Bowls. They’re the food world’s equivalent of the wheel. Indispensable in any kitchen. You can’t mix a cake batter without one, dough for a loaf or pastry for a pie. Without bowls, the kitchen wheels would come off, and many of the ingredients in the pantry would be as useless and rudderless as a rusting car chassis.

Fads. Fads are like trains and newspaper deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make when they go by, as Douglas Adams once said. The silliest food fad in ages is presently whooshing past, if something can whoosh in slo-mo: the fad of eating something out of a bowl, and the concomitant suggestion that eating food out of said circular receptacle is somehow healthy. What a load of utter bilge. Which could be served in a bowl, thus proving my point.

Poké bowls, acai bowls, Buddha bowls, smoothie bowls. Poké bowls come from Hawaii and contain cubes of raw or marinated fish with rice and vegetables; or modern-day faddist adaptations of that idea. Acai is a berry product that comes in a powder or a frozen puree. Buddha bowls contain pretty much everything a vegan eats. Smoothie bowls? Basically a deconstructed smoothie in a bowl. So not a smoothie then.

Image of a breakfast ‘smoothie’ bowl by blogmood__ from Pixabay

Obviously, there is food eaten out of a bowl that is sublime and seriously good to eat. And obviously, there are dishes which are best served in a bowl. Many pasta dishes for instance, in a gently curvaceous pasta bowl. Many Asian dishes lend themselves to it. And a breakfast bowl can be a very pleasing thing. Even if you insist on calling a bowl of muesli, yoghurt and fruit a smoothie. It isn’t smooth. Sooo… oh never mind.

Image of a cinnamon smoothie bowl by doucefrugalite from Pixabay

But in a world so bereft of substance that people have resorted to inventing the uninventable, bowls are not just bowls. They’re bowls. Uttered breathlessly, with in-the-know eyes and a superior brow. Bowls, darling. Bowls in which whatever is in it tastes better (that is the frequent claim) than it would if it were on a boring old-school plate. Bowls in which everything in it is healthier (yes, it is so claimed, ad nauseam) than the very same things would be if you were to eat them off a slab of slate, a board or a cute little frying pan like they serve calamari in at Ocean Basket.

Now there are all manner of pieces about bowls in online publications and blogs. “Trendy bowl foods – are they healthy?”; “Are Buddha bowls and poké bowls healthy?”; “Breakfast bowls: superfood or just the latest diet fad?”; “The world’s best bowl food”; “Bowl food is taking the world by storm”. Sigh. To many adherents, no doubt bowls are now “iconic”.

Which in a sense they might be. Bowls have been with us since the ancients first learnt that you could adapt your grunts to mean different things, and nascent language and consensual sex were born. Bowls were found in the ancient cultures of Greece, China and North America, with the earliest bowl dated to 18,000 years ago, Wikipedia tells us.

Bowls are reliant on gravity to hold their food as much as the water is held in a swimming pool, or as Widipedia puts it, “the contents of the bowl are naturally concentrated in its centre by the force of gravity”. Gosh, that’s deep.

Everybody has bowls and nobody can remember a time when there weren’t any. In every kitchen cupboard there were soup bowls and cereal bowls, punch bowls, baking bowls and the Chinese bowls you use once every seven years when you have an Asian-themed dinner party.

Bowls are what you get when you run out of fads. You have to make the fad up. Like the wheel. Maybe we should reinvent the wheel as a fad. Paint them shocking pink or cobalt blue; give them jazzy stripes or Seventies zig-zags. Stick wheels to the car roof as a statement of your individuality. Attach old Mini Minor wheels to your car doors. Useful for not damaging your car when you bump into others on the freeway.

Fad-lemmings will be customising their tyres to show how colour-cool they are. The roads will be a riot. Drivers will be blinded or distracted, or dead along the roadsides.

“People are eating more food than ever out of bowls, than opting for regular plates now, a healthy foodie blogger enthuses breathlessly. “Noodles, porridge, oats, cereals, soup, stews and dumplings are usually eaten out of bowls, so this is not the ‘bowl food trend’ that we are talking about. There is another category of ‘bowl food’, which is the rage now, which is all about dishes that could be enjoyed on a plate, but taste much better when eaten in a bowl.” (Disclosure: The blogger quoted here runs health cafes in Mumbai and elsewhere in India.)

Image of an acai bowl of goji berries and more by Ella Olsson from Pixabay

The Takeout is no less effusive: “‘Bowl food’ is a hot new trend where you eat food out of a bowl!” That explains it then. Just like old-school plate food was food eaten off a plate. Observing that “bowlfood” was on the menu for Harry Windsor and Meghan Markle’s wedding reception, the point is made that bowl food makes sense for a gathering so that people can wander around annoying each other while eating out of a bowl with a fork.

So which hand is holding the glass then?

Bowls. Surely the silliest food fad since onion ring mints, candwiches (that’s a canned sandwich) and cans of brown bread. (Seriously. It happened.) They’re all real, actual food fads which, one hopes, quickly died a death.

At least onion ring mints and canned brown bread were fads that centred on food. The bowls trend is about the receptacle itself, regardless of what you put in it.

My favourite food fad – by which I mean topping my list of the most ridiculous food fads I’ve ever heard of – has to be meat-free haggis. Haggis, if you don’t know, is a savoury “pudding” made from the pluck of a sheep. The pluck of a sheep is the animal’s heart, lungs and liver. The pluck is cooked, minced and then wrapped in a sheep’s stomach. Sheep have four stomachs, did you know, but any of them can be used in the making of haggis, whether boiled (most commonly), baked or deep-fried. So a meat-free haggis is…?

Here’s a clue: it’s not haggis.

One imagines it’s marketed at Scottish vegans. Well, good luck with that. I suspect there aren’t a lot in Scotland because, like Yorkshire folk, they’re not given to fancy.

It being Burns Night on Saturday, mind you, this is the perfect time to practise your haggis-making skills.

My long-suffering non-foodie wife, Diane Cassere, has the last word. When I told her what I was writing about, she retorted: “Bowls? It probably suits the vegans, because most of their food is runny.” DM