I remember the day I knew I’d have to move out of the Bay Area.
I moved there after finishing a master’s program at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy, lured by the prospect of a foodie paradise. I’d grown up in California, though some 500 miles south, and liked the idea of being among the avocado and pomegranate trees again—not to mention having easy access to so many world cuisines after a year of Italian culinary parochialism.
After a study program that encompassed weeklong trips to Provence and morning beer tastings (all situated in a rich and intriguing theoretical context), I expected some culture shock upon reentry. And I certainly found it. Instead of keeping students’ hours and getting around by biking through the countryside, I worked 8-5 with an hourlong bus ride in each direction. Though I was working at a nonprofit devoted to sustainable food systems, office culture favored spending lunch “breaks” at our desks sipping $12 green smoothies and scrolling through Instagram over going outside and eating food that required actual chewing. And rather than living in a sunny apartment with a balcony overlooking a sweet piazza, I spent a truly nauseating monthly sum to live in a mold-infested, dark apartment with a rotating cast of temporary roommates and an upstairs neighbor who blasted four songs on repeat at such a high volume that the neighbors two buildings down kept calling the cops.
Demoralizing as these new conditions were, they didn’t push me over the edge. So what did?
One day, at a hip movie theater in Oakland that sold beer and homemade food, I was in line behind a guy holding a hot pizza.
“That smells good,” said a thirtysomething white lady in front of him.
“Right?” he responded with happy anticipation.
“Too bad I don’t eat that stuff anymore,” she said.
He nodded sympathetically. “Is it the cheese?”
She looked down her nose. “Sure, the cheese. And the wheat.”
In that moment, all the worst aspects of foodie culture congealed in front of me like so much, well, melted cheese. Perhaps you learned in kindergarten that you shouldn’t “yuck my yum”—spoil my enjoyment of something just because you don’t like it yourself?
The German term for this is jemandem auf die Kekse gehen—to step on someone’s cookies. It’s rude, of course, and it’s also pointless.
But for those who’ve jumped off the deep end of contemporary foodie culture, Bay Area style, every dish and ingredient is forced through the relentless crucible of wellness and its cousin, personal productivity, until folks are not only refusing to eat cookies but stepping all over everyone else’s. Crunch, crunch, crunch.
I stayed in California for a few more months, but my path was clear. I live now in the Northeast, which has its share of foodie culture but where the dial is turned down a bit. Admittedly, there are no pomegranates at the farmers market now, but in general, people are willing to let strangers enjoy hot pizza in peace.
Or so I thought. Until I was catching up with a colleague one Friday afternoon recently. We were describing our respective days, and I said that I’d had a rough morning—dead battery in the car, rushed daycare dropoff—but then took a walk after lunch to get a still-warm chocolate chip cookie, so things were looking up.
“A cookie?” she said, looking down her nose. “Well, I hope you don’t have a sugar crash coming.”
Crunch, crunch, crunch.
