5 Words to Eliminate from Our Food Vocabulary
korean braised tinned pacific saury w/onions & daikon (꽁치조림 or kong chi jo rim) over a bed of cabbage & kale—a dish that my grandmother makes and some might call “funky” or “fishy”
I’ve realized that the majority of my food knowledge origins from passive consumption. I scroll through my feed. I watch recipe walkthroughs and cooking shows. I listen to culinary podcasts on a neighborhood power walk. I dog-ear e-cookbook pages. As I consume, terminology diffuses from channels of high to low concentration (e.g., Samin Nostrat’s Homecooking to my two brain cells). So that over the past six months, I’ve noticed my food vocabulary take off. I’ve felt like a toddler whose verbal repertoire explodes from 100s to 1000s words in months. I’ve picked up alliums, bannetons, and choux into my daily verbiage—a new set of ABC’s.
But as I’ve immersed myself in the food world and its language, I’ve also started to identify the words that have become trite, the words that exist as colonial remnants, and the words that scream privilege. My food age perhaps is maturing further, catching up to my human years: from toddling young child to embittered young adult.
(Tip: One calculates food age just as one would calculate the minimum age that society has deemed acceptable to date: half one’s age plus seven. For example, your wildly attractive T.A. is 26. 26/2 + 7= 20. Wide-eyed, freshman year Alex was two years too young to make moves on her stuttering, spectacled instructor. Ah, her heart still pines.)
I’m 22 in human years. So, in the food world, I’m 18, starting to reflect on my channels of consumption, indict the ones I once took comfort in, and forge my own. As I mark out my path, I’m holding myself accountable not to use these five phrases/words:
1) “These grain-free, dairy-free blueberry muffins were so delicious that the dozen were all whisked away from my granite countertops in less than a few hours!”
OK, Karen. We get it. Your muffins were so delicious that your 2.5 children and husband could not stop themselves from eating all 12. But I have two rebuttals: 1) What qualifications do your children and husband have to judge your food? Oh, I’m sure your toddlers (who chew on thumbs and drool at the sight of blankets) are supertasters and your husband (dressed in red flannel and khakis) is a James Beard award-winning cookbook author. 2) Do not all baked goods (unless they are actually inedible) leave our counter space within hours? Unless your family has some saintly self-control, I’ve always found that my family and friends will indulge in any baked good that has just emerged from the oven. Trust me: I’ve failed a lot of recipes, yet my grandmother is eager to try them regardless.
I’m not attacking Karen, her family, or their intergenerational wealth. I’m more concerned that we’ve abandoned descriptors of flavors and textures as measures of a good recipe and exchanged them instead for the hours it took for food to disappear off the table.
2) “funk”
Miso, kimchi, sauerkraut, kefir, tempeh. Most likely, you’ve read or heard funk describe fermented foods. Granted, fermented foods are hard-to-describe, especially when the foods origin from a cuisine that perhaps didn’t frequent our childhood dinners. But to assign the word “funk” as a panacea adjective to fermented foods’ indescribable mouthfeel is a cop-out. Moreover, to label them as funky is to estrange them as “other” and alienate the people who grew up with the foods in their household. Before reading B*n App*t*t or Al*s*n R*m*n’s Nothing Fancy (in which, I kid you not, she describes kimchi as a “fermented jar of funk”), I would have never described kimchi as ~funky~.
Kimchi is red-peppery, salty, and sour to a fault but still retains its tautly vegetal texture. Let’s challenge our creative muscles and forget “funk.” After all, you wouldn’t ever describe a cured meat or cultured butter as funky. One would write that they have a certain je ne sais quoi.
3) “cottage core”
Every other week, I type into Airbnb, “tiny house in Cotswold” or “cottage in Croatia.” Don’t get me wrong, I fantasize over a 800 sq-ft brick-laden home nestled in rolling greens. But I saw an Instagram post the other month that framed “cottage core” as an “underlying colonialist fantasy that romanticizes ‘owning’ stolen land & recycles manifest destiny.” This post really made me rethink my relationship with my romantic ideals of escaping to the countryside and forgetting urban society. So, you’ll notice that in my most recent video I avoid the using the word “cottage core,” and instead I’ve edited my dreams—instead to invest in building a collective, resource-stable village.
4) “love”
We love a lot of things. But I wouldn’t equate love for my grandma to my love for peanut butter on toast. Again, like “funk,” “love” becomes a cop-out of a description. Instead, let’s narrow down our attachment to a certain food: What does this food really make us feel? What memories does it return? What memories does it create? My grandma brings me the familiarity of cultural values while a staple meal brings me a reminder of joyful simplicity.
5) “healthy”
Healthy has become such an expansive word that it is essentially meaningless now. While every fad diet promises a more healthy lifestyle, one villainizes carbs, and the other touts it. Different diets preach different modes of health. I don’t blame fad diets for blurring health, but I believe health’s ambiguity origins from its original definition. Health is a state of normalcy and satisfaction absent of disease. Healthy then describes a variety of lifestyles from a variety of cultures—any meal or any lifestyle that allows you to remain content, or absent of disease. Let “healthy” join “love” and “funk”—a list of words too vague, words that fail to grasp on specific moments. I’m challenging us to find language that allows us to share exactly how we feel with others. And that’s the prose I’m challenging myself to here on this blog.
If you do find any of these words in any blog or IG post, please call me out. DM me, and I will bake you some sourdough in return.