It’s 2016 and We’ve Reached Peak Food Culture

If someone had once told me that in 2016 I'd be able to order six oysters and a bottle of prosecco to my bed thanks to a delivery app, I probably would've been surprised. And then, in time, extremely impressed. And maybe a little turned on.

It really wasn't all that long ago that being super into "food culture" was more likely to attract a World's Longest Groan than genuine interest or enthusiasm. Posting a photo of your breakfast to Instagram was social media suicide, and lining up for anything that wasn't a club or the new Yeezys wasn't really a thing.

But somehow, foodie culture wriggled its way into mainstream consciousness like a Pitbull song. What happened? And why, against all odds, has it kind of worked out for us?

Back in the days of old—when Valencia and Toaster were the Snapchat dog filter and you had to tag someone in the comments of a post to get them to look at it (dark times)—there were certain dos and don'ts, unspoken rules, about what we were putting on Instagram. A bird's eye view of your poached eggs? Don't. That was reserved for gym junkies, mums, and people that you hadn't seen since high school.

These days, taking a photo of your food and posting it to Instagram or Facebook satisfies a kind of group voyeurism we've decided that we can't resist. We're interested. I want to know what you ate for dinner! I want to know what you do every single minute of every day!

When we first were introduced to competitive cooking shows, the thrill was in seeing people fail and watching them crumble to dust under the immense pressure. But somewhere along the way, we stopped laughing in the face of every dropped plate and teary confession about that dish grandma used to make, and we became involved. We started to trial tempered chocolate and reductions in our suburban kitchens, and parents around the country started "plating up" dinner. And all the while, there was a strange proliferation of cravats around the house.

"I feel like Masterchef is a real touchstone moment for Australian food culture," Katherine Kirkwood, a Queensland University of Technology PhD candidate studying food media and food culture, tells VICE. "It transformed the cooking show from daytime TV to primetime TV and did it well—so then we had a subsequent mainstreaming of food in the media."

We began to realise that chefs weren't just people who were really good at julienning: they were creative geniuses turning ingredients into art. With the rise of the celebrity chef came #foodporn on social media. The culture was shifting, and self-described foodies went from being the human equivalent of the fedora to being the general populace.

Once upon a time, the word 'artisanal' used to stand for something. Middle aged foodies would frequent organic food stores in rich-person suburbs to stock up on caviar-infused honey sourced from Tasmania's best and most good-looking bees, sourdough bread baked at dawn on top of snowy mountains overlooking the ocean, and blocks of boutique chocolate handmade by blind Benedictine monks.

These days though, it's difficult to distinguish the real from the fake. Every beer label features a bearded man in a forest harvesting hops with his bare hands, generic brand salt and vinegar crisps have been replaced by rosemary and sea salt kale crisps, and ordering your personally customised wood-fired pizza is no longer simply a question of choosing between Meatlovers or Hawaiian.

But the desire for authentic food is real. According to a 2015 study by NewsLifeMedia, 46% of Australians consider themselves foodies, with two out of three survey participants saying that food is one of their greatest sources of pleasure. What's more, we want to know about the details of what we're putting into our mouths. It's easy to cast this off as privileged and indulgent, but the fascination with food brings with it an increased social consciousnesses about where food comes from and how it got to be on our plate. A global survey by Nielsen undertaken last year revealed that even though millennials are living in a tough financial climate, we're still willing to pay more for sustainable food.

"Concerns around animal welfare, human health, and environmental sustainability within the industrial food complex have led us to increasingly question where our food comes from, and under what conditions it's produced," Dr. Catie Gressier, a cultural anthropologist specialising in the anthropology of food, tells us. "This in turn has led to a preparedness to spend more on products marketed as ethical, while again foregrounding food quality in peoples' minds." She identifies this as one of the major factors fuelling the mainstream embrace of foodie culture along with media saturation and multiculturalism that has introduced us to diverse ingredients, flavours, and cooking techniques.

Buying charmingly speckled eggs from some kindly old woman who lets her chickens run wild and free in the garden is by default a feel-good activity that hurts no one, and if everyone started doing it the economy would change overnight. For example, it could help solve Australia's current milk crisis, which was created when supermarket chains started artificially lowering the price of milk at the expense of the farmers they weren't affiliated with.

"The thing I really like about markets is that you come face-to-face with the person who has made the product," Sarah Booth—who runs the ridiculously popular bake sale Flour Market and, a more recent project, Wholey Day—tells VICE. "It's all about getting people to come together physically to meet the maker. It's not like you're just looking at a photo of food, even though you'll probably end up Instagramming it."

Our attitudes have also expanded. "We're now used to people making specific food choices based on health, moral, or environmental issues," Wendy Syfret, one of VICE's in-house vegans explains. "In the past if you said you were vegan, people thought that you were judging them—or looked at you like you were wearing fisherman pants—but now people just respect that everyone has a different relationship with food and they don't take it as a personal attack."

When Phillipa Sibley's restaurant Prix Fixe opened in Melbourne in 2014—a themed fine-dining experience with monthly set menus designed around literature and fantasy like A Midsomer Night's Dream and Hansel and Gretel—it was clear that our obsession with the experience of eating food had well and truly manifested. Heston Blumenthal's $500-a-head pop-up restaurant, the Fat Duck, might've seemed like the ramblings of a madman when news of it hit the media. But that didn't stop it selling out. For those who can afford it, eating experiences have become penultimate to material possession.

"Being in a place like Australia where we have the economic capital to view food as a lifestyle instead of a substance; we can spend more time on it, we can spend money on it. It gives us cultural capital, it gives us standing among our friends because we've been to the newest place," Kirkwood says. She also points out that we're at an interesting point in food culture, explaining that "even though it was once a kind of snobbish thing, food culture is now accessible—like the trend of Americana food being considered gourmet."

Our appetites for all sorts of experiences mean that the lines between traditionally high and low culture have blurred. The same people you might find on Heston's site with credit cards at the ready are the same people lining up for six hours to taste an In-N-Out burger at a Sydney pop-up. So it's not just about fine dining or fancy ingredients—it's about experiencing it all, and letting everyone know.

"It's crazy to think that foodie culture wasn't always so prevalent," says young Melbourne chef Ali Currey-Voumard, whose impressive CV includes Cumulus Inc, Builders Arms Hotel, Moon Under Water, and the Otis Armada pop-up dining events. "The majority of us eat at least three times a day, so it's great to see us welcoming a new train of thought that encourages us to consider what it is we are eating, and—more importantly—how delicious it is."

Every once-humble pub meal is served with housemade aioli, and smashed avocado has become so ubiquitous that a slice of (organic spelt rye) toast now looks naked without it. We've reached peak foodie culture, and from here we will inevitably descend into a post-ironic embrace of normcore foods. But until then, let's enjoy supermarket aisles filled with bespoke cheeses.

This article is presented in partnership with Crust Pizza