The History of Portland Food & Drink by Chris Onstad
T IS EASY TO THINK that we live in the heyday of a food revolution the likes of which our city has never seen. However, if the cyclical natures of fashion, literature, and music teach us anything, it is that there is very little new under the sun, and that in each generation are the rediscoveries, fetishizations, and eventual abandonments of but a handful of concepts. Armed with this hypothesis, we scoured the last century’s public records for supporting examples from Portland’s history*. What follows in this guide are colorful bits from our past that while nearly forgotten, serve to illustrate that we are no different from our forebears: They, too, had their revolutions. They, too, had zeniths of outward curiosity and myopic locavorism. And they, too, could not as a people figure out a way to support good Szechuan delivery. I would give anything for that. I really would†. (THE END) * I drank a lot of yerba mate, played Words with Friends for a while, then made all this stuff up. † Seriously, call me. I have some ideas. Maybe we could take advantage of TriMet somehow, or remote-control airplanes.
October 10, 11, 2012 2012 The The Mercury’s Mercury’s Eat Eat & & Drink Drink Guide Guide 15 October