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Behold the Genius of Vegan Tuna: Whole Foods Trends of 2018
Dear eater, are your mushrooms dysfunctional? Do they just lie there on your plate, limply, underperforming? Then we have great news for you! Functional mushrooms are just one of Whole Food’s food trends for 2018. Yes, now your mushrooms can function again!
Well, not your mushrooms. Not the dull, familiar mushrooms you’re used to eating. They’re just edible, not functional – these days, merely functioning as food simply isn’t functioning hard enough. No, we mean mushrooms with names like “reishi, chaga, cordyceps, and lion’s mane”. Which are not a kind of massage, disease, surgical implement, or feline fringe, respectively, though we understand the confusion. Whole Foods explains,
Shoppers are buzzing about functional mushrooms, which are traditionally used to support wellness as an ingredient in dietary supplements. Now, varieties like reishi, chaga, cordyceps and lion’s mane star in products across categories. Bottled drinks, coffees, smoothies and teas are leading the way. The rich flavors also lend themselves to mushroom broths, while the earthy, creamy notes pair well with cocoa, chocolate or coffee flavors. Body care is hot on this mushroom trend too, so look for a new crop of soaps, hair care and more.
Yes. You are buzzing. Maybe you haven’t noticed the buzz yet, a sort of moo, like the sound of that cellphone you left on vibrate in your bag, but you, the shopper, want fungus in your coffee, candy, and smoothies this year. And in your hair and armpits. “Body care is hot on this mushroom trend” actually sounds a bit uncomfortable, but don’t let that keep you from buzzing. Just fish out the damn phone already, and answer it.
You know you want to.
***
2018 is also the year when “Tacos Come Out of Their Shell”. Yes, your tacos are officially molting. You might think ethnic esculent ecdysis is nothing new – how long have taco salads been around? But you’d be wrong. This trend is fresh, because reasons.
This street-food star is no longer limited to a tortilla, or to savory recipes: Tacos are showing up for breakfast, and trendy restaurants across the country have dessert variations. Most of all, tacos are shedding their shell for new kinds of wrappers and fillings too – think seaweed wrappers with poke filling.
Poke is raw fish salad from Hawaii. Which is naturally why, when you wrap it in seaweed, it becomes a taco. We realize treating Pacific-island cuisine as if it were Mexican raises concerns of cultural appropriation, but calling a wrap a “wrap” is off trend now, no matter how well “wrap” describes, well, wrapping foods inside other foods.
The wrap trend had a good run – you had your pita wraps, your lettuce wraps, your tortilla wraps, your gift wraps, your ermine wraps… (To all those thinking the last is only an item of clothing we must ask, have you tried ermine meat yet? It’s gamy, but surprisingly versatile. And the inclusion of small bones adds calcium. It’s high up on the food chain, though, so it’s only a sometimes food. But we digress. Where were we?)
Ah. Tacos. Tacos that are nothing like tacos, but that won’t stop us. As our press release says, “Taco ‘bout options!”
***
Continuing with the longstanding trends we’re regifting as fresh for 2018, we’re bringing you floral flavors (nothing like food or drink whose bouquet is… bouquet) and the “Feast from the Middle East”. The Whole Foods blog post goes on,
Things like hummus, pita and falafel were tasty entry points, but now consumers are ready to explore the deep traditions, regional nuances and classic ingredients of Middle Eastern cultures, with Persian, Israeli, Moroccan, Syrian and Lebanese influences rising to the top. Spices like harissa, cardamom and za’atar are hitting more menus, as well as dishes like shakshuka, grilled halloumi and lamb. Other trending Middle Eastern ingredients include pomegranate, eggplant, cucumber, parsley, mint, tahini, tomato jam and dried fruits.
Yes, after all this time, pomegranate is still trending. Truly, it is the superfruit, richly-seeded womb of inexhaustible trendiness.
Now, perhaps you’re a Midwestern paleface thinking to yourself, “Huh, I’ve used harissa paste for years,” or “I bought some za’atar at Trader Joes last spring.” Maybe. But ours will be Wholer. And Foodier. It’s what we do.
***
We also do powders. We’ve always done powders, of course – green powders like spirulina, wheatgrass, and henna; brown powders like cocoa and flaxseed – but this year, we’re drawing your attention to a powder that’s bright and shiny yellow – and smells like cheap mustard: ground turmeric. The gods at Whole Foods go on,
Powders are serious power players. Because they’re so easy to incorporate, they’ve found their way into lattés, smoothies, nutrition bars, soups and baked goods.
“Also watch out for ground turmeric,” HealthLine comments on our hot powder trend. As well HealthLine should: turmeric is strongly staining, thanks to awesome power of curcumin, a beautiful red-gold pigment, and you definitely want staining power in your “lattés, smoothies, nutrition bars, soups and baked goods.”
Curcumin isn’t just a stain, though, it’s also a PAIN – a Pan-Assay INterference compound: it nonspecifically diddles with a buncha biological targets. Because curcumin is natural, the diddling is good. Because it is nonspecific, the diddling is powerful. Powerful, like the way you’ll smell when you’ve had lots of turmeric. Powerful, like the yellow stain on your teeth you’d get from eating turmeric straight out of the jar. With golden molars and a personal aroma which would gag a goat, you, too, could open your third chakra through the fierce yellow power that is the big T, becoming one of 2018’s pow(d)er players!
***
Our most astonishing trend, though, for 2018 is undoubtedly vegan tuna.
If nose-to-tail is the cry of the ethical butcher, “Root-to-Stem” is the new rallying cry for the vegan. And in 2018, “High-Tech Goes Plant-Forward”. So we’re featuring plant-based proteins from Beyond Meat, a lab headquartered in California (where else?) which does some phenomenal science-y stuff to vegetal hemoglobin from soy root in order to make vegan burgers bleed tasty, iron-rich juices. But even that impressive wizardry cannot compare to the elegance of this high-tech vegan sushi:
In order to simulate the finest sushi-grade raw tuna, our “Ocean Hugger” suppliers take a tomato, skin it, and scoop out the insides. They then take this hollow shell, cut it into wedges, placing each wedge on a little brick of sushi rice. And there you have it: vegan tuna.
Simplicity itself. With all the translucent ruddiness of a premium tuna, who could ask for anything more? It’s technical genius!
Equipped with the most advanced food science, we have successfully deconstructed tuna into sliced tomatoes. We can’t think of a better summary of the sheer freshness of our 2018 trends. Dig in and bon apetit!
In addition, I’m allergic to soy which is a poison to me. It is in almost every food in some form in every restaurant. Anyone who thinks soy is a health food should read the book, “The Whole Soy Story” by Kaayla T. Daniel.
I don’t know about color, but when it goes bad it starts to smell like tuna.
Starbucks Fake Environmentalism:
EW
That is just a ninny employee who didn’t set the can up properly.
I’m pretty sure cordyceps is that variety of parasitic fungus that takes over the minds of ants and makes them behave strangely so it can reproduce in the heads of other ants. I swear I’m not making that up
If you see people behaving odder than usual around a Whole Foods, you may want to give it a wide berth.
Henry,
Now you’re onto something Henry. Fill up a shopping cart full of their nonsense products and go to the check out line. Offer to pay them with bitcoin. When they refuse, loudly call them Luddite idiots and storm out of the place.
You’ll still be hungry but strangely satisfied.
Regards,
Jim
So now it’ll always be true when you say “There’s a fungus among us!”
Also: blech. No thank you please.
We had something like this locally a while back when the recycle craze started. The town implemented a required recycle program with orange bins, a $35 a month charge, separate recycle trucks and penalties if you did not separate your trash. Program ended about a year later when it was discovered that both the recycle and the regular trash trucks were dumping at the same land fill, just on different days. The program sort of went away after that as the political types went and hid.
No, no you are not. I once wrote a humorous piece on the phenomenon for Ricochet. This was way… back in the Rico 1.0 days, so it may not even be archived anymore, just nonexistent.
Vegan tuna is just as bad as a veggie burger.
You mean, it wasn’t just the Mob (excuse me . . . “solid waste consultants,” like Tony Soprano) who dumped contraband and toxic waste in landfills while making bank from corrupt garbage hauling contracts? I’m shocked ! Shocked!
Quit ruining my jokes haha
Oh, @Rightangles, your joke stands. Very tall.
If saving the planet by recycling is as urgent as the Gaia-ites say, teach your emoloyees how to set up the receptacles.
I’m actually not opposed to restaurant recycling, or recycling in general. I think recycling is valuable. I’m just not militant about it.
I get the feeling Starbucks and its minions are the recycle police, and I’m gonna get capital punishment for insubordination.
Ha you and me both. We’re all given two garbage cans to put on the curb each week, a green one for regular and a blue one for recycling (I think they got that backwards). I use only the regular one because the whole thing is stupid.
But is poke woke?
It does rather flop around a lot.
I use both, because it means I don’t have to run them out as often. Plus it saves on garbage bags.
That’s a different cordyceps species. The officinal cordyceps parasitizes ghost moth larvae, not adult ants. (Due to DNA examination, the officinal species has now been renamed Ophiocordyceps sinensis, but that hasn’t hit product labels yet.) It is quite expensive, endangered in its original habitat, frequently adulterated in commerce (since it’s sold by weight, the insertion of fine lead wire isn’t unknown) and, while it can be cultured, it seems to be very finicky and it’s hard to get it to produce the known active compounds. Cordyceps militaris is the main species in commerce these days; it tends to parasitize insect pupae and occasionally larvae and is more cooperative in producing actives.
Cordyceps is of interest as to improve stress handling and to support intensive athletic training.
Due to being cultured on rice or bran, a lot of commercial medicinal mushroom products contain starch. Mushrooms don’t contain any starch, so the presence of starch at best means the product is diluted by culture medium and at worst, might well have been grown under conditions that produce only a minimal amount of the desired compounds.
I haven’t looked at all the mushroom lines WF carries, but one line is well researched even though it is mainly mycelia mixed with growth medium and not, as in traditional usage, fruiting body. That company takes its cultures to the point where the primordia form; this is a structure that elaborates from the mycelia as the culture matures and will develop into the fruiting body.
There’s good research on mushrooms, and more coming every year.
Here’s a good video talking about the difficulties of mushroom production. The company the presenter runs produces very good quality mushroom extracts for the wholesale market.
Oh, and I hate to break it to you: microbes affecting behavior ain’t just for fungally infested ants.
Some kids, (adults, too,) especially ones on the autistic spectrum, are knocked out by dairy products and/or gluten. Partial breakdown products of gluten and casein known as gluteomorphins and caseomorphins can agonize (turn on) opioid receptors in the brain if the gut lining is too permable. (Infants have a leaky gut until they’re around a year old; caseomorphins, especially human ones, are believed to be responsible for babies being “milk drunk.”) There’s a commercial probiotic containing a strain that metabolizes gluteomorphins and caseomorphins and reduces the amount that gets through a leaky gut. It’s useful for some kids.
I realized that sentence is a bit ambiguous: there are good C militaris products that are cultured on vegetarian, non-caterpillar/pupa media.
Olive, corn, canola …
Question: is paying a premium for extra virgin olive oil a form of slut shaming?
It sounds like we Catholics no longer have a monopoly on transubstantiation?
This comment has further cemented my opinion that no good comes from eating fungus. I require at least one degree of separation: pigs eat truffles, I eat bacon.
A virtue-signaling canister. Just like FB, doesn’t matter where you put your garbage, it ends up in the same place.
True dat.
I’m not against functional foods. It’s how they’re advertised to the general consumer that amuses me, though :-)
Only until they Immanentize the Eschataco…
Yes. One of my favorites is a powdered meal replacement sold under the name PaleoMeal. It’s a decent product, but our paleolithic ancestors would not have recognized as one of their meals.
By the way, in case you want to bother the heck out of your Prog friends, use a very earnest sincere tone of voice and remind them that without Orrin Hatch the FDA would have shut down most of the supplement industry years ago.
It helps the effect if you can keep a straight face.