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Ask a bunch of food writers what food trends they observed in 2013, and you get a long list of sometimes surprising answers. “Octopus everything: grilled, carpaccio, salad, escabeche! It’s everywhere!” says Sandra A. Gutierrez, author of
Latin American Street Food. And tacos, she adds. “2013 was said to be the year of the taco.”

Nuts, adds Jeri Quinzio, author of Of
Sugar and Snow: A History of Ice Cream Making, specifically, “the idea of nuts as healthy foods rather than merely fattening ones.”

“Dare I even mention the cronut?” says Casey Barber, who wrote
Classic Snacks Made from Scratch: 70 Homemade Versions of Your Favorite Brand-Name Treats. Introduced in 2013 by New York’s Dominique Ansel Bakery, the croissant-donut hybrid might actually be the only 2013 food trend that is truly new.

But while octopus, nuts, tacos, and most other trends were not first introduced in 2013, they did reach a certain prominence this past year that they lacked before. The same goes for the following five 2013 food trends. Unlike fads of years past (such as the Atkins Diet or the fat-free craze), most of them are actually good.

1. Fermented Food

As fermentation guru Sandor Katz pointed out, fermented foods are neither new nor newly popular. Cheese, beer, bread, and other fermented treats never go out of style. What
is new is our awareness of fermentation and our embrace of it. In years past, many people would cringe at the thought of putting live cultures in their bodies on purpose. The whole goal was to sterilize food to keep from getting sick, right?

Instead of telling themselves that bacteria and yeasts are creepy and gross, Americans are increasingly trying to culture these microbes in their kitchens by making homemade yogurt, kombucha, or sourdough bread. Or, for the less adventurous, buying ready-made fermented products in the store.