#PORTMANTEAU
HYBRID
MISH-MASH
MASHUP
FRANKEN-FOODS
There’s this chain of high-end salad bars called Mandy’s and, like Pluto’s in California and Salad & The City in Amsterdam, Mandy’s specializes in salads that are made to order. That said, I’ll admit, when many of the options for lunch-on-the-run focus so heavily on grains and meats, having a hefty dose of crunchy vegetables sure seems nice. GoogleMaps indicated that there was a Mandy’s near my house, a mere 5 minutes walking distance. Just hang a right at the end of my block.
Except, I could not find it.
No store front in the vicinity displayed the block-letter seafoam-and-mauve Mandy’s sign. 30 minutes later, I’m still circling the same four blocks like a madwoman. (Never mind that, by this point, I could have gone to the supermarket and back and prepared myself a week’s worth of pre-portioned salads.) At this time, I’m more intent on solving this puzzle than eating an overpriced bougie salad. Dammit.
Dear reader, I’m an advanced GoogleMaps dependent and, given a GPS, I can triangulate my location to a T. What I didn’t realize was that Mandy’s, a salad bar, was located inside another store. Talk about nested establishments.
Montreal has this thing where coffee shops and eateries are embedded inside other non-food stores. How this works on the legal front, I have no clue. But within a one-block radius from me, there is a clothing store with separately owned coffee shop inside it, there’s another trinket store with coffee shop taking up the front half, and there’s a coffee shop inside a children’s ballet studio. Then, there’s Mandy’s inside that other clothing store.
What is it with cross-merchandising [clothes + coffee] or [clothes + food]? Is this doubling up on the semantics of luxury? Is toting around intricate designs in latte art a prerequisite for grabbing a pair of jeans or sending off Little Milly to ballet lessons? Convenient, sure. But, like my exasperated state when I was searching for Mandy’s, these hybrid spaces are tailored for the fashionista/ballet-mom who chances upon the foodstuff, not the foodie/gastronome hungry for a sip or a bite. Which is fine. I’m not pouting at unfairness; I’m more befuddled by the mishmash of capitalist intents and its uncanny similarity to how drugstores and hypermarkets (e.g. Walmart, Target, Amazon) now sell food as well.
Part of the reason why I adore my particular neighborhood is for its tenacious stronghold of single-focus food businesses. There are two butcheries, two bagelries, a produce store, a craft beer market, three bakeries, and a fishmonger, all within one block or two from my apartment. (All we need is a cheesemonger, and I’ll be set #kthxbye.) There’s an inherent delicacy to singularity and uniqueness, a delicacy off of which these single-food businesses thrive. The mom-and-pop shops of yester-times may not be the posterchildren of convenience, but when everything becomes available everywhere, the resulting experience becomes inherently diluted. A decade ago, matcha lattes were a thrill at that one, quirky art-cafe in Long Beach (shout out: VyA!); now that it’s available everywhere, meh.
But, breaking down barriers and (as was the case with Mandy’s) literally being wall-less with other establishments opens up opportunities for creative spark. Food, in its infinite ability to adapt to the times, makes for an exciting platform for hybridizing and mixology.
This notion of hybridity hits me at the same time that my Instagram feed presented me with the pho-ritto: a burrito with vermicelli noodles, slices of gently simmered beef, cilantro, mint, basil, and, of course, sriracha. Incredulousness aside, I started thinking about other food portmanteaus and their linguistic equivalents:
[spoon + fork] = spork
[breakfast + lunch] = brunch
[donut + croissant] = cronut
[Lager + Margarita] = Lagerita
Or, even something that we at Pasta Madre frequently joke about when writing deadlines are looming:
[procrastination + baking] = procrastibaking
…of which I am absolutely guilty. In a food world that is egregiously pushing innovation and cutting-edge product design, mashing together ‘old’ food tropes in order to produce 'new’ food phenomena is insidiously commonplace.
What other food-related portmanteaus are in your world? And, perhaps more interesting, how did this mashup come about? How do portmanteaus blur the lines between distinct foods? How are food mashups held in public perception? To what extent does a food’s hybridity enable or hinder that food to be eaten, desired, or sought after? If you could create the perfect food mashup, what would it be?
Taking the idea of ‘portmanteau’ in all its meanings, this prompt explores the linguistic and material smashing together of distinct foods. Some preliminary ideas to think about:
The German iconoclast currywurst, for example, came about when available spices/condiments during post-war food shortages were thrown together.
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but necessity is also being touted as the go-to rationale for genetically modified foods. (The justification goes, “How else are we going to feed a population of 9 billion?”) Thus, franken-foods are the not-so-cheeky, not-so-innocent versions of hybridity and portmanteau. How do franken-foods animate our perceptions of food?
The mashing together of foods assumes that the resulting product is somehow ‘better’ than the constituents on their own. What are the additive effects of mish-mashing foods together and what is lost? To what extent is the whole greater than the sum of its parts?