Pass the meatloaf & mashed potatoes... please!

ARUGULA.

Even the word sounds dreadful. Seven letters. Four syllables. It's the main ingredient of a nouveau salad. Sometimes the only ingredient.

You'd never confuse arugula with romaine or (God forbid!) plain old iceberg. It's not nearly as leafy or as substantial. But you might confuse it with something as common as grass clippings. But don't tell the purists. They're so into the stuff that they even crave baby arugula. (Why would anybody want to eat "baby" anything?)

This is the new world of faux food - foods, food supplements and adaptations of more basic foods that are now oh-so-chic I call them "designer foods." And designer foods make for phony meals.

I don't know how it all got started. But I do know that dishes made up of these trendy new concoctions are often smaller, pricier and less fulfilling than their more basic counterparts.

A few more that I really hate:

Flatbread. This is a sort of permanently pressed cracker that is so thin it's liable to decompose if you even breathe on it. It's often topped with teeny tiny ingredients designed to make you feel as if you're actually eating something - IF you can pick it up and get it into your mouth. But don't be fooled: Flatbread is flatter than flat and it sure ain't bread. And in a typical upscale restaurant it can cost you between 5 and 10 bucks.

Applewood smoked bacon. Produced via a smoking process that uses applewood chips - up to two pounds to make a slab of bacon from one pork belly. Chefs soak the chips in water, then place them in a large pan over high heat until they begin to smoke heavily. That's when the smoke engulfs the pork.

The whole process is then repeated with fresh chips. Maybe you can tell the difference between this and regular bacon. I can't. I'll take the cheap old-fashioned kind.

Sea salt. Perhaps you've noticed that there's a war against salt. There are even billboards decrying salt as some sort of public enemy. Traditional table salt is pure sodium chloride refined from mined rock salt. Sea salt is obtained by the evaporation of seawater. Gourmets believe sea salt to be better than ordinary table salt.

Still, most people don't notice any difference in taste. Also, the health consequences of ingesting sea salt or regular table salt are said to be the same. But if you prefer designer water to tap water, you'll probably choose the sea salt. I don't need chic salt. Give me my sodium chloride straight, thank you.

Cilantro and chipotle. Yeah, I get it. We want our food to be zippier, spicier, livelier. But do we really have to add cilantro or chipotle to everything? Cilantro has a pungent odor that some people think tastes like soap. It's so ubiquitous and the backlash is so strong that there's now a website called ihatecilantro.com.

Besides being the name of a quick-stop Mexican chain, Chipotle is a smoked-dried jalapeño - a chili. It's brown. It's shriveled. It's zesty. And on a hotness scale of one to 10, it scores as high as six. I don't like the taste of soap and I don't need to burn my tongue to discover that I'm eating something.

Probiotic frozen yogurt. Don't be fooled. It may look like soft-serve but that's not what it tastes like. It has a naturally tart taste. Probiotics are live microorganisms thought to be good for your digestive health. But when my eyes see that tempting swirl, my palate expects something sweet and creamy. Not gonna happen.

I FEAR the foods and flavors here are just the beginning of whole new waves of tastes that will suddenly be proclaimed "au courant." And I haven't even touched on the growing popularity of animal organs. Ugh!

Add all these to old standbys like soy, polenta and flaxseed oil, and you have a sort of nouveau haute cuisine heaven.

As for me, I'll stay right here on earth. Pass the blue plate with the meat loaf and mac 'n' cheese, please.

Daniel A. Cirucci is a lecturer in corporate communication at Penn State Abington. He blogs at dancirucci.com.