On ‘mermaid toast’ and other food that’s too pretty to eat
Unicorn latte. Rainbow bagels. Cloud eggs. Mermaid toast. What’s going on?
This is food you eat, but mostly with your eyes. It’s more about presentation than taste.
Mermaid toast, for example, is toast spread with cream cheese that has streaks of blue-green colour. Sometimes the toast is topped with sprinkles of gold leaf.
It’s far too pretty to take a bite.
You can make unicorn toast as well, which is often topped with sprinkles against a rainbow of pastel colours like pink, yellow, purple and green in the cream cheese. Some food stylists use natural ingredients like powdered beetroot and crushed dried blueberries, instead of artificial colouring, to tint the topping.
The unicorn, that mythical beast which has brought a sense of wonder to storytelling for centuries, is now a word that describes a food style.
Starbucks recently introduced a creamy “unicorn frappuccino” drink that was all pink and purple with mango undertones. Like a magic potion, the taste changed as you kept stirring.
That was preceded by a drink invented last summer at a Toronto bakery. It was a latte, mixed with pink and blue cotton candy and garnished with a miniature whoopie pie. Customers named it the “unicorn latte.”
There’s more. Brightly coloured rainbow bagels are now available in New York City, where the plump, shiny boiled-then-baked creations once came only in various hues of white or brown.
And how about some “cloud eggs” with that toasted rainbow? Some people are separating the yolks and whites and whipping the whites with cheese, ham and other flavourings.
The airy mixture is then spooned into round blobs on baking sheets and baked for a few minutes before an egg yolk is returned to the middle of each blob and back into the oven. The result is an egg with a puffed-up white that looks like a cloud, with the golden yolk at the centre.
It’s a lot of trouble, just for eggs, toast and coffee.
But it means something. The food we eat often speaks volumes about our aspirations and emotions, as well as our wallets and our science.
Do some of us have too much time on our hands? Are we so wealthy and effete that the only food that tempts us must now be so artfully prepared? Or is it something else?
I keep thinking of that Australian real estate mogul who was criticized for saying young adults
would be better able to buy a home if they stopped buying so much avocado on toast.
“I’m appalled,” said Kate Fraser, 30, a local student who earns minimum wage and can’t even think about home ownership for another decade. She also points out that avocado on toast is nutritious.
At one Waterloo coffee shop, two pieces of toast with avocado costs $4.80.
Suppose you were buying that five days a week, but stopped in order to save money for a down payment on a $270,000 entry-level condo.
If you made breakfast at home instead for half the cost, it would still take you 24 years to save up for the $15,000 down payment plus closing costs.
Soaring home prices have blocked many millennials from enjoying the middle-class rites of passage of home ownership and starting a family. They’re trapped, instead, in a perpetual state of young adulthood. What’s left but small luxuries like beautiful pictures of food on Instagram?