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Culinary Cool: The New Rock Stars of Food

Like fedoras, Brooklyn, and start-ups, food has become a mainstay in our culture of cool. These days, it pervades almost every medium; watching and writing and tweeting and studying and documenting and talking and reading about it has become the new norm. Eating isn’t just physical nourishment anymore. It’s enjoyment, it’s art, it’s community … it’s an experience.

And it’s kind of like going to a concert. After all, food and music go together like the Mr. Softee tune goes with vanilla softserve. They are, intrinsically, sensory experiences that transcend communication barriers while conveying emotion and culture and history. Can we call them both universal languages, then? Perhaps.

But Zach Brooks, the creator of Food Is the New Rock, doesn’t like to get too deep. He will admit, though, that these relatively new cultural norms have grabbed chefs from their kitchens and pushed them into the public eye. Today, we look to culinary creators as cultural tastemakers, as artists … in the same way that we’ve revered musicians for decades. To put it plainly: Chefs are the new rockstars.

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