PARIS, Dec 15 — Potato salad. And crying babies. In 2014, some of the big food stories rallied thousands of strangers behind a simple project — to make good potato salad — and sparked heated debate about bringing kids to fine-dining restaurants.

As the year draws to a close, here’s a selection of some of the big food stories that got tongues wagging in 2014, and could carry wider implications in future.

Crying babies
When Chicago chef Grant Achatz took to Twitter to complain about a crying baby at his triple Michelin-starred restaurant Alinea, he unwittingly kicked off a firestorm of controversy that pundits called “Babygate”.

Parents and non-parents weighed in about the etiquette of bringing children to fine-dining restaurants.

The issue was exacerbated by a bigger trend that experts predict could become a growing practice: prepaid, non-refundable tickets for dinner.

When their sitter cancelled at the last minute, the couple decided to take their baby with them rather than lose out on the US$265 (RM926) they had shelled out in advance.

Recently, chefs Thomas Keller and Daniel Patterson also announced plans to introduce a ticketing system to their restaurants.

Look out for the issue of crying babies and crabby children to surface again.

Potato salad
Basically, the guy just wanted to make potato salad. He hadn’t decided what kind yet.

So Zach “Danger” Brown of Columbus, Ohio, took his little project to the crowdfunding site Kickstarter.

The pitch? “I’m making potato salad.” Short and sweet.

Perhaps it was the brevity of his proposal. His candid, simple honesty.

Whatever it was, nearly 7,000 Internet users responded to the modest pitch by throwing money at the guy — US$55,492 (RM193,889) to be exact. The original goal was US$10.

The absurdity of it all made Brown an Internet celebrity, and he was invited to appear on shows suc as “Good Morning America”, “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” and “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon”.

The runaway success of the potato salad campaign is just testament to how the Internet is a wild, unpredictable and powerful — if not strange — place where you just never know what will go viral.

Onions and carrots go haute
As the volume grows louder on the health and environmental hazards of red meat, more and more chefs have chosen to give vegetables the culinary spotlight this year.

French chef titan Alain Ducasse, for instance, did the unthinkable in French gastronomy by taking meat off his the menu at his newly reopened restaurant at the Plaza Athenee in Paris this autumn. Instead, the menu is based on vegetables and fish.

Likewise, one of Los Angeles’s hottest chefs, Roy Choi, created a vegetable and fruit-focused menu at his newly opened restaurant the Commissary, at The Line hotel in Los Angeles.  

AI chef
The restaurant industry is already becoming increasingly automated, with tablets and robots replacing servers and chefs. But this year, IBM rejigged its Watson supercomputer — which famously beat humans on “Jeopardy!” in 2011 — to serve as a generator of culinary creativity.

When prompted to come up with a new recipe, the computer spat out dishes such as Czech pork belly moussaka and Ecuadorian strawberry dessert.

What was once regarded as the last bastion and uniquely human attribute — creativity — is being turned into another automated and mechanised tool by engineers at IBM, who say that cognitive computing could be used to help chefs become more creative. — AFP-Relaxnews