The Big Food Trend Maneet Chauhan Predicted

If anyone knows food, it's Maneet Chauhan. The enthusiastic chef makes and breaks dreams as a judge on Food Network's "Chopped" and still somehow manages to run four restaurants with her husband, according to Worth. Before her judging days, she showed off her cooking skills on "Iron Chef America" and was star-struck to be competing against a longtime idol of hers, Masaharu Morimoto. While she didn't win, that competition only fueled her passion for cooking. 

Being no stranger to the food world, Chauhan has seen food trends come and go, and she can spot a new one from a mile away. In 2019, Parade asked her what she thought the next big food trend would be. Chauhan predicted the classics would make a comeback, and she wasn't wrong. Little did Chauhan know that the upcoming year would lead us to spend a lot of time at home, which had a lot of folks exploring their kitchen for the first time in a while (or ever).

When celebrity chef Maneet Chauhan told Parade we would be "going back to the basics" with food, she was right on the nose. While she probably wasn't anticipating the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns in that 2019 interview, she saw her prediction come true as people who were stuck at home started making traditional foods such as sourdough and banana bread over the course of 2020 (via HuffPost).

The chef celebrates flavors from her native India, merging them with American staples. This isn't to say her restaurants' menus are contrived. In her prediction about food trends, Chauhan even said, "I think contrived food is a thing of the past." She told Parade, "I want the world to see the true beauty of Indian food. This is a cuisine I'm proud of." 

Chauhan notes that certain methods and ingredients just starting to make waves in the food world in 2019 had, in fact, been around for generations. Maybe her food trend prediction was wishful thinking, as she seemed to rue the loss of certain old ingredients and cooking techniques, but she still wins a gold star for her accuracy. 

Just like fashion, food trends don't stick around. While Chauhan called it in 2019, she wasn't too shy to tell Food Network Canada that she finds the term "food trend" annoying. She believes food is simply to be appreciated.