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What kind of an eater are you?

We all eat food. But how would you describe your food habits and choices? Do you love ethnic food as a way of a culinary adventure? Do you can your own jams and raise chickens in the backyard? Or is your favorite meal the kind you unwrap from a paper sack, after it was handed to to you through your car window? The way that one eats has increasingly become associated with personal identity.

Taken too seriously, these kinds of labels could border on the ridiculous. But the editors at Stir It Up! decided to have a little light hearted fun, and maybe help make the next dinner party you host more manageable if you have to ask: Do you have any dietary needs? With this list you'll be one step ahead of the game when it comes to pleasing everyone at your dinner table.

Tony Avelar/The Christian Science Monitor
A young student learns the proper way to hold a fork at a formal dinner table during a Mrs. Good Manners class in San Jose, California.

1. Foodie / Gourmet / Gourmand

Cyrus McCrimmon/AP

  • By Stir It Up! editors

Their name has evolved through the decades, but this informed eater has been around since the Neolithic period, when a caveman accidentally dropped a garlic flower in a fire. Nowadays you’ve probably seen their Facebook posts about pan-seared tilapia and homemade white-chocolate-and-raspberry soufflé.

Often, a foodie/gourmet/gourmand will be able to identify the ingredients of a dish just by sniffing or tasting it, and by saying things like, "This East African slow-drip coffee has floral notes." In hipster neighborhoods, FGGs like to be the first to discover a new restaurant or keep seven kinds of flavored salt in their pantries at home. Their friends often get treated to incredible meals, homemade pickles, and well-tested recipes.

Big Mommas are a subset of FGGs – middle-age women (mostly) who like to cook, and they don’t very much care about their waistlines. Salt, sugar, and fat can be found in most Big Momma meals, but they are also the masters of that “special something” that elevates a meal from good to great.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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