In 2008, comedian Patton Oswalt magnificently lit into KFC’s then-gallingly-novel Famous Bowl: a foodstuff that was basically everything on the KFC menu, plopped into a bowl. Mashed potatoes, chicken, corn, and gravy, stuffed into a bucket. “A failure pile,” Oswalt called it, “in a sadness bowl.”
Seven years later, everything is bowl. Rice bowls, dressed with a kicky soy vinaigrette. Quinoa bowls, so virtuous that eating one leaves you glowing, pregnant-lady-style. Freaking freekeh grain bowls, topped with an achingly curated assortment of foraged-for greens, sustainably-raised proteins, and artisanally-pickled toppings, all hewing to a roughly two-to-one Good for You/Bad for You ratio. Hyper-chopped salad, pre-masticated into green gruel, for these purposes, counts as a bowl. So, befuddlingly, does the tortilla-less burrito. They’re everywhere: skinnygirl fashion editors and yoked-up investment bankers alike wait in a line that stretches through the reclaimed-wood doors of salad chain Sweetgreen, down the block, and sometimes even around the corner.
How did this happen? How did the failure pile in a sadness bowl become something that New York, arbiter that it is of a very specific kind of cool, called “the meal of the moment?” And why did we let it?
Here’s a complete list of lunchtime foods that you can and should consume from a bowl, with a spoon:
Soup Greek yogurt?This list, you’ll note, does not include things that you can, but categorically should not, eat in bowl form. Things like burritos. Or rice and massaged kale with lemon juice and mushrooms and a poached egg. Or the aggressively scythed salad. These are not things that you should eat out of a bowl, with a spoon. Spoons are for soup; bowls are for cereal, and yogurt, and baby food. Lunch comes between two slices of bread, or in a wrap, or on a goddamn plate.
When was the last time you ate lunch off a plate?
There’s the lamentable fact, for example, that a sorrel-rice bowllooks great on Instagram.
And the bowl is expanding, trickling down the food landscape. The best-selling menu item at Chipotle (which is, I’m confident, still at least nominally a burrito chain) is the burrito bowl. Taco Bell followed suit with a “Cantina Power Bowl.” Panera Bread serves four varieties of the “Broth Bowl,” which takes the standard nu-bowl ingredients and submerges them in a thin, salty fluid. The hottest restaurant in Los Angeles serves primarily vegetarian-leaning rice bowls. Somehow the bowl—less then a decade ago the object of scorn for coastal hipsters—has become the exact thing those very same people (and I’m one of them!) are lining up to eat. And boy, are we lining up: it’s not unreasonable to wait a smartphone-aided half-hour for your bowl.
To my mind, there’s a constellation of cultural imperatives behind the rise of the bowl. There’s the gradual erosion of the “work” portion of the phrase “work-life balance”; if you’re eating out of a bowl, you’re still free to use a computer. Time spent eating a sandwich is time spent less-than-perfectly-efficiently. Then there are the twin impulses toward healthfulness and shareability. On the one hand, you’ve got the vague, shame-induced sense that we should probably be eating more salads. (A question: can anything be healthy if you stick a poached egg on top of it, or kale-ribbons beneath it?) On the other, there’s the fact that a sorrel-rice bowl looks great on Instagram—and that it telegraphs the fact that you are in fact eating more salad-shaped stuff.
But the thing deep at the heart of the bowl-nanza, I think, is a deep-rooted (and particularly, forgive me, millennial) anxiety regarding food. This one contains all the other things I’ve mentioned—health, social media, desk-work in a “creative field.” It’s the idea that food, too, has become a commoditized signifier, a choice we must make that says something about who we are. Trick is, we’re living in a moment where food choices are so boundless as to be nearly paralyzing. The secret behind the success of the bowl, then, is that it obviates the need for any choice at all. Give me twelve ingredients, stick ‘em in a slope-sided container, and make it such that every bite I take contains things both healthy and pleasurable, “American” and yet “ethnic,” simultaneously efficient and on-trend.
A while back, stopping to pick up lunch at a place near my office, I ordered what they called a “Bliss Bowl.” When I got back to my desk, I learned it wasn’t exactly what I’d thought. The tempting and righteous mix of ingredients—brown rice, chicken, cucumber, spicy chili sauce—that had seemed to make up a health-food bowl were actually components of its exact opposite. Without realizing it, I’d ordered a bibimbap.
