foodie

noun

Etymology: From food + -ie. Popularized by Ann Barr and Paul Levy in The Official Foodie Handbook (1984). Levy credits New York food critic Gael Greene with the coinage. The word was used by Greene in a 1980 article in New York magazine, see quotations.

1. A person with a special interest in or knowledge of food, a gourmet.

   “We self-professed foodies liked to meet in restaurants and talk like experts about what we were eating.”

   “She offers crayfish with white feet or red . . . three ways, tends stove in high heels, slips into the small Art Deco dining room of Restaurant d'Olympe—a funeral parlor of shiny black walls and red velvet—to graze cheeks with her devotees, serious foodies, and, from ten on, tout Paris, the men as flashily beautiful as their beautiful women.”