Food Trends 2012: What We'll See In The Year Ahead

The other day, HuffPost Food brought you the 11 Food Trends we've seen over the past year, from insects to meatballs. But almost anyone can see that there are more kinds of bitters on cocktail menus now than there were a couple years ago. It takes a special kind of soothsayer to pick up on the fainter patterns and subtler accelerations that portend the trends of the future.

Pretender-prophets abound: every food publication and organization, from the James Beard Foundation to foodchannel.com, releases its own predictions for 2012 around this time of year. One tricky thing about predicting the future is that no one can disprove a prediction in advance, so, on some level, you'll just have to trust that HuffPost Food's predictions are as good as anyone else's... at least until December 2012.

Here, then, are the 12 trends we expect to crop up in the culinary world in 2012: