Shared from the 1/1/2020 Houston Chronicle eEdition

What and how we’ll be eating in 2020

Plant-based foods, hyper-local cuisine and more on tap

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MEATLESS MAINSTREAMING

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BIRRA BOOM

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FLOUR ALTERNATIVES

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UGLY PRODUCE

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VIRTUAL RESTAURANT

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HYPER-REGIONAL COOKING

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LEGAL CBD

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Paul Stephen / Staff

RESOURCE EFFICIENT SUSTAINABILITY

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GRANDMA/GRANDPA FOOD

I n terms of food trends and topics, the introduction of Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen’s fried chicken sandwich was surely the fast-food phenomenon of 2019. And who can forget the Starbucks cup brouhaha from “Game of Thrones”? Or the great fuss over White Claw as the official, often unavailable drink of summer? Or the uproar over the banana-taped-to-the-wall food-based art project from Art Basel in Miami Beach, Fla.?

Important issues were seriously discussed, too: the food industry’s environmental responsibility; the emphasis on more healthful eating and more sustainable seafood; the growing (or maybe overgrown?) food-hall phenomenon; the keto foods and pressure-cooker crazes.

What will be some of the hot topics for 2020? Read on.

The virtual restaurant

The rise of “virtual restaurants” is an interesting phenomenon. These online enterprises offer restaurant food without the restaurant: Food is cooked in a commercial kitchen, then delivered built for speed and efficiency. Not a bad idea, considering food-delivery apps such as Uber Eats, DoorDash, Favor and GrubHub nibble at the $863 billion American restaurant industry. In Houston, chef Gabe Medina launched a multiconcept virtual restaurant under the umbrella of Click Virtual Food Hall. Even Rachael Ray has jumped on the bandwagon, choosing Houston as one of the dozen U.S. cities for her first virtual restaurant, a partnership with Uber Eats. According to the National Restaurant Association, 60 percent of restaurant meals are consumed off-premises, and that is expected to grow to 80 percent by 2025.

Meatless mainstreaming

The advances made by companies such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods have gone a long way to making plant-based-meat products more digestible to a meat-eating public. It’s common now to see consumers of all stripes opt for meatless burgers at fast-food franchises and reach for the plant-based proteins in the supermarket aisles. “Since nearly 90 percent of these consumers use traditional meat and dairy, it’s fair to say people aren’t necessarily becoming vegetarians or vegans,” said Darren Seifer, food-consumption analyst at NPD Group. “Rather, consumers are integrating these products as additional options for their daily repertoire.” According to the Plant-Based Foods Association, retail sales of plant-based foods grew by 11.3 percent in the U.S. last year, compared to a2 percent rise in overall food sales.

More sustainability

The great drinking-straw backlash over the past couple of years got many people thinking twice about automatically reaching for that single-use piece of plastic. Now bans of single-use plastic shopping bags have been introduced in 72 countries as the global community contemplates ecological and environmental issues posed by plastics. The food-service industry has responded with reusable cups, biodegradable straws, portion-controlling dispensers to limit overuse and waste, compostable packaging and wood-fiber utensils. “Look for the industry to incorporate a wider range of resource-efficient, circular practices in the name of sustainability,” management-consultant company Technomic says.

Hyper-regional cooking

Southern cuisine, which has been riding a wave of popularity in the past 10 years, is about to go hyper-Southern. But that’s only part of atrend that recognizes how the global pantry is delving even deeper into very specific regions of umbrella cuisines. “Regional food will be broken into micro-regions,” chef Josh Habiger of Bastion in Nashville told Food & Wine. “Southern will break up into Appalachian, Lowland, Creole, etc.” Indeed, Unilever Food Solutions predicts that flavors from western regions of Africa — kola nuts, moringa, plantains, chiles, yams, peanuts and sorghum — will be hot, as will foods of Mexico’s Oaxaca, Michoacan, Yucatan, Campeche and Baja regions. Even mainstream American barbecue and fried chicken are enjoying regional flourishes that consumers can now readily identify.

Finding beauty in ugly produce

In 2019, both Walmart and Whole Foods experimented with selling less-than-perfect produce, a sign that larger companies are thinking about the enormous waste of misshapen and imperfect fruits and vegetables. According to ReFED, a nonprofit organization committed to reducing U.S. food waste, as much as 40 percent of food is wasted globally; Americans throw away 63 million tons of food a year. ReFED also states that the U.S. spends more than $218 billion (1.3 percent of GDP) growing, processing, transporting and disposing of food that is never eaten. According to FoodBev magazine, a number of companies are either selling imperfect produce or learning how to recover millions of pounds of produce a year and redistributing it to local food banks. Even governments are buying into the notion of reducing food waste. Australia, for example, has set a goal of reducing food waste by 50 percent by 2030.

The birria boom

Made of slow-cooked meat steeping in its own bright-red, heavily spiced, aromatic juices, birria is no stranger to Mexican border cuisine, but it is now making inroads into mainstream dining. The Los Angeles food culture is going through a Tijuana-style birria taco moment as the most popular food trucks serve meaty tacos with corn tortillas dragged through the red juices. “Shredded and stuffed into a griddled semi-crispy taco, birria comes with a braising liquid for dunking,” observed Baum & Whiteman, international food and restaurant consultants, in their annual prediction of food trends. In November, New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells doled out two stars to a birria taco truck in Queens. Locally, the new Candente Mexican restaurant in Montrose is serving a plate of birria de res tacos that comes with a cup of beef consommé and bone marrow.

Grandma/grandpa food

At age 69, the Michoacán grandmother Doña Angela became an internet sensation with millions of YouTube views of videos of her cooking channel De Mi Ranchero a Tu Cocina. Her cooking is simple and unpretentious and in a matter of months of its August 2019 debut captivated the food world. Fortune magazine notes Ethiopian, Ecuadoran, Indian and Italian grandmothers are becoming internet stars, too. The YouTube channel Pasta Grannies has become popular enough to spawn a cookbook published in October. Food & Wine suggested that “grandparent food” could be a 2020 trend. “I think tradition will be very important in 2020, the food of our grandparents,” chef Josh Kulp of Honey Butter Fried chicken in Chicago told the magazine. “Foods that represent personal and shared histories, without fuss.”

Flour power

In its list for top trends for 2020, Whole Foods Market makes a case for baking flours besides wheat. “Consumers on the baking bandwagon are seeking out ingredients used in traditional dishes, like teff flour used for Ethiopian injera,” Whole Foods writes. In addition to everyday all-purpose flour, the home pantry might be stocked with cauliflower flour, coconut flour, almond flour, chickpea flour, peanut flour and tigernut flour. Flours made from starches, tubers and seeds are now part of the alt-flour movement. “Consumers look for more ways to boost their bake, ‘super’ flours delivering protein and fiber join the trend,” Whole Foods adds.

The rise of legal CBD

Think what you will about the health and wellness benefits of CBD (cannabidiol), the nonpsychoactive compound of the cannabis plant. But CBD has begun to find its way into a variety of food products, with more coming to market: sparkling waters, breakfast cereal, tea, popcorn, hot sauces, snack chips, chocolate bars and candy. Chefs are creating special menus for dinners for the “canna-curious” as bartenders shake up CBD cocktails. Though the global market for both legal and illegal cannabis stands at $150 billion, the legal market is projected to grow to 77 percent of total sales, reaching $166 billion by 2025, according to Food Business News. In Texas, a bill signed by Gov. Greg Abbott in June expanded the kind of hemp products that can be legally purchased in Texas. Hemp-based products, including CBD oil, are legal as long as they contain no more than 0.3 percent THC, the psychoactive compound found in cannabis plants. greg.morago@chron.com twitter.com/gregmorago

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