foodie

food +‎ -ie. Popularized by Ann Barr and Paul Levy in The Official Foodie Handbook (1984). Levy credits New York food critic Gael Greene with the coinage. The word was used by Greene in a 1980 article in New York magazine, see quotations.

• IPA^(key): /ˈfuːdi/

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• Rhymes: -uːdi

foodie (plural foodies)

1. (colloquial) A person with a special interest in or knowledge of food, a gourmet.

   We self-professed foodies liked to meet in restaurants and talk like experts about what we were eating.

   • 1980 June 2, Gael Greene, “What's Nouvelle? La Cuisine Bourgeoise”, in New York, →ISSN, page 33:

     She offers crayfish with white feet or red . . . three ways, tends stove in high heels, slips into the small Art Deco dining room of Restaurant d'Olympe—a funeral parlor of shiny black walls and red velvet—to graze cheeks with her devotees, serious foodies, and, from ten on, tout Paris, the men as flashily beautiful as their beautiful women.

   • 1984, Ann Barr, Paul Levy, The Official Foodie Handbook: Be Modern–Worship Food, London: Ebury Press, →ISBN, page 6:

     Foodies are the ones talking about food in any gathering—salivating over restaurants, recipes, radicchio. They don't think they are being trivial–Foodies consider food to be an art, on a level with painting or drama.

   • 2012 September 28, Steven Poole, “Let's start the foodie backlash”, in The Guardian‎:

     “Foodie” has now pretty much everywhere replaced “gourmet”, perhaps because the latter more strongly evokes privilege and a snobbish claim to uncommon sensory discrimination—even though those qualities are rampant among the “foodies” themselves.

   • 2014, Josee Johnston, Shyon Baumann, Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape‎, Routledge, →ISBN:

     While the Foodie Handbook is now decades old, its message strikes a chord with contemporary foodie discourse, touching on themes like the abysmal quality of mainstream food (e.g., “cheese in plastic-wrapped portions”), the appeal of foodie accoutrement like chefs' knives and gas stoves, as well as the importance of thinking and talking about food (as opposed to just eating well—“pigs can eat well”) (1984: 6–7).

• (person who appreciates good food): chowhound, foodist, foodista (rare), gastronaut, gourmand

• fast-foodie
• foodie-ism, foodyism