An interesting overview of contemporary eating habits as well as Google 2021 searches tell us. An often underestimated source of data that, in reality, can tell us a lot about current trends in the food world.
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Like every year, the online search giant Google has drawn up the famous “Google trends“, that is, the search trends that characterized the past year. Trends are organized globally or by country, including Italy.
The Italian word for 2021 is Serie A, closely followed by Europeans, which saw the triumph of the Italian national football team. Raffaella Carrà is, as one would expect for obvious reasons that the public does not need to be reminded, the most clicked farewell on the web, in Italy, while Spid is the most sought-after term among the “How to do…?“. Parallel to this last category of 10 words, we have a category dedicated to “How to do … (in the kitchen)?”: The words are 10 and represent the trends of Italian online research relating to food and the preparation of common and very famous dishes .
The ranking opens, without great surprise, with the term “pizza at home”: every comment is obviously obvious, or maybe not … what we have to say, however, is that the popularity of homemade pizza has (re ) saw its explosion during the sadly famous 2020, when the whole world suddenly found itself having to establish a new and profound relationship with cooking and home-made food, out of boredom or out of necessity. The Italians had to physically give up the physical (and sacred) place of the pizzeria, usually frequented on Saturday evenings by all age groups; pizza, however, Italians have not forgotten it, it has never left us, so much so that on Saturday evening at home we “rebuilt” it independently, hastily looking for online tutorials for the preparation of the most famous Italian dish in the world.
We are talking about rituals that are culturally obvious, necessary, totally normal and predictable in the daily life of every Italian family, couple, single, and that is why we brought the ritual of Saturday night with pizza inside the house, pushing more and more people. towards the recovery of a culinary manual skill that they would never have thought of meeting, perhaps relegating it to the generation of their grandparents and nothing more.
The second position is occupied by the timeless Genoese pesto: “Homemade pesto” literally brings back the Google ranking. The homemade preparation of this famous condiment has been, as we all know, profoundly supplanted by the industrial production of the same, which we can find practically everywhere, in Italy and abroad, ready to be opened and quickly added to our pasta pot (such as our hectic pace of life commands). It is interesting to find it directly in the second position: where such interest from consumers comes from? The rediscovered dexterity of the preparation of pizza and bread (which, however, does not appear in this ranking) has expanded like wildfire, touching dozens of traditional preparations, especially if we are talking about low-cost products with a relatively low list of ingredients. short, like that of Genoese pesto.
Third position: the bechamel. The most famous sauce of Italian (and French) cuisine appears in the top 3 of the food-themed research trends of 2021: looking within our country, this sauce is the protagonist of Emilian cuisine, where its use ranges from lasagna to crêpe. Its use is widespread for the oven-baked revision of vegetables such as cabbage and broccoli.
Number four: his majesty, the tomato sauce. How many thousands of canned bottles will be scattered throughout the peninsula? It would be nice to know. The preparation of tomato sauce has never abandoned the Italian culinary tradition, even before Italy became a single nation under the term of republic. Without thinking too much, I think many of you have prepared or received at least one bottle of beer, generally reused for tomato paste. We arrive at the latest preparation of the top 5, a product that has become a global phenomenon, well beyond the Japanese borders: we are talking about sushi.
The trendiest dish of the Japanese tradition has totally conquered the western tables. The phenomenon of acculturation (process of unidirectional or reciprocal influence between two cultures that have come into contact) triggered by sushi on a global scale is undeniable, so much so as to push Italians not to give it up definitively due to covid-19. However, the debate on this dish remains drastically divisive: there are those who love it, those who hate it, those who defend a more Mediterranean style of food, and those who appreciate the speed of consumption (and its instagrammability), without neglecting the widespread sense of insecurity towards hygienic speech.
Position number 6 features a classic of fast home cooking, namely hard boiled eggs. It seems strange, yet the relatively simple preparation of this dish presents various schools of thought: cooking minutes, preference for the internal consistency, capacity of the saucepan, maximum number of eggs to be cooked at the same time, etc etc.
But skipping the rampant psychosis on hard-boiled eggs, let’s focus for a moment on the seventh position: the xenophilic influence is very present in the current food trends in Italy, so that porridge holds this position in the ranking. The most famous product of the Anglo-Saxon breakfast has found a strong interest from Mediterranean consumers, especially in the last two years, following a strong social influence as it was for pancakes not long before. Take oats and let them soak in water for at least an hour; once the typical sticky consistency is reached, put the oats in a saucepan and add some milk, then cook for 4-5 minutes; finally season the mixture with what you prefer, fresh or dried fruit, honey and so on and so forth, the more you put.
We arrive in the last three positions and at number 8 we find the meat broth. Here too I risk repeating myself, because I will never tire of saying it: even in this case we are probably faced with a rediscovery linked to necessity. I come back to talk about Covid, as the main cause of the presence of pizza, pesto and tomato preserves in this ranking: the rule remains the same. The rediscovery of manual skills has spread like wildfire in a large group of Italians who have never stopped in the initial beauty of the (re) discovery of “homemade”, continuing the experiments. This time, however, we are no longer faced with the classic Italian Saturday evening dishes or the rich Sunday lunch, but with a preparation that still today narrates a gastronomic culture that has made the fight against waste its trademark. Everything makes broth, or almost, and some communities of our peninsula know this well, so much so that they have never completely abandoned the consumption of this nutritious “juice”, obtained from low-quality cuts of meat and vegetables of various types. A dish relegated to holidays and lean periods, it is also re-evaluated in the name of a home reality that we want to re-appropriate, in which authenticity is now a strategic value and the lightness of the product an indispensable factor.
Position number 9: homemade ravioli. Let’s go back to the dawn of pasta, to the dawn of its long history. This stuffed pasta is known as early as the 14th century, when the term ravioli appears in the letters of Francesco di Marco Datini, the famous market of Prato. Their notoriety will expand further under the work of the famous Lombard chef Bartolomeo Scappi, who served ravioli with boiled chicken during the conclave of 1549, in which Pope Julius III was elected. Nowadays their preparation is truly national, making it impossible to define their link with a specific place. What we can say is that the term ravioli does not refer exclusively to a single type of preparation, but to a family of preparations that differ in shape, dough, filling and seasoning.
The ranking ends with another extremely simple preparation. At number 10 we find the most famous dish of breakfast made in the USA: scrambled eggs. The xenophilic influence is particularly present in this ranking and the interest in breakfast products is very curious. Starting from the fact that scrambled eggs, at least in the Italian conception of breakfast, are hardly considered as a dish suitable for the most important meal of the day, their spread can generally be linked to the spread of the importance of protein diets. Dietitians and nutritionists have always approved the savory breakfast, bringing the importance of a higher protein intake into the spotlight, at the expense of the croissant and cappuccino combo. US films and TV series have consecrated the popularity of this dish, with a simple and fast execution, for a series of people with a fast lifestyle and, at the same time, attentive to the dynamics of a diet in stark contrast to the (excessive?) of sugars in industrialized food systems.
Food trends change, social trends change, the way of relating to food and of consuming it. Food philosophies and preparation methods are born and die continuously, out of fashion, out of boredom, out of functionality, out of curiosity, out of charm, out of distinction, out of personal satisfaction. Considering the close link between the web and our life, what users have been looking for in the past year can be considered as the mirror of current tastes, established or passing, that characterize our present: simple but certainly useful analysis tools to get a wide-ranging overview of the issue.