The foods Baltimore put on repeat in 2025, Chris Franzoni for The Baltimore Banner
There’s not a thing wrong with the article. It outlines the foods that Baltimoreans loved this year and where they found them. Every single place mentioned is an indie, a mom and pop, if you will. The menu items described are varied in flavors and cost.
It was a reminder to me of how different it is in Howard County. For the past few years we’ve been experiencing the frenzied proliferation of The Hot Chicken Place. Even if your favorite food is hot chicken, you probably don’t require a world in which the majority* of restaurants that open specialize in hot chicken.
There’s something vaguely weird and inorganic about this local surge and I think I’m beginning to understand it.
To my mind it’s very much like what happens when you express an interest in a particular topic on Facebook and suddenly your feed is flooded with it. The response to your mild interest or moderate curiosity is akin to having someone show up with a cement mixer and cover you with more-or-less related content.
It’s rather horrifying. It’s the King Midas story, updated. The algorithm will take over everything you see and push out topics you want to be following and people you care about. This method of “content delivery” looks a lot like this:
If one magical broom is good, an endless supply must be better!
In fact, this response is not good for human brains. I would guess that most of us don’t want to be flooded. We would rather control the flow of information through our own inquiry. I have found this phenomenon to be so disturbing that it has frequently scared me off of whatever it was that piqued my curiosity in the first place.
There were “fads and crazes” when I was growing up, of course. Television amplified them and a good deal has been written about that already. But this is “fads and crazes to the nth degree.” It feels out of control and borderline malevolent.
I don’t think it’s good for restaurants, either. But restauranteurs must have investors and investors want a sure thing and the great algorithm of the food industry tells them there’s money to be made in Hot Chicken. That’s all well and good until your area reaches and exceeds a saturation point.
Right now there appears to be an advertising war in my Facebook feed between a new food delivery service in Howard County called Feast and Fettle and a service I already use, Hungryroot. It’s almost as through Hungryroot fears I am going to be stolen away by the new upstarts. Stop already!
How much money is wasted on this and similar onslaughts? How lovely it would be if some of it was used to invest in local restaurants whose culinary inspiration was new, creative, and human-centered.
What do you think?
*Some of us are still hoping for a taco truck on every corner but that’s another story altogether.
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