Foodie personal branding
Your dietary values express your agency and identity — and deserve respect
Jeffrey Denny
Everyone loves to learn and indulge your unique and superior dietary needs, practices, and preferences.
So if a server asks about any dietary restrictions, sing them loud and proud. Whether you’re a garden-variety vegan or vegetarian, ovo-lacto-vegetarian, plain old lacto-vegetarian, lacto-intolerant vegetarian, intolerable vegenazi, pollo-vegetarian, pesce-pollo vegetarian, paleotarian, rawtarian, macrobiotarian or flexitarian semi-vegetarian plant-forward.
And if you must admit you love to eat animals, even their sweet, innocent, tender, delicious babies in their own gravy, reject the dishing on you. Rebrand.
You eat fish? You’re pescatarian. Chicken? Pollotarian. Octopus? Your work-life calendar is too slammed to read that book about the incredibly intelligent, charming, funny octopus before book club. Red meat? Ok, carnivore, but only sensitively pasture-raised, grass- and classical music-fed, and life-coached on their journey from farm to dismemberment to table.
You eat everything? You’re not a disgracefully gluttonous omnivore, your diet is literally DIET: diverse, inclusive, equitable and tasty.
What other foodie personal brands do dinner hosts need to respect?
Irritarian
Worse than Irritable Bowel Syndrome, you’ve been a pain in the nether membranes since you were a notorious toddler “picky eater” enslaving your parents.
Even into adulthood your love language is making everyone guess what you’ll eat. But now you’re politically righteous about it and whine on HuffPo if someone does violence to you by rolling their eyes.
Wegitarian
Your appetizer is a quarter head of iceberg lettuce topped with bleu cheese and bacon crumbles and you think it’s eating healthy due to the lettuce. While it’s roughly the calories of a bacon Quarter Pounder with Cheese yet essential to activate the digestive enzymes for a 2,000-calorie dinner including wine and dessert.
Whataburgertarian
On a related note, you say eat my healthcare costs, liberal Deep Nanny State CDC and millions of Americans paying more for insurance because of you.
You barely passed grade school biology, but your Ph.D. in bias-confirming internet research proves that medical science is a liberal hoax. You also welcome life-saving cardiac care on the public dime while hating taxes and socialized healthcare.
Hedgitarian
Just in case, add a side of free statin and Ozempic.
Catalonian
You adore authentic Spanish cuisine because you love to say tapath.
Sagittarian
You only eat the horse part of the centaur you slew with bow and arrow.
Yet like others born between November 22 and December 21, you’re adaptable and flexible with an open mind, strong moral compass and a curious yet misunderstood altruistic nature.
Aries love your humor, wit, and fiery passion. As the most aggressive sign in the zodiac, Aries also loves eating the human part of the centaur. A match literally made in the heavens.
Azerbaijanian
You preen about being globally-minded because you worked for NGOs and few Americans, unlike you, could locate the country on Worldle and know its cultural cuisine. Could be hummus. Could be Hamas. Could be hamburger, since Azerbaijan has over a dozen McDonald’s, mostly in Baku.
Glutenarians
You don’t avoid gluten — you want more.
You foolishly believe modern medicine that says unless you’re among the 1% diagnosed as POC (Person Of Celiac), gluten isn’t the Trump of food ingredients. It’s a natural source of protein, soluble fiber and nutrients. Gluten also lowers risk of exposure to toxic heavy metals, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and colorectal cancer.
Glutenarians say pass the bread! If they’re not low-carb Ketogenics.
Faditarians
Like MAGAs who believe and share everything Trump says because their research and sources confirm it, you swallow and regurgitate every latest healthy eating kick.
Remember Volumetrics? The Grapefruit Diet? Dr. Herman Tarnower’s Scarsdale Diet that failed to improve his health and longevity due to romantic murder? Or back to Dr. J. H. Kellogg’s diet of cereals to lead America to health and away from sin? Flash forward to Kellogg’s® Krave® Double Chocolate cereal, Now With More Real Chocolate.
GenZarian
The Best Generation Ever is proud of eating self-, worker-, and planet-healthy because they love to position as superior to their parents and grandparents who still fund their lives.
Yet Zoomers are also infamous for gobbling tons of salty, sugary, fatty junk food that’s unhealthy for them as well as workers and the planet as it’s extruded by carbon-spewing capitalist factories.
Don’t victimize Zoomers. Stress eating helps to self-medicate their anxiety of having the most triggering, terrifying and traumatizing lives of any generation in history. And also living up to their superior self-branding.
“Sixty-one percent of Gen Z has felt pressure on them since childhood to eat a certain way to communicate their identity and beliefs, which has created negativity and anxiety among this food-obsessed generation,” Ketchum Food Research found.
While GenZarians worry about jobs and long-term financial security, they righteously refuse to work long hours for more pay. But thanks to Zoomernomics, they still have plenty of disposable income for their costly preference for eating out instead of stupidly learning to cook and dine in. “Gen Z eats fast food like no other generation,” Business Insider says.
Chain restaurant execs advise that Gen Z diners prefer their food to be Instagrammable and aren’t worried about money, and even happy to pay extra to get their food delivered when they want it.
Unbornpollotarians
You feel it’s morally impossible to buy eggs to be ovo-anything.
You’re ashamed for stealing the unborn babies of cooped-up single chicken moms who, thanks to old white roosters, lack access to reproductive choices and care. While baby daddy rooster is off getting lucky with some clucky and hanging out with bad eggs like Goosey Loosey and Turkey Lurkey, the infamous barnyard pedophile.
But you can’t stand in front of the Trader Joe’s egg cooler forever trying to suss which eggs are best for the chicken — free-range, cage-free, pasture-raised, Ivy college safe spaces, Canyon Ranch spa weekend, or jetting to climate roundtables at the Davos World Economic Forum? Let alone wonder with your sick mind which came first, the chicken or the rooster?
What if the chickens had free-range access to Pickleball courts? Would being stupid happy make the eggs taste better or worse?
Mikeytarian
You’ll try anything. You’re a food Braveheart, JFK Profile in Cuisine Courage, and a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor recipient for daring to eat foods past the sell-by date and keep going months beyond the expiration date.
You scoff at the performative government warnings. You sniff test. You scrape off the mold. Your fridge preserves what food sissies call garbage.
As a child, you had siblings who said, “Look at this stuff. Some cereal. It’s supposed to be good for you. Did you try it? I’m not going to try it. You try it. I’m not going to try it. Let’s get Mikey. Yeah. He won’t eat it. He hates everything. [Mikey tries it.] He likes it! Hey Mikey!”
As the announcer intoned, “When you bring Life home, don’t tell the kids it’s one of those nutritional cereals you’ve been trying to get them to eat. You’re the only one who has to know.” Lying to children keeps therapists in the money.
Negatarian
You’re a dietary Debbie Downer. Your theme song is Joe Jackson’s “Everything Gives You Cancer.”
To feel safe, you pay premium prices for organic food. Even though, as one recent report says, “there is no reliable evidence showing that organically grown foods are more nutritious or safer to eat.”
Was this from Fox News, shamelessly shilling for Big Agribusiness sponsors? Try Harvard Gazette, in a story headlined, “Is organic better? Not if you follow the evidence, researchers say.” The writer is an Harvard associate in the Sustainability Science Program.
In the negatarian world, the Life cereal announcer would warn, “When you bring Life home, don’t tell the kids it’s loaded with salt, BHT, and gluten. And the milk is poison for the lactose intolerant. And stolen from cow mothers and their babies by Big Corporate Dairy to please Gen Z customers of corporate Starbucks lining up for $10 bespoke frappucinos.”
Douchetarian
You’re like a Trumper: You mock any personal preferences you don’t agree with. Like I’m doing here. Wait, what?
Jeffrey Denny is a Washington writer.
