I graduated college in 1999, but didn’t get my first “real” job, the kind with benefits, until January of 2000. Essentially, I’ve lived my entire “grown-up life” in the aughts and as I ponder the jobs I’ve had, all the traveling I did, friends and lovers come and gone, and a world with many sharp shifts, I also think about what I was eating. It has been both a hungry and fulfilling decade.

cosmoMy friend C.C. and I like to refer to the very early aughts as “The Sex and the City” era. We were both working and playing hard at a dot com way downtown, accruing stock options in lieu of 401ks, and drinking a lot of cocktails. Though I was always a dirty martini girl, the drink du jour was the Cosmo. Then came apple martinis, espresso martinis, a resurgence of Manhattans, and pomegranate martinis. With our 10-dollar drinks, we also scarfed down huge amounts of sushi. Sushi was everywhere, even the grocery store, and I was able to convince my Dad, a meat-and-baked-ziti kind of guy, to try a tuna avocado roll. Dudes in banker blue button-down shirts were eating steak like it was going out of style. Any man who hadn’t sunk his incisors into a wedge of Kobe beef hadn’t yet really arrived.

The stock market had a mini-crash, the dot coms started folding, and I lost my job. I stopped swilling martinis and started doing a lot of daytime reading on Cedar Hill in Central Park. One book passed on to me was The Botany of Desire. “Have you ever heard of Michael Pollan? He writes for the Times,” asked my friend Christina, whose cooking prowess increased as the relationship with her boyfriend grew more serious. “I never thought I would be interested in botany, but this guy really opens your eyes.”

>> Read on for details on the rest of the decade in food >>