Squandrous

“Ten years of organic, local, and a lot of unsavory processed food.”

GOOD breaks down the decade in food, with highlights from every calendar year through the aughties. Highlights:

• 2000: Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw visits Magnolia Bakery, launching the cupcake craze and America’s obsession with cute food.
• 2001: The scholarly publication Gastronomica debuts, mixing the sensual and the scholarly, as food studies offerings expand at colleges and universities.
• 2002: The Julie/Julia Project begins, popularizing a sensational, stunt-making style of food blogging.
• 2003: A trans-fat ban passes in Denmark, pioneering a wave of legislation banning fats, counting calories, or prohibiting new fast-food restaurants.
• 2004: Bottled water ranks as the second most-consumed beverage, surpassing milk and beer and leading to a sustained bottled water backlash.
• 2005: “Locavore” is first used to describe an adherent to the 100-mile diet. It later becomes the defining term for a diet based on local foods and low food mileage.
• 2006: Colony Collapse Disorder, a dramatic decline in Western bee populations, begins to appear in hives across the United States.
• 2007: The Agriculture Census shows that most farms are either very small or very large, a statistical trend that defines the decade in agriculture.
• 2008: Cloned food—meat and milk from cloned animals—is approved for human consumption by the FDA.
• 2009: The election of an arugula-eating president leads to the creation of a vegetable garden at the White House. Michelle Obama becomes the first First Lady to have a garden on the lawn since Eleanor Roosevelt.

The saddest news of all was the last thing on the list: Gourmet closing its doors. Read the full post for more.