The Absolute Worst Food and Dining Trends of 2024
These are the food phenomena we’d like to bid adieu to in the coming year
While 2024 saw many great things in the world of food and drinks — excellent new restaurants! An actually good season of Great British Bake Off! — there is much that the Eater staff would like to say goodbye to as we move into 2025. Some of these food and dining phenomena, from the benign annoyances to the potentially harmful, are perhaps more than mere trends. But, by naming them here we’re throwing our naive hope out into the universe that in the months to come they will please finally stop.
Too-perfect croissants
As croissants are one of life’s most dependable pleasures, the law of nature holds that there can never be too many of them. I’m certainly not one to disagree, and yet: In this era of extreme lamination, when bakers coax butter and flour toward ever more improbable feats of geometry, we’ve seen a profusion of croissants and other laminated pastries that look like they were designed by AI rather than human hands. They’re just a little too perfect, a little too expectant of deification on TikTok or Instagram. Which is not to say they’re not good. But I like a croissant that’s a little messy, something that reminds me that before there was social media, there was simply pleasure for its own sake. — Rebecca Flint Marx, home editor
The persistence of QR codes
I would like to think that the restaurant world has come a long way since those first dark days of the pandemic. In many thrilling ways, it has. But if there’s one thing that can drag me screaming back to 2020, it’s a menu QR code. And while I understand that some restaurants most likely continue to do this for convenience and cost savings, as a diner, it just makes me meditate on society’s growing estrangement from the natural world and our mostly voluntary imprisonment by our smart phone overlords. Give me a paper menu! Or even a roving chalkboard! Just don’t make me get out my phone; it’s what I do all day, and I don’t want to do it in a restaurant. — RFM
Weird — and extremely limited — restaurant opening hours
It used to be that if you wanted to go out to eat, you had to remember many restaurants were closed Mondays. But lately, I’ve noticed more restaurants closed for entire chunks of the week. Of course, being open seven days a week doesn’t guarantee you’ll earn enough on those days to cover the expense, and restaurants are likely just trying to make the numbers work. But it’s frustrating to find yourself face to face with a restaurant closed on a Thursday night, or inevitably turned away because the hot bakery only open weekends has a line down the block. — Jaya Saxena, correspondent
Functional ingredients in everything
Lately, it seems everything we ingest has to have a purpose: Your hydration powders need to pack enough electrolytes for an Olympic gymnast; your gummies should be flush with vitamins while fighting inflammation and your yogurt chock full of enough probiotics to frighten the FDA. It’s virtually impossible to peruse a grocery store aisle without seeing at least one functional food promising a healthier, happier, more protein-packed you, for just a few more dollars. But rather than signaling greater industry transparency or a meaningful deviation from the diet fads of yore, much of this simply points to the lengths that advertisers and manufacturers will go to sell consumers more while educating them less on what exactly they’re putting into their bodies. — Jesse Sparks, senior editor
AI food slop
This year saw the rise of AI slop of all kinds and I found myself morbidly drawn to Facebook, where my feed has been overtaken by grotesque pictures of AI-generated “food” that strains the limits of our physical reality. Some of the images are passable, sure — until you squint. What appear to be shrimp, at first glance, turn out to be shoddily generated torus shapes: Where there should be a tail, there is only more “shrimp.” A recipe for “carrots” includes an image that looks dubiously like hot dogs, except orange. Jars containing “cheesy pasta” have continuity errors in their drips. It should go without saying that the “recipes” accompanying these pictures are similarly dubious, claiming lists of ingredients that don’t match what’s in the image. The comments, if any, suspect nothing. “This looks so good,” these “people” say, only adding fuel to the dead internet theory fire. It’s hard enough out there for real recipe developers, without everyone’s eyeballs glazed over from all this garbage. — Bettina Makalintal, senior reporter
Raw milk
The consumption of raw milk is a trend that needs to be left behind in 2024 (or, better yet, the 1910s when pasteurization became a requirement for selling milk at grocery stores). Although it shouldn’t need to be said, it bears repeating: Drinking raw milk can make you sick. Unpasteurized milk is full of bacteria that include salmonella and E. coli. The act of pasteurizing, or heating up milk until it’s hot enough to kill such bacteria, does not detract from the overall nutrition of milk. Please stop getting your food supply information from trad wives and carnivore diet influencers. — Kat Thompson, associate editor
