Extraordinary Observations

If there's one street in Washington that's caused much consternation among commuters, it's Pennsylvania Avenue, between the Capitol and the White House. Back in 2010 the city experimented with a new transportation approach: putting the bike lanes in the middle of the street, rather than on the far right, as had been typical. The design is actually quite well-done. The problem is that the quality of the design relies on users following the rules; and far too often that doesn't happen.

This sign at 13th and Pennsylvania sums it all up. On the top, instructions for bicyclists to obey the traffic light; on the bottom, a sign explicitly banning U-turns.


I ride this stretch nearly every day, and almost always see drivers (especially taxi drivers) making U-turns. I also see bicyclists going through red lights. I've never witnessed enforcement for either violation.

The problem with illegal U-turns is that they're dangerous. Drivers have to cut through two bicycle lanes and find an opening in traffic on the other side. The situation got so dire last year that the mayor announced emergency rulemaking explicitly banning U-turns. But he didn't mandate any enforcement, so U-turns regularly occur to this day.

Red-light running is its own problem. I never do it, but plenty of people do. I understand the argument for allowing Idaho stops, but when the signage explicitly says "obey this signal" it would seem that Idaho stops are not justified. The real problem is that red-light running is fuel for the anti-bike crowd's fire. Like it or not, drivers use it to justify their own law-breaking and you can witness this attitude in any debate where a legitimate complaint is lodged against a dangerous driver.

David Alpert has a good overview of three taxi hailing apps that you can now use in DC. I've only used one (Uber) but did recently create an account for MyTaxi. Since I almost never hire rides, I haven't used the latter yet. For the purpose of this post, everything I say about Uber refers only to its taxi service, not its Towncar/SUV service.

In my opinion, the DC taxi industry isn't just bad, it's downright terrible. The economist in me sees the obvious problems: cabbies don't have any incentive to provide good service because people don't really get a choice in which cab they hail, nor can they usually hire the same drivers more than once.

Adding to that, the taxi regulator (DCTC) is extremely weak and cab drivers know they can get away with a lot of abusive behavior (refusing destinations, inefficient routes, discrimination, etc.). And traffic enforcement is weak, so cab drivers also know they can drive like dangerous maniacs and pick up more fares as a result.


David's post is about how these apps change the user experience. I think there's even more to it than that.

Uber, for example, is a new de facto regulator of the taxi drivers that use the service. If I have a bad taxi experience, I can file a complaint with DCTC (and it probably won't go anywhere) and I can file a complaint with Uber (and it's much more likely I'll have the situation resolved or at least get an apology).

If a taxi driver working for Uber provides poor service to enough customers, he could get kicked out. If Uber is generating a decent amount of business for him, this could be incentive enough to provide good service to the passengers who hire him through the app.

The other issue that the technology addresses is anonymity. For a driver that finds passengers via street hails, providing bad service to one customer isn't going to stop another customer from hailing him a few blocks down the street. With Uber, customers get to rate their drivers after each ride, so the driver has the same incentive to earn a good rating on Uber as any business has to earn a good rating on Yelp.

In order for Uber to have enough muscle, they need to generate enough business for cabbies so that the drivers have no choice but to use the service if they want to make any money. If Uber isn't pushing enough business to them, drivers might not care if they get kicked out, because they can always go back to using street hails for business, or sign up with a competing app.

It's too early to tell if any of these apps will make a dent in the DC taxi industry, let alone fix any of the problems. That said, I'm at least optimistic for the time being.

Ashley Halsey III has an article about the millions of dollars that were generated in DC last year via parking tickets. Here's the money quote:

Not counting Sundays and holidays, AAA calculated that the District issues an average of about 7.3 parking tickets each minute.

This is incredible, not because of how many tickets are being issued, but because it shows just how rampant illegal parking is. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that for every one person who gets a ticket for illegal parking, dozens more get away with it. 



A lot of the violations are from people who simply don't pay their meter (which is what it is), but another chunk come from people who park illegally because there isn't a legal space on the street at their destination. So instead of finding a legal space, they double park, park in bike lanes, loading zones, handicap spaces, tow-away zones, or wherever else they can squeeze their car, regardless of whether it's legal. Sometimes they throw on their hazard flashers, as if that makes it OK (though I've never seen that stop a parking enforcement officer from issuing a ticket). 

To some, the problem is too few parking spaces. This is a stretch. DC has plenty of parking spaces, but many of them are in garages. And garages often charge market prices, and people don't want to pay market prices when a much less expensive option is out there. Sometimes garages are a few blocks or more from people's destinations. Often the available legal spaces, even on the street, aren't right next to where people are going.

In this sense, what they really mean is that there aren't enough free or under-priced spaces directly in front of their destinations. What's the solution then? More government subsidized municipal parking lots? Lax enforcement that lets people double and triple park wherever they want without consequence?

Government could build more parking spaces, but the simple fact that those spaces won't all be right in front of where everyone wants to go all the time, illegal parking will continue.

The reason this is such an incredibly difficult issue is because illegal parking is enough of a "victimless crime" that any punishment greater than a monetary fine seems inappropriately harsh. But at the same time, the fines and current enforcement system clearly aren't enough to actually deter people from doing it. The result is that the city rakes in a ton of money, and it's extremely easy for people to cry "extortion" or "scam" when the numbers come out and show that parking enforcement generated $92 million in revenue. 

As Martin Austermuhle writes, nothing that the city will do can ever make everybody happy:

Townsend complains that D.C. charges too much for parking and enforces too aggressively, but at the same time motorists aimlessly circle the block looking for parking. In AAA's ideal world, parking would be (all but) free and enforcement (all but) nonexistent, which would obviously resolve the city's on-street parking woes by...allowing drivers to park all day and without paying a dime?

Of course, there is a world where exactly this exists:  the suburbs. DC has plenty of suburbs in all directions where parking is like heaven (though driving to that parking can be like hell). The great thing about DC is that it's a city and not the suburbs. The other great thing is that people have a choice between whether they want to live in the city and patronize businesses in the city or not. From what I can tell, despite many of the threats and much of the outspokenness, DC's central neighborhoods are doing just fine.

The other day I posted a silly thought experiment about using a van for personal storage and keeping it parked on the street. The analogy was flimsy and people pointed out problems with it (I ignored the costs of registration and insurance, I ignored the fact that the van might get targeted by thieves, and generally speaking, it's kind of a pain for just storing a bunch of junk).

For all those reasons, I was never actually considering doing it; but from the comments it sounds like some people already are (in DC and elsewhere). In any case, now that the conversation is going, I can get a little more serious about the issue.


We know what the market price for parking is in DC, and it's not the same in every neighborhood. In some areas, like around Dupont Circle, a monthly pass for a garage might cost as much as $250 per month. At $35 per year, street parking is offered at roughly a 99% discount to the market price for that area. It seems obvious why so many people would opt for a Residential Parking Permit and try to park on the street, even knowing that space is tight.

Let's forget about the hypothetical person who wants to use a parking space as a storage locker, but instead think of two people whose profiles actually seem common in DC...

Occasionally I joke on Twitter about my  plan to buy an old, beat-up Chevy Astro Van, park it on the street near my house, and use it exclusively as storage space. It sounds ridiculous, but it's actually an interesting thought experiment.


People typically react by saying that doing this would be an abuse of the public parking system. Street parking is supposed to be for parking cars, not storing stuff they say. But in essence, street parking (public space) is used to store automobiles (privately owned things) for little to no cost (it would cost me $35 per year for a residential permit in my neighborhood). Using a van for storage would cost significantly less money than renting a space at one of those self storage warehouses, and it would be a lot more convenient.

Using an Astro Van as a storage locker would cause some pain for drivers in my neighborhood. Since I'd never move the van (except when legally necessary for street sweeping or an emergency no-parking permit holder) the space would never turn over. I'd single-handedly eliminate a valuable parking space from the neighborhood. And yet - doing so is perfectly legal and within my rights, under the current law.

Why is it that if I want to store a bunch of junk, I should have to go pay market price to do so? But if I want to store a car, the city will give me space, near my home, for practically free? That's really the central issue that's going to be at the heart of the many parking debates to come this summer. There will be finger pointing, there will be claims about what street parking should be for, and who street parking should be for and why it should be provided for next to no cost.

At the end of the day there will be a lot of unhappy people. But as I see it, this is an issue that will always have a lot of unhappy people. We're talking about a lucrative government subsidy, after all; and the people who like getting it aren't going to give it up without a fight.

In the last two days I've devoured every article in the Washington Post about the Nationals painful and epic defeat on Friday night in the NLDS. It was a tough way to see the season end, there's no doubt about that.

These articles make it clear that there are a lot of people emotionally invested in professional sports. I think they sometimes they forget that, ultimately, Major League Baseball is big business. Each team is a major corporation and the league itself is an organization governed by a bunch of executives. The television networks that show the games are under contract with the team owners and the games aren't usually available to those without cable.

This is why it can be so hard to be a fan in this game. It's the multi-millionaire and billionaire owners that call most of the shots. They get to decide how much they're willing to spend on players. They get to decide who to hire as the CEO of the company. They get to decide how much they charge their fans for the privileged of attending a game. They get to decide whether having a winning team is more profitable than having a losing team. Hell, they get to decide whether to even stick with their current city or pack up and leave for another.

In this arrangement, the "fans" are really "customers" and the "players" are just "employees" of the company that is the franchise. The fans put their hearts into their favorite teams, but it usually feels like the billionaire owners think about themselves before they think about the fans. Psychologically, fans don't like the idea that they're customers of their favorite team for the same reason college students don't like the idea that they're customers of the school they attend.

There were a lot of shenanigans that got on my nerves at the end of this year's regular season. Lerner's refusal to put up a few thousand dollars to keep Metro open late was at the top of that list. The actual cost would have been chump change, given how profitable a single postseason game surely was. But the refusal to do it made me feel conflicted - how could I be enthusiastic about a team who's owner behaves like such a selfish jerk?

The way MLB handled playoff scheduling and their contract with TBS was another thing that bothers me. The Nationals had the best record in baseball, but only got to play one night game in the five game NLDS. For the first home game of the series, MLB stuck Washington with the 1pm game and decided that it would be shown on the obscure Major League Baseball Network. Even the games shown on TBS seemed amateurish and the commentators were downright terrible.

Should the playoffs be a time to reward teams for their performance in the regular season? Maybe; but MLB's playoff scheduling is deliberately designed to put the most "profitable" games in prime time and stick the less profitable games in the afternoon time slots. The Nationals may have had a lot of success during the regular season, but they didn't have the all important "brand" that MLB cares about.

People like to think of professional sports as a game and not as a business. At least baseball would be a lot more enjoyable for the fans if their interests were aligned with the team owners - winning games. The reality is that fans of some teams have it better than others, but at the end of the day, it's all business, and it's all money.

Jessica Sidman has a well-written story about Yola, the recently-shuttered yogurt/coffee shop in Dupont Circle. I'll admit that I didn't go to Yola especially frequently, though I don't work too far away. That said, it was the kind of business that people frequently say they want in their neighborhood - a warm, inviting shop with lots of seating and better than average food and drinks.


One of the store's partners is surprisingly open about the experience and the hardships that came with it. It's a story that makes me feel pessimistic about doing something as entrepreneurial as opening my own coffee shop in the city. She explains the problem about as explicitly as anyone ever has:

"We are a $5 average check size business in a close to $10,000-a-month rent location. It just doesn’t work. The math doesn’t work.” 

It's easy for an observer to sit back and recount the ways the business was a failure, or how it was doomed from the start. The same thing happened when Mid City Caffe shuttered last year. These people would say "a businessperson who knew what they were doing would have never opened in the first place, because the conditions weren't right".

Unfortunately, that's the reality and the problem. The environment is such that either a bright-eyed entrepreneur tries, and eventually it doesn't work out; or the business simply never exists in the first place. So whether or not it ever gets a chance, it simply isn't a sustainable proposition.

To survive, the business has to make either the revenue side of the equation, or the cost side of the equation, work in their favor. The problem is a classic chicken and egg: in order to make revenue, you need volume, and volume is highest where there's a lot of foot traffic.  Rents are also highest where there's a lot of foot traffic. Given that constraint, how do you make it work?

When I researched and wrote about this last year, the owner of Peregrine Espresso explained it to me in pretty clear terms. You have to keep the rent costs down, which typically means having as few square feet as you can reasonably operate a coffee shop in. It means you do a lot of take out business, and dis-incentivize "camping" at tables. In essence, you make it work by not being a "third place".

 Over at District Bean, coffee guru Jonathan writes:

In the grand scheme of things, though, there is so much activity in the DC coffee scene that the closing of one shop is but a blip in a wave of progress. 

I think he's right, but I also think this points to the divorce between coffee and third places. We'll still have coffee shops, especially ones that serve good coffee, because more people are demanding it than ever. But these coffee shops will either be located in storefronts with virtually no space, requiring you to take your drink to-go; or they'll share space with a business that can successfully cross-subsidize the coffee side, like a bar.

At the end of the day, a business can only be a viable third place if it's also profitable, and I think the days of coffee shops being meeting places or studying places or blogging places are over. Good coffee will live on, but the space where we enjoy it will change.

Tess Wilson has a great article at Apartment Therapy that points out the benefits of schlepping stuff around the city. Her post focuses mostly on the fact that schlepping is good exercise, which it is; but I'd argue that it's even more than that. It's a seeming inconvenience that has plenty of unintended benefits.

Take grocery shopping for example. There are plenty of people who will argue until they're blue in the face that grocery shopping without a car is an unacceptable burden in life. I wouldn't take it that far, but I would agree that it's less convenient and more challenging to do than if you have access to a car.


I don't have a car, so when I do it, it means I have to make strategic shopping choices. I don't buy whole watermelons or 12-packs of Pepsi because those things are really heavy and bulky and difficult to transport without a car. To some people this is a great tragedy.

What would life be without sugary soda and 15 pound melons? To me, it's a blessing in disguise. Schlepping means I keep fresher food in the house, because I'm not tempted to "stock up" on junk that keeps indefinitely in the pantry. It means I have less waste because I don't overbuy.

No, this isn't for everybody, and I've heard dozens upon dozens of reasons why it's impossible for many people and many families. But that's not the point. The point is that sometimes when you look past what seems obvious, and you move beyond seeking out convenience at any cost, what you find might not be quite as bad as you might think. It could even be a blessing in disguise.

The transportation exhibit at the Smithsonian's American History museum is one of my favorites. It's as much about the evolution of transportation technology as it is about the history of suburban sprawl. It's a pretty balanced approach to the issue too.


Last weekend I stumbled across this little nugget in the exhibit:

Americans Adopt the Auto

Cars Everywhere?

For automobiles to become a permanent fixture on the American landscape - rather than simply a toy for the rich - people needed to be convinced that they were reliable, useful, appropriate, and even necessary. In the early years of motoring, not all Americans were convinced that the new "devil wagons" were here to stay. But as people came to value the convenience of the car, and as they adapted it to their own needs, cars became a significant part of everyday life.

This statement is enlightening because today we take for granted that cars rule the urban landscape, and in fact, the "necessity" of them was not immediately obvious when they first came onto the market. In fact, the necessity of them was questioned pretty aggressively.

Today, people believe that cars are absolutely a necessity - and they're not entirely wrong. But it's because we made policy decisions throughout history that made it that way. The reason why sprawl happened the way it did is complex. It's not simply because people wanted it to happen, as some believe; nor is it simply because government pushed it to happen, as others believe. The reason is somewhere in the middle, but it didn't happen by accident.

There's a rant over at the Washington Post about towing companies in the DC area. You can click through and read the article, but it sums up like this: Person can't find a legal parking space in a busy neighborhood. Person decides to park illegally instead. Person leaves the car unattended for ten minutes and car gets towed for being parked illegally. Person gets very upset. Person calls the situation "predatory". The end.


The article makes every indication that the author knew that parking in the space was illegal. There's also nothing to lead the reader to believe the towing company acted in violation of the government's regulations. If there were evidence that the towing company acted illegally, I think it would be more than fair to call this "predatory", but let's examine the situation for how it's described.

This point in particular caught my eye.

So we pulled into one of about four empty spaces outside a dry cleaner that was closed, right next to the building entrance. And, yes, there was a sign that said towing was enforced 24 hours.
I stayed with the car until I had to go up to help my husband lug the piece through the lobby. I put a sign on the car windshield written in Magic Marker: “Moving furniture, back in 10 mins, PLEASE don’t tow,” and put my flashers on. No mercy!

Emphasis mine. I see this every single day: an illegally parked car (usually doubled parked, but sometimes parked in a rush-hour zone) and the hazard flashers blinking, and I don't get it. Why do people think that putting the hazard flashers on makes an illegal parking job acceptable?

If anything, doing this does two things. First, it draws attention to the vehicle, so that the nearest parking enforcement officer can ticket the car, or call for a tow, or both. Second, it's an admission of guilt. The person parking illegally clearly knows it's wrong but does it anyway. You never see legally parked cars with hazard flashers on... The only thing I can think of is that this maneuver might prevent someone else from rear-ending the illegally parked car.

There has been a lot of discussion about ethics in transportation recently. First a debate over whether cameras should be allowed to catch speeders. Then a series of articles about whether it's OK for bicyclists to go through red lights. Now this about whether it's "predatory" for a company to tow an illegally parked car. All we need is someone to write an article about whether jaywalking is acceptable and we'll have hit the transportation ethics trifecta.

One common theme seems to come out in these pieces. A non-negligible number of people will say "it's totally illegitimate and unacceptable to bust speeders or illegal parkers if the speeding or illegal parking wasn't too bad".  There are people who will say "of course bicyclists need to go through red lights for X, Y and Z reasons".

Point is, it doesn't matter what the mode of transportation is in question, law breaking is rampant out there. The question is when and if law breaking should be tolerated. Should going 5 mph over the speed limit be ignored but 15 mph over not? Should illegally parking for 10 minutes be tolerated by illegally parking for 30 minutes not? How do we draw that line?

It's a very difficult conversation to have because the public opinion is not black and white. Instead, we're in a weird gray area where it's really difficult to decide on the appropriate shade of gray.

The Washington DC economy benefits heavily from tourism. Some businesses benefit directly while others take advantage of tourism spillovers. Is Capital Bikeshare in the same boat? I took a look at membership and trip data for one year from April 1, 2011 through March 31, 2012 to get to the answer.

Capital Bikeshare offers a variety of products, from one-day memberships up to annual memberships. Annual and monthly members (registered users) have plastic red keys that allow them to access the system. Everyone else (casual users) use their credit card to access the system for short-term periods. Though not perfect, this makes a nice proxy for locals (registered users) and tourists (casual users).

More short-term memberships were sold during the 12 month study period than for full-memberships. But since full-memberships cost more they ultimately generated more estimated revenue*.


*This is a good time to mention that these are not actual revenue figures. These are estimates that I'm calculating based on membership, trip and price data. The actual numbers are probably slightly different. For example, the revenue statistic for registered users is likely inflated because I'm not taking into account the Living Social deal that Capital Bikeshare ran last year; but for the sake of this post I'll assume a "best case scenario". A more detailed methodology and caveats is posted here.

The real difference comes when you look at how registered and casual users are utilizing the system. Prior work has shown that casual users have a much higher propensity to take rides that incur fees. In fact 97% of registered user trips were less than 30 minutes and therefore generated no revenue. Only 59% of casual member trips were under 30 minutes.

I stumbled across this article yesterday on the Americans for Tax Reform website. It's about how the IRS can (in theory) tax Olympics athletes who win medals, on the basis that those medals are taxable as income. The conclusion of the post is: isn't it outrageous?!


The problem with the simple analysis is that it assumes an absolute worst-case scenario. In other words, they present a chart that shows the tax costs for gold, silver and bronze medals, assuming that the winner falls into the 35% tax bracket ($388,000 per year and above).

Now, some athletes certainly fall into this bracket. The NBA players on the men's basketball team are filthy rich, so it's hard to feel bad that the tax falls on them. A few other high profile athletes, like Ryan Lochte and Michael Phelps get big bonuses from their sponsors and aren't hard-up for money. But I suspect that many American Olympians are of modest means and probably don't pay a 35% marginal tax rate anyway.

The funny thing is that the Americans for Tax Reform article links to a Reuters article that concludes with this:

Still, [Alex Knight, a tax partner at Atlanta’s Habif, Arogeti & Wynne] doesn’t expect to see the IRS chasing after athletes for a slice of their gold. “I have to imagine that would be a public relations nightmare,” says Knight.

Taxation is a funny topic. Nobody likes to pay them, so it's easy to point to any tax, no matter how far fetched and say, "hey look, the government wants to take your money, isn't that outrageous!?" Well, sometimes it's a lot less outrageous than it may sound.

Earlier in the month a series of floods wreaked havoc on the Bloomingdale neighborhood in DC. It was the result of a variety of factors, including weather, geography and out-of-date infrastructure. In short, when it rains really hard and really quickly, water flows downhill into Bloomingdale but there's not enough sewer capacity to carry it away.


The solution? A multi-billion (with a B) dollar project by the water utility to install a sewer tunnel from Bloomingdale to the water-treatment plant on the other side of town (among a handful of other things).

This is not the kind of "sexy" infrastructure project that typically gets a lot of attention. The Silver Line to Dulles is an expensive project  that a lot of people have an opinion on. Capital Bikeshare is a much less expensive project that gets a lot of attention. But a storm sewer?.. it's hard to get people excited about that.

It's probably nonetheless one of the most important infrastructure projects in the city. It's a reminder that when cities get old, things need to be replaced and upgraded. Infrastructure is durable, but it doesn't last forever. When it works like it should, nobody really notices. But when it fails, and people have to suffer through multiple floods in a month - that's when people actually start to notice.

Earlier in the month Kojo Nnamdi spent an hour discussing the challenges that small businesses have in DC when trying to find affordable retail space. Small business have a tough time, even when they can afford to rent space, because landlords are often more interested in leasing to "credit" tenants who they believe are less likely to go delinquent on the lease.

One of the callers into the show brought up the small business culture in Portland, Oregon. This is something I intended to blog last winter, after I spent 4 days in the city.




 People in Portland absolutely love small businesses. It's like there's something in the air or the water there. They will go out of their way to patronize a small business in lieu of a chain business. I'm not sure there's another city where Powell's could not just survive but thrive, for example.

I went to one great little coffee shop in downtown Portland (it was not Stumptown, but it was a few blocks away). The owner told me that he is one of 32 coffee roasters in Portland. Not just a coffee shop, but a roaster. A bar owner I met was basically serving glorified homebrew from a hole in the wall pub, and he explained that Portland has dozens and dozens of microbreweries scattered across the city.

This was incredible to me. By my count, DC has 2 coffee roasters (plus another 2 or 3 in the suburbs); and 3 microbreweries (and a handful more in the suburbs), all three of which opened in the past two years.

There are a lot of reasons why DC isn't Portland, or why pretty much every city isn't Portland, for that matter. There's local laws and regulations, local economies, etc. But one key consideration is simply cultural. In DC, people get excited about the prospect of a new Dunkin Donuts at least as much as a new local donut shop. I got myself into a whole lot of trouble when I asked why everyone was getting so excited about WaWa last year.

Arguably this is the result of the "mixing pot" nature of DC. People come to DC from all over the place. So people from the Northeast feel safe at Dunkin Donuts. People from everywhere else feel safe at Starbucks. People like eating at Chipotle because they remember eating at Chipotle back home. I was the same way for a while. I bought foods and drinks that reminded me of back home. I've seen stopped buying them quite so frequently.

Small business culture isn't non-existent in DC. It's pretty good, actually. But the culture in Portland is just out-of-control good. If I could say there's a single thing about Portland that I wish I could have brought back with me - that's what it would be.

Recently somebody accused me of being a food snob. This was the first time in my life this ever happened and frankly, caught me by surprise. Being called a food snob isn't a title that most people want. Being a called a snob of any kind isn't a title that most people want. When it comes to food though, this is completely backwards - people should strive to be food snobs.


What does that mean exactly? It doesn't mean that you go to fancy restaurants owned by iron chefs. Hell, it doesn't mean that you ever even go out to restaurants. Being a food snob means caring about your food, its freshness, how it's prepared and cooked, and what impact it has on your health.

A person who eats at McDonalds, buys boxed Kraft macaroni and cheese and makes sandwiches with white bread and American cheese wouldn't be considered a food snob.

A person who shops at farmers markets, buys fresh fruits and vegetables, and makes garden salads at home with feta cheese and homemade vinaigrette, paired with pan seared yellow tail tuna might quality as a food snob.

This is a shame, because American society sees the first person as a regular, average Joe. Society sees the second person as some kind of out-of-touch elitist. The second person, nonetheless, is probably also lot healthier and gets to enjoy more interesting and flavorful food.

I think the number of cooking and food-related shows on TV these days is a great thing. I think the fact that there are now two cable channels dedicated to food and cooking is great. Some people believe these shows are the driving force behind the "foodie" movement, and that's a plausible belief. But it's not mainstream - not yet anyway. It won't be mainstream until people who care about food are no longer considered to be "snobs".