to rise in excess of 1,200 calories apiece. Tag it as "Magnificent."
Also note: Posting pictures of half-eaten food is akin to looking at crime scene photos of a mutilated corpse. It stuns the appetite into hours-long hibernation. Especially olive pits, even if the pit bowl is something ancient you pulled from the ground in rural Italy. I have consulted experts, and I believe it's safe to say the Facebook Foodie is the mosquito bite on the leg of life. One further note: Everyone wants to defriend you but keeps you because of the irritation quotient, which can, in a group, be translated into low-grade entertainment, or because they work with you and don't want to attend a mediation session in HR.
The Shitty Food Blogger I know your mom and girlfriend say it's cool, but your mom still feels guilty about drinking heavily before she knew for sure that she was pregnant with you, and your girlfriend makes dresses from used sheets she buys at Goodwill. So, well, there you go.
To make it official, you got the name and URL of Your Shitty Food Blog printed on a T-shirt from Zazzle but are still waiting for a fan to buy one. Not yet, not yet. But you know it will happen. Yes, I realize I am the Destroyer of Dreams, but if there's one thing that people possibly could care less about than your pictures of what you ate today, it's your waxing and waning in accompanying long-winded copy in a bite-by-bite first-person creative nonfiction narrative.
Slap yourself once for each time you type the word "seductive," pinch yourself for every time you mention the word "slather," and kindly ram a fork into your belly whenever "commingled" is used. The presence of the word "defiant" is enough to make villagers tear you limb from limb, like Montgomery Clift in Suddenly Last Summer, and I, for one, would provide an alibi for each and every one of them. If we buy the T-shirt, can the dream reach its full life cycle? Can this madness end? The Journey Man Seriously. If you go to Cambodia to discover the cuisine, all I really want to know about is what kind of parasite you got, what part of your body it came out of, and what are the chances of me getting it in the United States. Because I am not going to Cambodia.
I don't care about the herbs, the oils, and the wafting scents (although I have to admit I am frightfully interested in the food poisoning you got every single time you went back to the same food stall that had no refrigeration method and ate "fish fresh from the river" three times). P.S.: I wasn't in the Peace Corps, but even I know there are no fresh rivers in Cambodia, and if you want to eat fish that someone caught in a toilet, expect to take to your bed for a while after you vomit in public. I, frankly, wouldn't eat anything in a country that is still finding corpses in regular places unless I had an autoclave and plenty of batteries in my possession. But, you know. There are certain states whose sewer systems are suspect, too: Mississippi. Alabama. Michigan. Arizona.
The Shoplifter Plucking a recipe card from your Nana's file isn't really the same thing as copying a recipe from the New York Times food section and changing the salt measurement by an eighth of a teaspoon. Then putting it on your blog. With the word "adapted from" somewhere at the bottom in six-point type. Funny how the go-to recipe from my favorite food blogger, upon comparison, was exactly the same as the recipe my neighbor favored from Jim Lahey of Sullivan Street Bakery. And I think Lahey probably created his first. So I started paying attention to my favorite blogger and discovered that almost all her posts were someone else's recipes with a slight adaptation. That's called stealing, but does it matter? Her book is about to hit the shelves big. I'm hoping Jim Lahey is paying attention.
