When and why did bowls become a thing?
"Not only do bowls restrict the amount of food in one serving, but the act of eating what you normally eat on a plate out of a bowl might make you more mindful of the food itself. So maybe the bowl trend is just one part of the larger health food trend."
Alia Nahra - Washington University, St. Louis
This arrived in my mailbox today. It's a flyer from a local gourmet pizza bar called Crust. I don't think it's an actual pizza restaurant or even a bar. I think it may just be takeaway, but I could be wrong, and apologies if I am. And I am not going to talk about their pizzas - interesting though they looked. No I'm going to talk about the fact that a pizza specialist is turning to bowls.
And a gradual realisation that bowls are a big thing. And indeed when I looked into it on the net I found that it is huge - especially in America, and especially with respect to a particular kind of bowl food - poké - which somebody described as a sort of deconstructed sushi. Here is one example.
Another time I might talk about poké. Today it's just bowls.
And it occurs to me that the bowls from Crust are really sort of deconstructed pizzas. Well their pizzas anyway. The ingredients in the bowls are also to be found on the pizzas. Is there a whiff of desperation there? Are people eating less pizza and more bowls? If so how come?
"Somehow the bowl—less then a decade ago the object of scorn for coastal hipsters—has become the exact thing those very same people (and I’m one of them!) are lining up to eat." Sam Schube
Sam Schube's short article is mildly amusing. One of the things he says is that the only things you should consider eating out of a bowl at lunchtime with a spoon is soup or yoghurt. Which is sort of true.
When I was a child we did have bowls. But they were, as he says, for soup - we didn't have yoghurt in those days. And rice pudding and apple crumble - our staple desserts. We didn't have pasta either, but in recent years many of us have been eating pasta from a bowl. In fact I prefer pasta in a bowl - it's easier to eat somehow, but my husband prefers a plate. The chopstick eating nations mostly eat from a bowl - again I think it must be easier. And when I went to France I discovered that breakfast included a small bowl/very large cup of milky chocolate or coffee - though in my later visits I preferred a bowl of black coffee, which caused the French much mirth. I'm just not good in the morning, let's leave it at that. At home these days we do not eat much from bowls. Soup yes, some desserts yes - the sloppy ones - and me and my pasta. But otherwise it's all plates.
I think the current craze began with smoothie bowls - well that's what one article said - but surely you drink smoothies from some kind of glass or mug? Anyway maybe they mean those kind of breakfast (or dessert) bowls that look a little like this:
On the left is the ubiquitous açai bowl and on the right, the Mango pitya bowl (pitya is dragonfruit). To me it looks like an awful lot of gloop to get through though there is obviously scope for making them look very pretty. And note the artfully scattered flakes of coconut, seeds and grains - sometimes it's granola or muesli.
This moved on to breakfast bowls - and no I do not mean a bowl of weetabix and rice crispies. It will inevitably have an egg, probably some avocado and a fashionable grain such as quinoa. As per these two:
This one looks a little less healthy, but that's only because of the bacon.
"can anything be healthy if you stick a poached egg on top of it, or kale-ribbons beneath it?" Sam Schube - GQ
I think one reason why we get bowls is that you can hide what is lurking at the bottom - just a lot of leaves most likely - or muesli. You can put something expensive and healthy looking on the top and then fill up the bottom with roughage. Which isn't to say it isn't healthy, but probably not as classy as the top. And it also occurs to me that perhaps it's a logical step onwards from piling everything on your plate into a tower. Though you could see what was at the bottom with that particular craze. You just had difficulty eating it.
The other reason that has been proffered for the popularity of the bowl is that people think they are getting more. The bowls are always filled to the brim - even over the top and so it looks generous - even daunting to me in the case of those smoothie bowls. And have you noticed, none of those bowls have brims? The say this would make it look as if there is less.
I know I have been going on about the look of food and its representation in cookbooks of late, but it is important isn't it? We might not do much about it at home - but some of us do. I briefly visited my daughter-in-law who was preparing lunch for her husband who was working from home. She was only making toasted sandwiches but the slices were from 'proper' bread, and the fillings included avocado, lettuce and other wholesome things. They were artfully piled in between the two slices of toast and then just as artfully sliced in half and positioned to look attractive. I was touched at the care that went into this. Bowls can look gorgeous - and it might well be easier to make them look gorgeous - after all they are not going to collapse in a heap on the plate or slide off the edge are they. The rim holds it in position as does whatever you have hiding at the bottom. Even soup these days is often not just soup in a bowl but has at least a swirl of some kind of cream on the top.
I don't think the poké craze has hit us yet, but it's probably on its way. And interesting that a pizza shop (an unhealthy image even if not deservedly so?) has moved to bowls.
