The 5pm Dining blog has a long and unhappy history of predicting future food trends. In particular, our 2010 assertion that tapas were on the way out springs to mind.

Despite one or two flukes, we have almost unerringly backed the wrong horse when it comes to culinary trends.

Occasionally, we have backed the right horse – just at the wrong time.

Fly pie

A good example was last year’s prediction that we would all soon be eating insects. We confidently predicted that the use of insect protein, such as cricket flour, would soon be commonplace as animal protein became more expensive/unsustainable to produce.

We would stick by that prediction but concede that it may yet be a few years down the line before bug flour buns can be found in the supermarkets.

In the same category, the blog tipped seaweed as an ingredient to watch. Well, it did crop up in some unexpected places, such as a flavouring in the Isle of Harris gin.

Has it gone mainstream? Not really but many are predicting that it will be a hot ingredient in 2016.

We also reckoned that smoked and pickled foods would become more popular over the last twelve months.

We got that one sort of right but, since it was a trend which was already well underway, it would be unseemly to take much credit for it.

Demonstrably less successful was our prediction that 2015 would be the year when souping became the new juicing. It didn’t.

In fact, it’s probably more fair to say that 2015 was the year in which soup faded back into obscurity or was replaced by the much more trendy bone broth.

Sugar becomes a bad boy

The most glaring omission was that last year’s food trend blog made no mention of the fact that 2015 would become the year in which sucrose, fructose and dextrose became the new axis of evil.

Sugar was fingered as a major cause for heart disease, obesity and type 2 diabetes in 2015. Expect more calls for fizzy drink taxes and sugar bans in 2016.

The 5pm Dining blog tends to take all food scare stories with a pinch of low sodium salt. Is sugar the new Black Death?

We have no idea. We’re just happy that 2015 was also the year in which the reputation of saturated fats experienced something of a bounce back.

Swapping a can of Irn Bru for increased rations of hot buttered toast seems a reasonable trade off.

The blog will be back tomorrow with some wild stabs in the dark about the hot new food trends of 2016.