Do you recognize this man? (photo by Neeta Lind)

Food in our culture has changed quite significantly during the 2000s (the decade, not the all the cumulative years since January 1, 2000). With the advent of immediate 24 hour news cycles and unprecedented access to global publishing platforms, our collective nature to discover, experience, share and create new foods and conversation about them is at an all time high.

We won’t get into the history of the term foodie and how it’s evolved from it’s intended meaning(s). If you’re a foodie, you like food and you love to eat it… and talk about it… and LEARN about it…. and find as much great food as you can (to eat). But it certainly delves even deeper than that. Because your entire food knowledge and perspective cannot simply come from reading Eater (or Serious Eats or watching shows on Food Network). Just because the fooderati have forced Christina Tosi on you as a demi-god (we admit, Crack Pie is seriously like crack) or that you read about behind-the-scenes drama on the set of Diners Drive-Ins and Dives. This does not mean you’re a foodie. It just validates things for your mother when she refers to you to her friend’s at a dinner party: “My daughter knows all the best restaurants. She’s a foodie!”

There’s something innate about our bond with food. Of course, we need sustenance to survive and in fact we’ve never understood the human obsession with gold and how it can drive whole national economies and their currency (Good luck eating that gold during a famine!). But food… it can create bonds between families and cultures, it can warm us up on a cold day and it can make us happy when we’re sad, sad when we’re happy… and everything in between.

What do you think a foodie is? Are you one? Let us know in the comments, we’d like to hear what everyone thinks.