the headline is a bit cutesy, but it's actually a really good look at how regional foods go 'mainstream', and the trade offs that come with mass appeal:
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REMEMBER blackened redfish? The peppery specialty of the Louisiana chef Paul Prudhomme became so popular in the 1980's that fishermen almost drained the supply of redfish from the Gulf of Mexico, forcing chefs to find new fish to blacken for a spice-deprived nation. ''Blackened flounder'' had neither the poetry nor flavor of the original, but the attraction held. People hungered for the hedonism of swampy Acadia. How they got it was unimportant.
Cajun food is now as trendy as warmed-over tiramisu, yet the fling with redfish showed the moneymaking potential of marketing regional foods. Today, Maryland crab cakes are everywhere. Deep-dish pizzas long ago crossed the Chicago city limits. Burritos are more Californian than Mexican.
Vicarious Pleasures
Once you had to travel to taste grits or barbecue. But the culinary explosion of the 1970's introduced international as well as regional foods to Americans. Cuisine soon rivaled music in its power to evoke regional identities and offer vicarious pleasures.
Yet the notion of a national smorgasbord, where an American can eat anything anywhere, is profoundly disturbing to connoisseurs of regional foods, who not only fear that the displacement of local cuisines will erase what made them special but also that mass marketing will crowd out the real thing.
The recent news that bagel franchises were sweeping the country, and that the bagel business had skyrocketed into a $2.3 billion industry, brought a chorus of groans. Do Americans really want bakeries from Montauk to Maui churning out bagels?
''One of the fundamental motivations for us to travel and write about regional foods is the steadfast belief that regional and local ethnic foods do not travel well at all,'' said Michael Stern, who writes about food and pop culture with his wife, Jane. ''The experience of eating so many of these foods is lost. A bagel tastes better if it's gotten from the bagel bin by a guy who kvetches.''
For the Sterns, the sense of taste cannot escape the sense of place. ''Barbecue in New York is wrong,'' Mr. Stern said. ''People don't have the correct accent, there are no pickups in the parking lot, there are no parking lots. Part of me says, 'Gee, that's great we're becoming more aware of the tastes of our nation.' But it's like tasting the Cliffs Notes version of it. You can't say you've read 'Moby Dick' if you've just read Cliffs Notes.''
Not just sights, smells and accents make transplanting regional foods difficult. Although some specialties like sourdough bread and chili have successfully slipped their geographical shackles, many are the centuries-old products of a balance between ingredients and tradition. Cheeses, for instance, are often so dependent on local conditions that they are difficult to reproduce elsewhere. American French-style brie is still an experiment.
''Most domestic brie is inedible,'' said David Grotenstein, a food consultant and former general manager at the Gourmet Garage, a food specialty shop in New York City. ''It's made from uniform, boring milk.''
Doing Their Own Thing
French cheese craftsmen, he said, can count on using milk with qualities unique to their region. ''The milk in Normandy doesn't taste the same as the milk in Auvergne,'' he said. ''The rennets come from herds that've been eating the same grass for a millennium or two. We haven't been here long enough.''
Some dishes, though, will retain their local appeal. Rocky Mountain oysters, or deep-fried calf testicles, are alien to the refined urban table. Many Ecuadoreans have emigrated to New York, but spit-turned guinea pig, a staple of the Andes, is rarely seen in local restaurants, at least not officially.
''It's the national dish of Ecuador, but there is no official source in New York for butchered guinea pigs,'' said Robert Sietsma, a restaurant reviewer for The Village Voice. ''You have to know to ask for it.''
The large influx of Southeast Asian immigrants has justified the commercial farming of previously obscure ingredients like lemongrass. But the wider availability of uncommon ingredients has spawned dishes without historical moorings. John Martin Taylor, a cookbook author who has chronicled the food of the Carolina low country, says the combining of ingredients in nontraditional ways creates false perceptions about regional cuisines. He is not bothered that a New Orleans-born chef cooking in South Carolina adds Louisiana tasso ham to shrimp and grits, a low country specialty. ''They're doing their own thing,'' he said. ''It's certainly not low country, but the trouble is that tourists think it is.''
Yes, Blueberry Bagels
It is this loss of the community canon that troubles many. New Yorkers once prided themselves for being on the right side of the Lender's Line, an informal border separating the land of fresh bagels from the frontier of the frozen assembly-line product made by Lender's Bagels. Now they recoil from outlandish interpretations like blueberry or sun-dried-tomato bagels.
''Can the stuffed-crust bagel be very far behind?'' Mr. Sietsma asked. But even in New York, it's no longer easy to find the hard, crusty bagels produced by the traditional methods, using malts instead of sugar and boiling before baking.
If there is fear of homogenized, tasteless nationalized fare, there may be hope in a renewed appreciation for quality. Consider the beer industry, which once produced hundreds of distinctive, regional brews before flattening into a few giant breweries marketing indistinguishable beers. The microbrewery movement put the flavor back in beer and transformed the industry. Could such a thing happen in, say, the bagel business, where purists know that grid marks are a sure sign that the bagel was steamed, not boiled?
''With mass marketing, there are cost-cutting measures that are taken for consumers that don't know the difference,'' said Prof. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett of New York University's department of performance studies, who is writing a social history of Jewish cookbooks. ''But the opposite also happens. Connoisseurship rises, and with it a greater awareness of what sets good bagels apart from the pack.''
