The 2022 Food Trend We Hope Is Gone For Good

This year brought the Negroni sbagliato to the forefront and green goddess salads to the table. With that said, it brought us some trends we could do without as well — like the overamplification of butter boards to spring into everything from pumpkin butter boards to a peanut butter, bacon, banana board, or even a frosting board (per Delish & Bon Appetit). These boards got so out of hand they were lampooned in TikToker Mythical Kitchen's blood board skit. In the skit, two foodie hosts create a 'Gram worthy blood board using "different types of animal bloods," a "whipped beef blood base" spreads the board like butter and is topped with a fresh blood spatter, paired with blood sausage and crostini. Gross, but not that much grosser than some of the ones we've seen scrolling this fall and winter (we're looking at you, frosting board).

Other food trends we'd be happy to leave in 2022 include the unsanitary and frankly gross-to-watch trend of caviar bumps (via The New York Times). We could also do without the black market for restaurant reservations. But there's one food trend that really rubbed us the wrong way in 2022, even more than the others.

And the award for worst food trend of 2022 goes to crypto reaching its tech talons into the food industry. This year we saw super upscale NYC private club Flyfish Club use NFTs as digital membership cards of a sort and NYC restaurant Dame exploit one of our other least favorite trends, the difficulty of getting a reservation, by selling NFTs as virtual reservation tokens for $1000 a pop, per Broken Palate. They weren't the only ones. Usher made history with his Rémy Martin collab which included an NFT that represented an AI interpretation of Usher's experience of the taste of Rémy Martin.

NFTs didn't just invade the high end of the food sphere. We saw them bust out as part of Starbucks' new revamped NFT-based rewards program built onto their existing loyalty system that will include an NFT marketplace among other things (per Tech Crunch). McDonald's got in on the action, too, using the new technology to bolster customer loyalty and creating something The Spoon likened to a digital version of the classic McDonald's Monopoly promotion. On the whole, we're ready to say "buh bye" to NFT in the food world, but sadly, we doubt they're anywhere near done.