What Your New Year's Resolution Should Be, Based On Your Favorite 2024 Food Trend

As another year winds to a close, like so many of us, we have our fingers trepidatiously crossed behind our backs, hoping 2025 will birth a more evolved version of ourselves. We've spent the remaining days of 2024 brainstorming little promises we can set to ensure personal growth during the coming year. But, if we're to treat history as a template for our odds of success, we'll admit that setting resolutions based on blind ambitions, vanities, and even envy proves ultimately disheartening when we break our pledges prior to Groundhog's Day.

A perennial wishful thinker with a thick streak of self-hatred, past resolutions include vows to read a book a week and call our moms more — all of which we fell short of before daylight savings time. So, to shake up the New Year's resolution selection process for us all, we've created a prescriptive list of proactive goals based on the food trends you've followed most during 2024. Like a horoscope or Magic 8 Ball, read along and find the entry most applicable to your habits over the past 12 months and aim at achieving the low-stakes aspiration we believe aligns with or would complement your past years' dining habits without the anxiety of dismay.

As a culture inoculated by remakes, we are now so accustomed to sequels and spinoffs that we enter every new intellectual property fearful of how the current offering might devolve as it passes through the meat tenderizer of an overly nostalgic civilization. But, even with our protective shell of skepticism, we did not foresee 2024's collective reappraisal of the cosmopolitan cocktail. It was first spotlighted by "Sex and the City's" cohort of femme friends ordering the blush-toned cocktail during nights out at New York's hippest hot spots. Now, over 20 years since Carrie Bradshaw and company entered the zeitgeist, another blonde, pop-culture behemoth brought the cosmopolitan back to life.

Widely reported as Taylor Swift's go-to drink, if you too sipped through a significant amount of cosmos over the past year, we're encouraging you to explore your feminine side in 2025. No matter your pronouns, try dipping your big toe into understanding the traditionally coded feminine dimension of your persona in a greater way; take yourself for a pedicure, add a couple of cutesy accessories to your wardrobe, try icing a cake entirely in pastel frosting, invest in an extensive bubble bath routine — whatever femme means to you, you're clearly open to a touch of pink on your palette and would benefit from delving further. Even if you simply set aside time to screen female-directed films or read books written by women, we'd say that's this New Year's resolution done right.

Ah, a trend that just won't stop growing. Tinned fish, a market predicted to earn over $76 billion a year by 2030, saw yet another roaring year in 2024. While we'd never dissuade your love affair with these mermaid-friendly morsels, we nudge any tinned fish fanatics to branch out just slightly by pursuing the art of home pickling and preserving.

If you want your next "Seacuterie board" (a fishy reworking of a classic, meat-heavy, charcuterie board) to sing a tune as alluring as the sirens', we suggest trying your hand at home pickling projects, canning, and even kimchis in 2025. Bright notes lined in vinegar, pickling projects liven up the savory, oily notes of all your favorite tinned fish and bivalves in time for picnic season. Since you clearly appreciate the wonders of preserving, pick a project a month (like a book club), and serve yourself and guests inventive salads, new interpretations of martinis and Gibsons, and gussied-up garnishes all while learning a little about food science along the way.

If you, like Dua Lipa, announced your affection for "dirty sodas," beverages comprised of a base layer of sodas before diluting with juices, creams, and syrups. Originating from Utah's Mormon community, many of whom try to avoid coffee and tea due to their religion, dirty sodas dominated summer's TikTok trends and spawned creations such as Sugar Cookie Dr. Pepper, a Shirley Temple derivative, and Dua Lipa's briefly viral Spicy Pickle Diet Coke.

Somewhere between an Italian soda and a float, if you mixed your way into the trendy, slightly off-beat beverage last year you obviously invested energy in the most current viral crazes and (literally) put your money where your mouth is, so why not give voice to your efforts and start your own writing project, podcast, blog, etctera as a space to air your own ideations and reactions to the world. Whether you start a Substack, a YouTube channel, or go old school and boot up Tumblr's dependable interface, make 2025 the year you document the seasons of your life for everyone to see and for you to reflect on years later.

Brands keep getting wise to the algorithms that rule our pocketbooks. In 2024 alone, we saw the teaming up of Cheetos and Puma, Pringles-inspired Crocs, and even a high-end Kate Spade M&M partnership.

Like personalized license plates meant to announce our affinities toward recognizable, even lowbrow food items, the teaming-up of celebrated companies provides brands an opportunity to attract fans from outside its typical audience. Though we've long waved goodbye to most earmarks from the monoculture, these collaborations provide a collective wink toward well-known brands. And though we type this donning our 2023 McDonald's Hamburgler Crocs, we hypocritically encourage any of our co-fans to seek out local eateries in your city and cheer them on like how Taylor shows up for Travis. Some of our most brag-worthy swag originated from small businesses, and we've made  favorite acquaintanceships via Instagram posts of beloved bites in our area.

Better yet, become the pop-up wiz of your group chat and champion a nomadic restaurant before they even sign a lease on their brick-and-mortar. Akin to liking a band after only the release of their EP, getting in on the ground floor of an upcoming restaurant's fandom feeds your need to peacock while also supporting your local community.

A fad widespread enough to earn an SNL parody, the 64-ounce, Stanley-branded, stainless steel vessels commanded the hydration conversation in 2024. While the brand's specific appeal eluded us, we too sipped from an oversized water bottle throughout work, reminding ourselves to hydrate as we type and scroll the day away.

A fad tethered to health and beauty, take your growing interest in hydration a step further and implement one more step in your skin routine. If your nightly face wind-down ends with a quick rinse, add a moisturizer. If lotion already rests on your bathroom counter, find time to relax in a face mask weekly. A trivial amount of time and commitment can gift your visage a refreshing breather from the toxins we, unfortunately, expose our skin to daily by merely stepping out of the house. But as someone who recently adopted both a bedside humidifier and red light therapy, the mere minutes we spend attending to our face provide us with the self-care session we need nightly.

If you've found peace in public while sipping on the slew of new non and/or low-alcoholic spirits and wines making waves during 2024, then you're evolved enough to take another step toward self-actualization. Though we squirm and fidget through the shortest of meditations, the notion of maturing enough to be able to sit in centered silence without the distraction of podcasts, or true crime shows whirling in the background remains as enigmatic as an "X-Files" episode.

But since you no doubt wake up refreshed and ready to face the world, why not attempt to center yourself even further and attend a sound bath or meditative retreat? Bask in both the glory of self-growth and relaxation by surrendering to chimes intended to release remaining anxieties, soothe, and harness your internal energies. Because you've long since required the comfort of liquid courage in hand to promote your self-esteem, take the aural plunge into a world of actualization we can only dream of entering.

Another sensation circulated over TikTok screens, freeze-dried varietals of popular candies such as Skittles, gummy peach rings, and Jolly Ranchers crushed their way to fame in 2024. Produced by simply removing all moister from sugary morsels, the inviting juxtaposition of airy, lightweight snacks countered with a sizable crackling bite seized upon candy fanatics' fascination with texture.

Now found in convenient stores everywhere, the once obscure treat managed to elbow its way to the main stage, so if you had a hand in freeze-dried candies' popularization, how can you follow up their appeal in 2025? Well, since it seems as if you enjoy staying abreast of the buzziest, Zoomer preoccupations, why not take a risk in 2025 and give yourself a little makeover? Whether it means trimming or dyeing your hair into a style drastically different from your current one, learning a new makeup technique, or simply including a couple of pops of color into your wardrobe, don't let your mouth solely experience the tides of 2025's trends and expand your worldliness into your wardrobe.

All of our favorite bakeries started including tropical notes on their croissants, Danishes, macrons, and more last year. The unexpected sharp bites of passionfruit, guava, and papaya cut through butter and chocolate forming a delicacy as balanced as an Olympic gymnast. If you gravitated to desserts with notes of tropical fruits and rebuffed the classical pain au chocolat we empathize with your tendencies toward the tropical in 2024, but suspect some of the pull perhaps indicates an underlying desire to get out of town.

Like a cold climate dweller who dons shorts anytime the weather pokes above seventy degrees, perhaps your 2024 preference for hard-to-find fruits points to the urge to expose yourself to a little excitement beyond the norms of your daily life. Instead of continuing to pick up tropical pastries, possibly invest in vacationing to somewhere entirely unlike your hometown where you can explore obscure produce in their native environs. If packing your bags for an overseas trip doesn't feel feasible this year, try incorporating local flora into your everyday habits with hikes, walks, and even just closer investigations at the flowers and plants growing around you.