Why are people so weird about food? What about quinoa made it associated with rich yuppies? If you didn’t already know you would probably assume the main consumers would be dudes who want their chicken and carb to have even more protein.
Because nobody really ate it in the US and then it was everywhere it was a fad among rich yuppies. Yeah peasants ate it in South America (there were even newspaper editorials chastising yuppies for denying poor people their quinoa supply by eating it for frivolous reasons) but so what?
Food choice being a proxy and signal for class/culture is nothing new. You’d be hard pressed to find a cultural tradition that doesn’t speak to it.
While everyone needs sustenance, there are often several adequate choices about how to get it and making those choices become a way of communicating to others. And communicating is an defining and seemingly valuable part of being human.
It’s not really weird and it’s not going anywhere.
I share the same concerns about quinoa as OP. My guess is that it has to be made and served fresh, and these stores have it sitting on shelves for days at a time and it tastes funny after a while.
It become quite expensive for a few years, as it became popular at a greater rate than production increased. Bulk price seems to be down again now, though.
There's reports of prisoners complaining about the torture of being fed salmon all the time, because it used to be common food. People signal their class and status through everything, also through food.
Salmon not prepared, handled or stored properly or not served fresh can taste pretty bad and smell pretty bad compared to other meats. Seafood in general goes bad fast compared to beef or pork for example.
I used Blue Apron for a while and got an unreasonable amount of salmon for some reason. It's been almost 6 years and I can still barely eat salmon after that. So I can definitely understand where the prisoners were coming from on this one.
Things might have changed since then, but from what I recall while we had some options on what to pick, for example I could eliminate red meat entirely, there was no option to get meat and not get salmon. So pretty much every week at least one of the meals was salmon.
The lumber camp installation inside the Nordic Hertitage Museum (Seattle) shows a sample employee contract: Salmon will not be served more than 3 times per week.
At the time, salmon was the cheapest, most abundant source of protein. Poor people's food.
Lobster was once for prisoners and slaves or a poor mans food, while nowadays it's almost exactly the opposite. It'll be hard to find a prisoner or slave that gets to eat lobster.
Oysters were poor people food in the same era, and like now, many people ate them raw. It has less to do with culinary trends and much more to do with the relative productivity of the lobster fishery. (In recent years, the lobster fishery has been really productive, but prices have been pretty sticky[0].)
Mark Kurlansky's The Big Oyster has some great primary source research on the social status of eating shellfish through the years.
At the time when lobsters were fed to prisoners, they hadn’t yet figured out the boiling-them-alive trick, which is supposedly how you get lobster to taste good. I don’t know anything about oysters though.
Boiling lobster (and other things) alive is more about preventing food poisoning as bacteria appears quickly as soon as it's dead. You could kill a lobster right before cooking it (not boiled alive) and have the same flavor + reducing health risks.
It's not ironic. Agricultural methods have changed over the millennia and as a result the relative price of many foods has gone way down. See also white rice.
I'm not aware that quinoa is expensive. Some rich yuppies have the time for following lame food/health/lifestyle trends. However, doing that is lame at any income level. A proper bro dude will never eat yogurts sprinkled with acai berries and quinoa or whatever crap.
