THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, February 22 - 23, 2020 |C5
tion, as if avocado toast has oblit-
erated all of the other options in
our heads.
Like high school, food trends
breed a boring culture of confor-
mity. This seems to apply espe-
cially to foods labeled as healthy.
Everywhere you look, there are
chia seeds and blueberries. This
can feel like menu planning on
autopilot. I sometimes think I
will scream if I see another kale
salad; I loved them when they
first appeared, but now they
have been dulled by ubiquity.
In a world of food trends, it
can feel like a radical decision to
eat something different. One
sunny day last May, I was having
brunch at a cafe in Brooklyn
called Rucola. They served toasts
spread with a luscious pale-green
concoction. But wait! For once, it
wasn’t made from avocado but
from fresh garden peas mixed
with mint and ricotta, topped
with radishes. I almost fell off
my chair with surprise and de-
light. It was so refreshing to eat
something different for a change.before piling them onto toast
with chili oil, ricotta and a little
lemon zest. As well as being sus-
tainable, I find this a more satis-
fying plateful of food than avo-
cado, because it has more variety
of texture. Mushrooms on toast
are another overlooked treat—
quickly cooked in butter with a
squeeze of lemon, a dab of sour
cream and maybe a dash of soy,
with or without a poached egg.
It feels good to cultivate un-
fashionable tastes. When you
stop being led by trends, you see
that there is a whole world of de-
liciousness out there for cooks
willing to seize it. Swap your
kale for cabbage; try pearl barley
instead of quinoa.
Another thing I’ve started eat-
ing instead of avocado toast is
smoked mackerel, mashed into a
quick pâté with cream cheese
and a little horseradish, served
over toast with a green salad.
The pungency of the fish might
not be to everyone’s taste, but
that’s OK. We don’t all have to
eat the same thing.If you want to buck a trend,
you could start by branching out
with your savory breakfast
toasts. The British chef Fergus
Henderson covers his toast not in
avocado but in beef fat. Cheese
on toast, aka Welsh Rarebit, is
another half-forgotten classic.
In her 2017 cookbook “Home
Cook,” British food writer Thom-
asina Miers has a lovely recipefor purple sprouting broccoli
with ricotta on toast, but it
would work with any robust
greens in season. You simply
steam the greens until tender,
then stew them for 10 minutes in
oil and garlic until they collapse,Like high
school,
food trends
breed a boring
culture of
conformity.Women
Who Popped
The Question
AN OLD TRADITION
holds that every leap
year, on Feb. 29, women
may propose marriage
to men without censure
or stigma. Sources disagree about
the origin of this privilege. One at-
tributes it to St. Brigid, who became
concerned for all the unmarried
women in 5th-century Ireland and
persuaded St. Patrick to grant them
this relief. Another gives the credit
to Queen Margaret of Scotland, who
supposedly had the custom written
into Scottish law in 1288.
Neither story is likely to be true:
St. Brigid, if she even existed, would
have been a child at the time of St.
Patrick’s death, and Margaret died
at the age of 7 in 1290. But around
the world, there have always been a
few women who exercised the usu-
ally male privilege of proposing.
In the Bible, the widowed Ruth,
future great-grandmother of King
David, asks her kinsman Boaz to
marry her—not with words but by
lying down at the foot of his bed.
On the Bissagos Islands off the
coast of Guinea-Bissau, women pro-
pose by offering the man of their
choice a ceremonial dish of fish
marinated in palm oil.
Queen Ankhesenamun of Egypt,
who lived in the 14th century B.C.,
is believed to have made the earli-
est recorded marriage proposal by a
woman. Based on a surviving letter
in the Hittite royal archives, schol-
ars have theorized that Ankhesena-
mun, the widow of the boy king Tu-
tankhamun, secretly asked the
Hittite king Suppiluliuma to agree
to a match with one of his sons, so
that she could avoid a forced mar-
riage to Ay, her late husband’s
grand vizier. The surprised and sus-picious king eventually sent her his
son Zannanza. Unfortunately, the
plan leaked out and the Hittite wed-
ding party was massacred at the
Egyptian border. Ankhesenamun
disappears from the historical re-
cord shortly after.
The Roman princess Justa Grata
Honoria, sister of Emperor Valentin-
ian III, had marginally better luck.
In 450 she appealed to Attila, King
of the Huns, to marry her, in order
to escape an arranged marriage
with a minor politician. When Val-
entinian learned of the plan, he re-
fused to allow it and forced Honoria
to wed the senator. In retaliation,
Attila launched an attack against
Rome on the pretext of claiming his
bride, capturing Gaul and advancing
as far as the Po River in northern
Italy.
The idea that marriage was a
sentimental union between two in-
dividuals, rather than an economic
or strategic pact between families,
gained ground in Europe in the late
18th century. Jane Austen high-
lighted the clash of values between
generations in her 1813 novel “Pride
and Prejudice”: Lady Catherine de
Bourgh insists that her daughter
and Mr. Darcy have been engaged
since birth, while the heroine Eliza-
beth Bennet declares she will have
Darcy if she wants.
Two decades later, a 20-year-old
Queen Victoria came down on the
side of love when she chose her
cousin Albert to be her husband. As
a ruling monarch, it was Victoria’s
right and duty to make the pro-
posal. As she recorded in her diary
on October 15, 1839, “I said to him
... that it would make me too happy
if he would consent to what I
wished.” The 21-year marriage was
one of the most successful in royal
history.
Although it’s still the custom in
most countries for men to propose
marriage, leap year or not, there’s
more to courtship than getting
down on one knee. As the Irving
Berlin song goes, “A man chases a
girl (until she catches him).”THOMAS FUCHSHISTORICALLY SPEAKING
AMANDA FOREMAN
EXHIBIT
ATTENDANCE AT THESmithso-
nian’s National Portrait Gallery
in Washington, D.C., has more
than doubled since the unveiling
of Barack and Michelle Obama’s
official portraits in early 2018. A
new book, “The Obama Por-
traits,” published by Princeton
University Press in association
with the gallery, sheds new light
on the creation and impact of
these artworks, including exclu-
sive photographs of the Obamas
during their sittings.
Kehinde Wiley, the Nigerian-
American painter who was se-
lected by President Obama to
create his portrait, specializes in
vivid depictions of black men,
often juxtaposing hip-hop attire
with aristocratic poses reminis-
cent of those in Old Master por-
traits. He depicts Mr. Obama sit-
ting in a chair, floating among
foliage and flowers. At the por-
trait’s unveiling, the president
complimented Mr. Wiley’s ability
to show “the beauty and grace
and dignity” of African-Americans.
Amy Sherald, the Baltimore-based artist who painted Mrs.
Obama’s portrait, is known for her elegant, large-scale depic-
tions of black women, often using a palette of grays to cap-
ture their skin tone. She shows Mrs. Obama against a simple
blue background, wearing a patterned dress whose triangu-lar shape dominates the composition. Shortly after it went
on view, a photograph of a 2-year-old African-American girl
staring at Ms. Sherald’s portrait became a viral sensation.
Above, a photo from the book shows Mr. Wiley working
on his portrait of Mr. Obama in 2017.
—Elizabeth WinklerPainting a Presidential Duo
PHOTO BY AIN COCKE. © KEHINDE WILEY 2017
REVIEW
“YOU CAN’T BE VEGANif you
eat avocados,” said a teenage
brother to his sister in a family
that I know. “Avocados are vio-
lent.” His point was that her sup-
posedly ethical decision to re-
place the butter on her toast with
avocado was hypocritical: The av-
ocado trend has made life much
more dangerous for many Mexi-
can avocado farmers, thanks to
the rise of violent cartels that
control the business. The boy
crowed that his sister’s topping
of choice was little better than
“blood guacamole.”
Trendy foods always seem to
follow the same pattern, from
hype to overconsumption to disil-
lusionment. Think of how quickly
almond milk went from being a
cool thing to have in your coffee
to being reviled as a cause of
drought in California, from all
those thirsty almond trees.
(Frankly, it wasn’t that great in
coffee anyway.) Or consider qui-
noa. When it first became popu-
lar, in the early 2000s, we
couldn’t get enough of this grain-
like seed, which was as whole-
some as brown rice but higher in
protein and gluten-free to boot.
Quinoa became a byword for
healthy eating all over the world.
The problem was that the
world’s runaway appetite for qui-
noa meant that the Bolivian
farmers who
grew it could
no longer af-
ford to eat their
own product.
From 2000 to
2008, as the
price of quinoa
increased more
than six-fold,
consumption in
Bolivia plum-
meted as peo-
ple switched to
cheaper and less nutritious carbs,
such as instant noodles. Sud-
denly, our quinoa salads came
with a side order of guilt.
A similar backlash is happening
now with avocado. In a cafe in a
wealthy Western city, few options
feel more blameless than smashed
avocado on toast. This luscious
pale-green concoction on top of
toasted sourdough is what you
choose when you are being “flexi-
tarian” and trying to cut down on
meat. But when millions of people
around the world all decide to eat
avocado toast at the same time,
there are unintended conse-
quences. Apart from the violent
cartels, our love of these rich
green fruits has contributed to de-
forestation and excessive water
use in Mexico and Chile.
The bigger question raised by
food trends is why so many of us
want to eat the exact same thing
at the same time. Human beings
have always been social animals
at the dinner table. Copying each
other when we eat is how cui-
sines are passed on. The trouble
today is that, with the rise of so-
cial media and a vast interna-
tional food trade, the copying has
spiraled out of control, affecting
the whole world. Food trends are
MITCH BLUNTa collective failure of imagina-
TABLE
TALKBEE
WILSONFads like avocado toast and quinoa salad are bad for farmers and
make menus duller. It’s time to cultivate unfashionable tastes.The Pleasure
Of Defying
Food Fashions
Artist Kehinde
Wileyatworkon
his official portrait
of President
Obama in 2017.