So, the challenge posed: "Can we quantify when these food trends emerged, and how quickly they made the transition from urban elites to mass acceptance?"

Yes, and the Times made these charts, among others.

Popularity of Various Foods, 1980-2013

The entirety of all of the data for these trends is based on mentions in The New York Times. All of it. Transparently, yes. Note the caveat:

"If anything, given the paper’s New York-centric restaurant coverage, we might expect it to be a bit ahead of the curve relative to a broader sample of newspapers from across the country."

Which made me wonder, what other trends did The New York Times start? Using the same database of articles, I did a few analyses of my own.

Popularity of Pants

It's interesting to see how pants really took off around 1970, lulled in the early 1980s, and really came into their own in 2010.

Of course, the media landscape is dynamic and sinister, and the Times was thinner at various points in the past. Fewer articles necessarily means fewer mentions of any given thing. So what if you look at the graph as a percentage of articles that make mention of pants?

Popularity of Pants

Pants still seem to have clearly fallen out of favor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

I conjecture in this case that New Yorkers took to wearing pants in the 1860s, and then the trend descended to the flyover states, every ma and pa wearing them. So the City renounced them. Until pants fell out of favor in the backwaters, and were reclaimed by the City in the 1970s.

Or maybe it only works for food.

Popularity of Fondue

I guess this fall, fondue is a fon-don't.

I've been waiting to use that one. Waiting until fondue went out of style. Which I thought it did a while ago? Actually, I have no idea what foods are cool, ever.

Popularity of Ketchup

Popularity of Gluten

Gluten is, you know, a natural plant protein that has been around since the beginning of plants. It is now the driver of billions of dollars in misplaced diet-minding and concern, and a vague notion that gluten-free means healthy. Thank you, New York Times.

And of course there's a broader point to be made about America here as a cultural melting pot. Irwin's analysis:

There is a broader point to be made about America as a cultural melting pot. After all, hamburgers and hot dogs are both Americanized versions of German dishes, and they have now been supplanted by foods with origins in Italy and Mexico. But rather than consider these themes further, we are now getting hungry and have a few ideas for solving that problem.

That's where the article ends.