Sharing food with the people you love is one of the few simple pleasures left. JK! Dinner tables are as politicized and ruined as the rest of modern life. If it doesn’t cause cancer, it tastes like drinking orange juice right after brushing your teeth. Once upon a time, meals cemented social bonds. Now you’re bound to alienate someone by not catering to their obscure allergy or stupid diet trend.
Do you know what a zero-proof drink is? How about a flexitarian? What’s this year’s kale? Whole Foods Market, your friendly neighborhood multibillion-dollar subsidiary of Amazon, released predictions for the top 10 food trends in 2020. Over the next year, ads will bombard you until enough sheeple adopt the trend. Then, it becomes the new normal. This list will help you assimilate or plan to resist.
Photo: Elitsa Deykova (Getty Images)
Grub up: 10 Meat-Free Foods That Will Fool Your Tastebuds Into a Tasty Meatless Monday
Raw deal: Arizona Woman Says Burger King Sold Her Uncooked Chicken Sandwich
Follow Mandatory on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
1- Annoying Food Trends Slideshow
-
Mixed drinks minus the drink.
Called mocktails, spirit-free drinks, or zero-proof libations, this trend for non-alcoholic beverages leaves us asking one question: why bother?
-
Bye bye soy.
Soy is so 2018. Fake meats made from mung beans, hemp seed, and avocado are this season’s "it" proteins.
Photo: Jeff Kronenfeld
-
Flour powerless.
If your part of the .01 percent of Americans that bake from scratch, your old-fashioned values mean you’ll probably have no interest in the host of gross alternate flours made from bananas, squash, and other plant genitals.
Photo: Richard Jung (Getty Images)
-
Regenerative agriculture.
Like organics, regenerative agriculture is good for Mother Earth, and also for virtue signaling and showing off how poorly you spend money.
-
Meat-plant blends.
These mixtures of animal flesh and plant-based proteins appeal to neither vegetarians nor carnivores.
Photo: FrozenShutter (Getty Images)
-
Gross butters.
Have you ever wanted to try butter made from watermelon seeds or chickpeas? No one else did either.
Photo: Tasty Art Ltd Rob White (Getty Images)
-
Fridge snacking.
Of all the food fads Whole Foods is trying to brainwash us to think we want, the trend for replacing affordable and non-perishable foods with overpriced alternatives that take up precious fridge space left us flummoxed.
Photo: Reza Estakhrian (Getty Images)
-
Bitter sugars.
Syrupy reductions made from sorghum, monk fruit, and other plant products may sound healthier than traditional sweeteners, but in fact they’re just as likely to cause diabetes.
Photo: Alexandra Grablewski (Getty Images)
-
The cuisine of West Africa.
We're actually fans of West African food, but you have to wonder if it’s such a good idea to steal food from a continent where roughly 333 million people are affected by food insecurity according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
Photo: Diana Robinson Photography (Getty Images)
-
The kids’ menu reimagined for foodie snobs.
It’s never too early to teach your kid to brag about how they can afford to eat food not drenched in pesticides, hormones, and heavy metals because of their high socioeconomic status.
Photo: Sol de Zuasnabar Brebbia (Getty Images)
