The Next Big Thing

by Rhodri Marsden

  Creating New Exciting Cuisines by Fusing Eastern and Western Flavours

  National cuisines are the product of slow evolution, a complex interweaving of ingredients and flavours based on centuries of trial and error. Fusion cuisine of the 1990s was often based on scant minutes of trial and error. And mainly error. There’s nothing wrong with innovation in the kitchen, of course – otherwise we’d all be subsisting on hunks of bison meat torn from the carcass with our bare hands – but fusion cuisine would create a head-on collision between, say, Thai and Spanish cookery, for no other reason than raising a few eyebrows.

  It’s telling that the proponents of misguided fusion cooking largely kept their activities well away from the countries whose culinary traditions they were despoiling; while the British might happily wander into a Chino-Argentinian restaurant in search of sustenance, such an establishment in Beijing or Buenos Aires would have caused untold consternation and distress. If we learned one thing from 1990s fusion, it’s that you can’t stick soy sauce and ginger on a plate of non-Eastern food, call it exotic, price it at $20 and hope to get away with it. These days, practically every chef drones on about how they “use the best ingredients and treat them simply”; this refrain may be annoying, but it’s nowhere near as annoying as, say, sushi stroganoff.

  Refusing to Pay your Taxes

  No government really expects the electorate to enthusiastically embrace the idea of paying more tax, which is why they’re invariably introduced via the back door and concealed as “exciting new initiatives”. But most of us – aside from large corporations, who just shift all their assets offshore – usually just grumble a bit on the Internet and pay up because we’re not that keen on being arrested. But there are situations where we’re pushed to the point of civil disobedience. The introduction of a poll tax for every English citizen was incredibly unpopular in the fourteenth century, and eventually prompted the Peasants’ Revolt. But when a similar tax – rebranded the “community charge” to make it seem more cuddly – was introduced in England and Wales in 1990, the authorities, imagining us to be a supine bunch, probably didn’t imagine that tens of thousands of people would descend on London to protest. But they did.

  And even more striking, people who had never broken the law in their lives took a stand and refused to pay it. As the government’s records of who lived where were incredibly disorganized and inaccurate, those who were renting flats or houses simply kept moving and became impossible to pursue, while homeowners, knowing that huge swathes of the population were standing shoulder to shoulder with them, refused to cough up. In some areas, thirty percent of the population wasn’t paying, and courts were having to deal with thousands upon thousands of cases. Eventually, the anger paid off; in 1993 the less punitive system of council tax was introduced, and we went back to grudgingly paying it.

  Jumping from a Great Height with Elastic Bands Tied to your Ankles

  There are some things that were clearly never meant to be attempted by human beings. Making Baked Alaska. Getting your tongue pierced. Wearing top hats. twenty-four-hour telethons. But of all the activities that we have inexplicably thrown ourselves into en masse in the hope of experiencing pleasure, bungee jumping has to rank as one of the most insane. David Attenborough returned from the island nation of Vanuatu in the 1950s with footage of local men hurling themselves from great heights with vines tied around their ankles in the hope of proving their masculinity, but it took 25 years for the Western world to begin to think of the act as a leisure pursuit.

  Intrepid practitioners of dangerous sports were the first to (literally) take the plunge, but by 1988 the idea of leaping into the blue yonder with only elasticated rope to keep us from smacking into the ground was considered as safe as going on a rollercoaster, and the first commercial bungee jumping ventures started to flourish. Strict safety rules were employed (not least that the length of bungee cord had to be shorter than the distance from the ground) and the vast majority of jumps passed off without incident, but free falling and bouncing around suspended by your ankles was quietly advised against by some doctors, concerned about the effect on your spine, or neck, or blood pressure. When James Bond kicked off the film Goldeneye by bungee jumping over a dam in 1995, the activity was already in decline as millions opted for having a nice sit down instead.

  Creating a Thriving Sub-economy Based on the Resale of Beanie Babies

  After we’d managed to wean ourselves off ridiculous numbers of Cabbage Patch dolls (see Hanging Mass-produced Art on the Walls of your Home) it seems almost inconceivable that a few years later we’d be manically grabbing a new soft toy off the shelves. Beanie Babies didn’t do a great deal more or less than the Cabbage Patch dolls – they obeyed the laws of gravity, they stayed roughly in the position you’d left them in, and never spontaneously combusted; they were, essentially, just bean bags with faces. But the creator of Beanie Babies, Ty Warner, had undoubtedly taken note of the factors that made Cabbage Patch dolls such a success: give them individual names and a birth date, make them thoroughly collectable, and above all make them a challenge to get hold of.

  You couldn’t buy them in bigger stores; demand was satisfied via speciality stores and gift shops, but also via classified ads, trade shows, and, most notably, the Internet. For a period in the late 1990s, 822 various types of Beanie Babies were being auctioned on eBay in frenetic festivals of clicking with thousands upon thousands of pounds changing hands. For many people, it was their first auction experience, so the thrill of outbidding someone only added to the rush of getting one’s hands on, say, the dark blue version of “Peanut” the elephant. Today, thousands of vintage Beanie Babies, still in mint condition with their various tags intact, barely fetch two dollars. It makes you wonder what it was all for.

  Contraceptives that either didn’t appeal to us, or just didn’t work

  It’s probably no coincidence that the act of procreating, and thereby ensuring the survival of the human species, is a uniquely pleasurable one. But its tragedy is to be so pleasurable that we’ve had to spend centuries looking for an effective way of experiencing the pleasure without having to deal with the consequent child-rearing. Such has been our desperation that we’ve resorted to unusual measures – chemical, mechanical and even magical – a few of which did indeed lessen the chance of conceiving, but were mostly as useful as keeping your fingers crossed and hoping for the best.

  Many contraceptives of yore look bizarre today because they were based on a fundamental misunderstanding about the mechanics of conception. Not until the late 1600s was it realized that semen was merely a carrier for the sperm, and the discovery that only one of those sperm needed to be successful wasn’t made until the late 1800s. Had the magnitude of the task of producing an effective contraceptive been apparent in Roman times, it’s unlikely that they’d have bothered continuing with their miserable attempts to use crocodile dung as some kind of barrier, not to mention Pliny the Elder’s idea of getting a man to urinate into a jar, and then drowning a lizard in said urine – a process strangely disassociated with the act of sex itself. Subsequent Byzantine medics didn’t have much of a clue, either; Aëtius of Amida suggested that a woman ought to carry the tooth of a child as an amulet around her anus. “Which child?” “Doesn’t really matter, love, because it doesn’t actually work.”

  Incredibly, with all this ignorance and superstition clouding the issue, some inventions were accidentally moving in the right direction. Viscous substances such as honey marginally slow down the progress of sperm, and acidic ones act as a mild spermicide; so the complex Ancient Egyptian concoction that contained acacia tips (which release lactic acid) could have done the job it was intended to do, although the time consuming process of preparing it would have been a guaranteed passion killer. You may snort, balk or even screech at the idea of using lemon halves as a uterine barrier or pig intestines as condoms, but they both stood more chance of success than attaching severed weasel testicles to your leg, or digging down into a grave a
nd holding the hand of a dead man, both of which were attempted by medieval women who presumably went on to have dozens of children each.

  Some methods somehow persisted for hundreds of years despite having no effect whatsoever; drinking the water that a blacksmith had used for cooling metals was attempted by many desperate women, as was the pointless act of vigorously jumping up and down after sex – as if she wasn’t tired enough already. And then there was douching. The efficacy of douching was still defended as recently as the twentieth century, with Coca-Cola supposedly having particularly magical powers – although for all the good it did they may as well have mixed it with vodka and enjoyed a post-coital booze-up.

  Thankfully, modern medicine has given us a number of effective contraceptives, although some of them have been cumbersome and unpopular (the introduction of the femidom in the 1990s being a good example), while the Pill had the disappointing side-effect of failing to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted infections. Ironically, the most effective method is also the one sanctioned by puritanical religious leaders: abstinence. Unfortunately, it’s also the most unrealistic.

  Rollerblading Rapidly through City Centres

  The feeling of the wind blowing through your hair is a fairly irresistible one, but the steps you take to experience that minor thrill really need to be offset against any associated inconvenience to others. Rollerblading, or inline skating, had a massive surge of popularity in the mid-1990s, to the point where two-thirds of eleven-year-olds in the USA owned a pair by 1997. And as a result, pavements were blighted with two-speed traffic: pedestrians making their way to and fro at walking speed; and rollerbladers on a series of unspecified urgent missions that required them to dodge anyone who didn’t have wheels bolted to the underside of their feet, but frequently left shopping bags upended regardless. Cyclists you can tell to get on the bloody road; not so with rollerbladers.

  They were described in the press as the “bane of modern urban society”, and the rollerblading masses were certainly easy to despise; with their kneepads, CD Walkmen and blatant disregard for their fellow human beings, they also seemed to be under the impression that they were engaged in a fantastically sexy new sport with the unlikely name of “aggressive skating”. This is despite the fact that a set of wheels was doing all the work, and the skaters were burning off fewer calories than those of us who chose to walk. It looked as if the only way of impeding their activities was a return to cobbled streets; but fortunately – whether through new-found consideration for their fellow man or just frustration that we were stopping them going as fast as they would like – they stopped of their own accord.

  Wearing Copious Amounts of Body Glitter

  We don’t like to align ourselves with animals of limited intelligence such as magpies, who are so distracted by shiny objects that they’re incapable of doing anything other than looking at them. But there is something pleasing about watching something sparkle in an iridescent fashion, which is probably why there have been a couple of periods when women chose to adorn themselves with glitter. The 1970s movements of glam rock and disco offered one opportunity, but things got a little out of hand in the mid to late 1990s, when girls weren’t properly dressed unless their hair, lips, eyes, face, shoulders, décolletage and legs were slathered in minute metallic crystals. New York Magazine referred to it as a “sparkle epidemic”, and roll-on glitter applicators facilitated mass glitterizing on a hitherto unimaginable scale.

  There were two drawbacks for the glitterati. Firstly, that the stuff got everywhere. There was no process sufficiently thorough to eradicate all traces of it from your person, it became a permanent feature of the living-room carpet, bathroom sink and pillowcases, and you’d inevitably transfer your glitteriness to anyone you came into contact with – which led to the second problem. Glitter on a man’s face became the new lipstick on the collar – but way, way more difficult to get rid of. Men would effectively be branded, the glitter would betray them, and there were no excuses convincing enough to allow them to get away with it. A few thousand broken relationships and furious hoovering sessions later, and the glitter fad was no more.

  Worrying about the Millennium Bug

  You only need to try getting information out of your bank when their “system is down” to realize that our lives hang precipitously on the reliable behaviour of computers. The realization towards the end of the 1980s and throughout the 1990s that many computer programs had been written, with dubious foresight, to store years with two digits rather than four – and would thus have trouble coping at midnight on the 1st January 2000 – ended up escalating into a wave of fear mongering that wasn’t that far removed from predictions of nuclear war (see Planning your Escape from Nuclear Fallout). Prime-time television-show hosts urged us to stockpile ten weeks’ worth of food, a prominent US politician described the imminent catastrophe as an “electronic El Niño”, and governments blew billions of dollars attempting to rectify the problem.

  Some say that this money was well spent, because as the clock chimed midnight planes failed to fall out of the sky and electronically controlled sewage plants failed to explode. True, 150 slot machines at a Delaware racetrack stopped working, and a few versions of Microsoft Excel had trouble with leap-year calculations. But in laid-back countries like Italy, where officials had shrugged their shoulders and assumed everything would be OK, nothing untoward happened. Suddenly, the media were labelling the fuelling of the Y2K panic as the “hoax of the century”, despite the fact that they were largely responsible for it.

  Putting on a Velcro Suit and Hurling yourself at a Velcro Wall

  Many applications of Velcro would have been fizzing around the mind of Swiss engineer George de Mestral when he first came up with the hook-and-loop idea in the late 1940s, but it’s unlikely that one of those would have been to create amusement by suspending people a couple of metres above the ground on a sticky wall. He would no doubt have been delighted when NASA started using the material for serious purposes on space missions, even if the clothing industry was a bit slow on the uptake – but it wasn’t until David Letterman stuck himself to a wall using Velcro during a live broadcast in February 1984 that the seeds of a quite different money-making idea were first sewn in the minds of wacky entrepreneurs.

  The “sport” of Velcro jumping first took hold in New Zealand, but by the 1990s Americans were eager to run a few metres wearing a Velcro suit, jump off a small trampoline, and slam into a cushioned wall also covered in Velcro. Fairly free of danger (as long as the suit consists of hooks and the wall consists of loops or vice versa), it became a standard fairground attraction along with bucking broncos and bouncy castles – but there was never much of an adrenalin rush, and once you were stuck, all that there was left to do was peel yourself off and do it again. “Absolute madness”, is how a British company still offering Velcro wall hire describes it, and that’s pretty near the mark.

  Making Alcohol Vastly more Palatable to Kids

  Over the centuries, there’s one thing that has remained a barrier to children curious about getting drunk, and that’s the fact that children find alcohol, in the main, pretty unpalatable. Adults learn to adore its various characteristics because of the wonderful side effect of blotting out reality for three or four hours but, on the whole – and certainly to the novice drinker – beer tastes metallic and insipid, wine tastes rough and acidic, and spirits seem to strip the flesh from your oesophagus. Those who couldn’t bear the taste would create saccharine concoctions such as Southern Comfort and lemonade, Malibu and pineapple or Amaretto and cola, but it wasn’t until the appearance of alcopops in the early 1990s that people with unschooled palates could easily down huge quantities of alcohol and get completely legless without grimacing.

  Bacardi Breezers blazed the trail, with their lip-smacking but undeniably alcoholic rum ’n’ fruit mixtures, to be followed by such sugary creations as Two Dogs lemonade, and various varieties of Hooch. While the companies involved may well have claimed to be broa
dening the choice for consumers, their most immediate effect was to inebriate people who had previously not been that interested in drinking. As one writer put it, alcopops were a “fizzy drink which allows alcohol to pass into the bloodstream while bypassing the taste buds.” Governments eventually made concerted efforts to slap taxes on them – which did lessen their consumption, but could never succeed entirely in putting much of a dent in the human need to get legless every so often.

  Imagining that Girl Power would Change Society

  Times have undoubtedly moved on from the state-supported wife beating of the 1500s (see Punishing One’s Wife with Disproportionate Acts of Violence) but, women still earn less money than men for doing the same work, still experience sexual harassment, and still encounter career glass ceilings. In the 1990s, the “third wave” of feminism was doing its utmost to battle these continuing injustices – but the decade wasn’t defined by third-wave feminism; it was defined by Girl Power. The 1990s global phenomenon of five-piece pop act the Spice Girls brought the phrase to the attention of everyone who wasn’t living a hermit-like existence – but it didn’t so much galvanize a women’s movement as encourage ten-year-old girls to dress up in emulation of their favourite Spice Girl archetype, be it Sporty, Scary or Posh.