re: How pretentious is the word "foodie"?

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I made up the specific complaint, I was trying to make the point that self identified foodies always seem to be the first ones to point out the negatives about the experience. Like if everyone had razor sharp senses like theirs we'd all see the deficiency. Foodie = amateur critic that no one wants to hear from.

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Foodism has taken on the sociological characteristics of what used to be known—in the days of the rising postwar middle class, when Mortimer Adler was peddling the Great Books and Leonard Bernstein was on television—as culture. It is costly. It requires knowledge and connoisseurship, which are themselves costly to develop. It is a badge of membership in the higher classes, an ideal example of what Thorstein Veblen, the great social critic of the Gilded Age, called conspicuous consumption. It is a vehicle of status aspiration and competition, an ever-present occasion for snobbery, one-upmanship and social aggression. (My farmers’ market has bigger, better, fresher tomatoes than yours.) Nobody cares if you know about Mozart or Leonardo anymore, but you had better be able to discuss the difference between ganache and couverture.”

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