re "foodie"

[Laurence Horn]

The recently published (11/21/11) annual food issue of the New Yorker has a piece on foraging by Jane Kramer ("The food at our feet") that includes this attribution:

"My friends Paul Levy and Elizabeth Luard--writers, foragers, and distinguished foodies (a word that, for better or worse, Levy is said to have coined)--…"

Now the OED has a first cite from the estimable Gael Greene (1980, _New York_ magazine):
She‥slips into the small Art Deco dining room of Restaurant d'Olympe‥to graze cheeks with her devotees, serious foodies.

but I wonder if Greene really made up the term.  Curiously, her use does seem to have predated Levy's, though--one of the Google Books cites starts out claiming that "the original usage of the term 'foodie' is commonly attributed to the British writers Paul Levy and Ann Bar" (in _The Official Foodie Handbook_, 1984) but then goes on to say that Levy and Bar "give credit for the term to New York food critic Gael Green [sic]".

But even if the OED's Greene cite does turn out to be unantedateable, their definition--basically treating "foodie" as a complete synonym of "gourmet", seems a bit off, if only because of the sort of people each term evokes (in both the U.S. and the U.K., as far as I can tell).

LH

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