Saturday read

‘Ilike being an Uber driver because it means I can drive anywhere I want to get lunch,” my Uber driver explains after recounting a dish of Taiwanese popcorn chicken slathered in sweet and spicy sauce and served in a paper bag in a Los Angeles parking lot.

I write down the name of the food truck serving the popcorn chicken before telling him about a recent life-altering plate of blue corn tortillas. He mentions the best spot in Los Angeles for Korean Barbecue. I recall a tasting menu full of celery ribbons and avocado confit by French chef Ludo Lefebvre.

And just like that, food is a tennis ball we’re bouncing between each other, and I refuse to be the one to drop it first. When he deposits me at my location, the air in the car freezes as we watch the tennis ball roll on the floor. Instead of exchanging numbers, we swap Instagram handles. Now we can follow each other’s respective food adventures until the end of time.

Of course we are not the first people to bond over a shared love of putting flavours to taste buds. Before the explosion of the modern foodie, gourmands made pilgrimages to La Pyramide in France in the 1960s, and to Chez Panisse in California in the 1980s. Yet the degree to which people my age, otherwise known as Millennials, obsess over gastronomy has reached a critical peak.

Not only have we birthed food trucks and food porn, we have created more depraved food trends in our few years on this earth than most other generations care to know in a lifetime. If you were born between the 1980s and early 1990s, chances are that food makes up a good chunk of what you talk about, think about, share online and spend what can only be described as “too much” money on.

We love eating so much that the personality trait is being used as an insult against us. The reason we can’t afford houses is no longer because we are too lazy or entitled to find proper jobs. (Nor is it because housing prices have risen much higher and faster than wages.) Millennials can’t afford property because we like avocado toast and coffee too much. Specifically, as Australian property mogul Tim Gurner told 60 Minutes, $19 slices of avocado toast and four coffees at $4 each.

Attributing an entire generation’s financial problems to a penchant for avocado toast reads, at first, like an incendiary argument with the specific purpose of garnering hate clicks. It’s so reductive that it seems barely

Our bodies were nourished by a diet of prepackaged microwave meals heated in melting plastic, Lunchables, anemic iceberg lettuce, Five Alive juice boxes and Healthy Choice pudding cups. Raw ramen noodles sprinkled with MSG were an after-school snack or a forbidden treat, depending on how strict your parents were. The gospel of nutrition at the time was low fat. Allegedly healthy foods were sanctified by a promising red and white Health Check logo — a symbol that lives on in a quiet corner of our minds as an anthropological culinary fossil of the early aughts.

As we grew up, we noticed conventional North American diets were not only boring, but they didn’t work. New research suggested promising alternative nutritional wisdom: there was good fat and bad fat, ancient grains were full of protein and fiber, and yogurt and kimchi had health-enhancing substances called probiotics. The local food movement pushed farmer’s markets and Whole Foods into the mainstream as we searched for fresh, non-anemic produce and hormone-free meat. Soon it wasn’t a question of whether or not we should spend money on food, but how much money we should spend.

Meanwhile, the internet was permanently changing how we interacted with our surroundings. It coddled preteens concerned with feeding their Neopets into teenagers who sent illicit emojis to their crushes on MSN Messenger on the family computer. Without realizing it, we sacrificed the development of critical social skills for the reward of communicating without the awkward blushing and burping of real life. The internet broke our still developing brains and taught us new online social cues at the cost of real life social skills. We learned that entire relationships can be built off handmade heart emoticons and a mutual interest in Blink-182.

Even if we weren’t aware of it, choosing what to have for lunch gave us agency by offering an opportunity for concrete awareness and control. Food became a tangible form to return to after an increasing amount of our lives was being experienced through a screen.

Today it remains one of the only mediums that cannot be replaced by a digital replica. It doesn’t matter how great virtual reality technology gets, it has yet to come close to satisfying the feeling of sinking your teeth into a juicy hamburger with crunchy pickles and extra cheese.

Food tethers us to reality while simultaneously allowing us to escape from it.

In the Netflix series Master of None, Dev, played by Aziz Ansari, is well aware of the power