7 Epic Food Trends that Starving Children Didn’t Have Access to in 2013

When this donut-croissant hybrid first reared its yummy little head back in May, thousands of eager foodies waited on line for hours to get a taste of the light, fluffy epic-ness that is Cronut. As Cronut Fever reached epic proportions, devoted crone-heads paid up to 40 dollars for one “black market” cronut – a truly EPIC price and twenty times the average daily income of a family in Mozambique!

2013 saw foodies everywhere rubbing their bellies and doing the Truffle Shuffle. In case you’ve been living under or a rock (or anywhere in the Third World), truffles are highly-coveted subterranean fungi that cost up to $1,200 a pound and require specially-trained pigs or “truffle hogs” to sniff them out. But they weren’t the only truffle hogs oinking for these delectable dirt-diamonds this year. With truffle fries, truffle mac and cheese, and even truffle popcorn, the only place you couldn’t find truffle was in the mouths of the 16.2 million American children who regularly go to bed hungry!

This epic culinary mashup gave new meaning to the term “using your noodle” and was just one of countless ways to “think outside the bun” in 2013. Other epic mashups included burgers with deep fried mac and cheese for buns, tacos with a woven bacon shell, and the most popular mashup among children in Sub-Saharan Africa, unclean water and sadness!

One of the most simple-yet-epic dessert concoctions of 2013 was the Pop-Tart ice cream sandwich: a scoop of ooey-gooey ice cream nestled between two oh-so-yummy Pop Tart pieces. For those who don’t know, like the 25 million children in India who suffer from malnutition and starvation, “dessert” is an additional, just-for-fun meal you eat when you’re already full but still want to chew and taste.

Knowing when and if you’d eat again was one of THE hottest food trends of 2013, though it’s been slow to pick up in less trendy parts of the world like Ghana, Sudan, Burundi, Comoros, Ethiopia, Haiti, Angola, Zambia, Central Africa, Yemen, India and Sierra Leone (these places tend to have the fewest foodies).

There were many epic culinary fads in 2013, but the absolute hottest was being able to supply one’s body with enough calories to continue living.

Here’s to an epic new year and making sure everyone’s a foodie (has some food) in 2014!