I picked up some hot cross buns yesterday as a mid-afternoon snack. They were tasty but transgressive – hot cross buns are an Easter food and it’s September.
Lots of foods have an annual periodicity. Pumpkin in the autumn, summer is for Pimm’s.
There are longer periodicities.
Hamburgers seem to be renewed every decade or so. Fat gourmet ones in the early 2000s. Premium fast food style in the 2010s. Smashed from 2020.
Pizza is on a 20 year cycle, at least in the UK – Italian style in the 70s, deep pan American in the 90s, sourdough from the mid 2010s.
In economics, Kondratiev waves are long 40-60 year cycles – we’re ascending the 6th K-wave right now.
Like, are there K-waves for food?
Can we predict the next breakthrough food?
I have two hunches.
One is mustard.
So we all know about the hot sauce revival. There are some amazing small batch fermented hot sauces here in Peckham, south London. A local craft beer + hot sauce shop has shelves with incredible variety.
If you look at hot sauce on Google Trends you can just about trace hot sauce up from its last trough around 2008, to when I would suggest it peaked about 2 years ago – that’s our half period.
Which gives us a 28 year condiment periodicity, call it a C-wave.
Now, mustard last peaked in the 90s. At the time Grey Poupon brand dijon mustard was strongly associated with wealth. Wikipedia:
in 1992, Grey Poupon had the strongest correlation between a person’s income and whether or not they used the product.
32 years ago.
i.e. in accordance with condiment wave theory we’re overdue another mustard peak.
Mustard heat is incredible – there’s nothing like mustard so hot it clears your sinuses and makes your eyes water with English sausage or a ham sandwich on white bread. It’s in the family of horseradish and wasabi and the heat is so, so different from the chilli pepper heat of hot sauces.
But just like hot sauces, there’s huge variety.
Just downstairs we have: English hot mustard, powdered mustard, Dijon mustard (French, made with white wine), whole grain mustard, and American yellow mustard, not counting unsweetened French mayonnaise (containing mustard) and whole mustard seeds (a spice). We use all of them on the regular.
Yet.
When I look at the mustard labels, there’s nothing new there. No 2020s challenger brands.
There’s no small batch local mustard, despite mustard being a major crop just 100 miles away.
There’s no Scoville scale for mustard that we talk about and print on labels and dare friends to try.
No mustard nerds hanging out on some daunting subreddit gatekeeping Dijon sub-varieties; no direct-to-consumer mustard tasting monthly subscription box plaguing my social ads trying to cash in.
We are totally due a mustard C-wave peak. You heard it here first.
My second hunch is Kendal Mint Cake which is an energy bar for hikers originally from the 1880s, taken on Hillary’s 1953 ascent of Everest, and it is pure white sugar, nothing else except peppermint, and it used to be everywhere, like right next to the confectionery and in every shop back in the 1980s.
Think: a peppermint pattie without the chocolate enrobing.
Nowadays energy foods are either cereal bars (the health angle) or high calorie running gels (scientific efficiency) or drinks (functional).
I went looking for Kendal Mint Cake the other day in a local deli.
It’s the kind of thing they would stock, especially with the traditional packaging – but no.
Anyway, mint cake is due a comeback. I’d keep the old fashioned brand, but amplify the angle that there’s no grains or complex carbs or gluten or weird additives. Straight shot glucose and mint, bam.
28 year C-waves.
Are there periodicities that are even longer?
For instance: I bet we’ll see a resurgence of meat consumption, and that would be the reversal of a 100 year trend.
Meat 2.0 will be wrapped in something else, a counterculture omnivore diet, maybe a practice of gratitude or it’ll go alongside something like calorie counting but for climate impact, to de-fang one major meat downside.
CONCEPT: Carbon Counting?? Like calorie counting or 10,000 steps or closing your rings only for your personal daily CO2E budget. How about a group-based accountability system like Weight Watchers?
Although. Despite my best efforts I haven’t been able to revive Beef Fizz from the 1950s as carbonated gravy.
So maybe longer waves aren’t waves at all, just things permanently going out of fashion.
Longer still.
How far back can we go?
The last universal common ancestor of plants and animals was 1.6 billion years ago, when the lines split.
The ultimate super long C-wave would be photosynthesis revival.
I mean, to put it more practically:
When will we have the first adult human able to supplement their food with energy from chlorophyll in the skin? 2040? 2050? The year 3000?
They can make mice that glow green with DNA from bioluminescent jellyfish.
So imagine CRISPR or another genetic toolkit used to splice sunlight-powered energy producers into every cell.
Actually not absurd perhaps!
The genes exist and are available, some animals photosynthesise: The Oriental hornet relies on a pigment in its exoskeleton, called xanthopterin, to turn sunlight into electrons.
Alas. We need more skin:
To produce roughly 60kg of ATP, a typical adult woman therefore requires around 700g of glucose per day. Given the maximum known rates of photosynthesis in higher plants and assuming that the surface area of an adult woman’s skin is around 1.6 m2, a woman with green skin could produce a highly disappointing 1% of her daily demand for glucose through photosynthesis. So to meet her energy demands, a photosynthesising woman would have to have a lot more skin. Indeed, roughly a tennis court’s worth.
Then the question is how you expose all that skin to sunlight.
The obvious answer is to flatten the skin expanse and use the surface area to sit on the air cushion itself, a future race of humans like manta rays basking above the clouds, lofting on thermals, naked post-humans, bright green, paper thin with gently billowing tennis court flaps of skin spread between delicately boned limbs, laughing and gossiping high in the atmosphere, sugar-drunk on sunlight.
An unlikely comeback.
You and I can stick with the mustard.
I picked up some hot cross buns yesterday as a mid-afternoon snack. They were tasty but transgressive – hot cross buns are an Easter food and it’s September.
Lots of foods have an annual periodicity. Pumpkin in the autumn, summer is for Pimm’s.
There are longer periodicities.
Hamburgers seem to be renewed every decade or so. Fat gourmet ones in the early 2000s. Premium fast food style in the 2010s. Smashed from 2020.
Pizza is on a 20 year cycle, at least in the UK – Italian style in the 70s, deep pan American in the 90s, sourdough from the mid 2010s.
In economics, Kondratiev waves are long 40-60 year cycles – we’re ascending the 6th K-wave right now.
Like, are there K-waves for food?
Can we predict the next breakthrough food?
I have two hunches.
One is mustard.
So we all know about the hot sauce revival. There are some amazing small batch fermented hot sauces here in Peckham, south London. A local craft beer + hot sauce shop has shelves with incredible variety.
If you look at hot sauce on Google Trends you can just about trace hot sauce up from its last trough around 2008, to when I would suggest it peaked about 2 years ago – that’s our half period.
Which gives us a 28 year condiment periodicity, call it a C-wave.
Now, mustard last peaked in the 90s. At the time Grey Poupon brand dijon mustard was strongly associated with wealth. Wikipedia:
32 years ago.
i.e. in accordance with condiment wave theory we’re overdue another mustard peak.
Mustard heat is incredible – there’s nothing like mustard so hot it clears your sinuses and makes your eyes water with English sausage or a ham sandwich on white bread. It’s in the family of horseradish and wasabi and the heat is so, so different from the chilli pepper heat of hot sauces.
But just like hot sauces, there’s huge variety.
Just downstairs we have: English hot mustard, powdered mustard, Dijon mustard (French, made with white wine), whole grain mustard, and American yellow mustard, not counting unsweetened French mayonnaise (containing mustard) and whole mustard seeds (a spice). We use all of them on the regular.
Yet.
When I look at the mustard labels, there’s nothing new there. No 2020s challenger brands.
There’s no small batch local mustard, despite mustard being a major crop just 100 miles away.
There’s no Scoville scale for mustard that we talk about and print on labels and dare friends to try.
No mustard nerds hanging out on some daunting subreddit gatekeeping Dijon sub-varieties; no direct-to-consumer mustard tasting monthly subscription box plaguing my social ads trying to cash in.
We are totally due a mustard C-wave peak. You heard it here first.
My second hunch is Kendal Mint Cake which is an energy bar for hikers originally from the 1880s, taken on Hillary’s 1953 ascent of Everest, and it is pure white sugar, nothing else except peppermint, and it used to be everywhere, like right next to the confectionery and in every shop back in the 1980s.
Think: a peppermint pattie without the chocolate enrobing.
Nowadays energy foods are either cereal bars (the health angle) or high calorie running gels (scientific efficiency) or drinks (functional).
I went looking for Kendal Mint Cake the other day in a local deli.
It’s the kind of thing they would stock, especially with the traditional packaging – but no.
Anyway, mint cake is due a comeback. I’d keep the old fashioned brand, but amplify the angle that there’s no grains or complex carbs or gluten or weird additives. Straight shot glucose and mint, bam.
28 year C-waves.
Are there periodicities that are even longer?
For instance: I bet we’ll see a resurgence of meat consumption, and that would be the reversal of a 100 year trend.
Meat 2.0 will be wrapped in something else, a counterculture omnivore diet, maybe a practice of gratitude or it’ll go alongside something like calorie counting but for climate impact, to de-fang one major meat downside.
CONCEPT: Carbon Counting?? Like calorie counting or 10,000 steps or closing your rings only for your personal daily CO2E budget. How about a group-based accountability system like Weight Watchers?
Although. Despite my best efforts I haven’t been able to revive Beef Fizz from the 1950s as carbonated gravy.
So maybe longer waves aren’t waves at all, just things permanently going out of fashion.
Longer still.
How far back can we go?
The last universal common ancestor of plants and animals was 1.6 billion years ago, when the lines split.
The ultimate super long C-wave would be photosynthesis revival.
I mean, to put it more practically:
When will we have the first adult human able to supplement their food with energy from chlorophyll in the skin? 2040? 2050? The year 3000?
They can make mice that glow green with DNA from bioluminescent jellyfish.
So imagine CRISPR or another genetic toolkit used to splice sunlight-powered energy producers into every cell.
Actually not absurd perhaps!
The genes exist and are available, some animals photosynthesise:
Alas. We need more skin:
Then the question is how you expose all that skin to sunlight.
The obvious answer is to flatten the skin expanse and use the surface area to sit on the air cushion itself, a future race of humans like manta rays basking above the clouds, lofting on thermals, naked post-humans, bright green, paper thin with gently billowing tennis court flaps of skin spread between delicately boned limbs, laughing and gossiping high in the atmosphere, sugar-drunk on sunlight.
An unlikely comeback.
You and I can stick with the mustard.