One of the people walked quickly and efficiently along the aisles, stopping every so often to grab items from the shelves before moving on, her basket satisfyingly filling with goods.

The other person – me – stood in an aisle with an empty basket, squinting through an old pair of glasses kept in the car for times when I forget my good ones, trying to work out what to make for dinner using items from a store I’d never been in before.

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The efficient woman – a running friend – went to skirt around the dumb woman blocking the aisle until she realised it was me, broke into a broad grin and asked if I’d wandered into the store by mistake, and if I was looking for the public toilet and got lost, it was just around the corner.

Me: “Don’t be rude. I’m trying to expand my cooking horizons but I just get bored in the end and go home and make toast or scrambled eggs. What are you making?”

Friend: “A pulled pork dish using jackfruit. The kids have decided they’re vegetarian so I’ve had to come up with a whole new repertoire of meals, which is why I’m looking for jackfruit. You haven’t seen canned jackfruit in your travels, have you?”

Me: “Maybe. I’ve reached that point where I’m just wandering around getting in people’s way, but I’ve been in here for so long I feel like I’ve got to buy something or they’ll think I’ve been stuffing food in my bag. I need rice. I’ll just get a bag of rice.”

She laughed. Friends can be so cruel.

Me: “I thought you said it’s vegetarian?”

Friend: “It is.”

Me: “Didn’t you say it was pulled pork?”

Friend: “It tastes like pork and when you make it, it looks like pulled pork, but that’s why you need the jackfruit. It gives the texture of pork but vegetarians can eat it.”

Me: “Then why say pork? Why not just say jackfruit dish or pulled jackfruit, whatever the hell ‘pulled’ means?”

Friend: “Because that sounds terrible. Don’t ask me. I’m not the vegetarian. I’m just cooking for a few of them until they turn back into carnivores.”

Me: “Stop feeding them. Easy. They might even leave home quicker.”

I bought my rice and a couple of other things that joined a cluster of items that will probably sit in the kitchen cupboard until an annual clean-up a couple of years from now, when I’ll notice the use-by date and throw them away. Or I’ll make something with them, using only half the required ingredients with the addition of items I’ve got sitting in the cupboard. Hence SPC ham-flavoured Baked Bean Korma with two-minute noodles, chicken variety, hold the chicken salt. You read it here first.

But the jackfruit talk got me interested. I looked up pulled pork/jackfruit recipes and realised how long jackfruit has been a foodie “thing”. It also occurred to me that what I’d just experienced with my friend in the Asian grocery store was the trickle-down effect in action.

Trickle-down economics might be on the nose in most quarters after the global financial crisis and rising inequality in developed and developing countries, but trickle-down foodie-ism is a real phenomenon, as evidenced by the Asian grocery store conversation.

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Jackfruit appears to have been lumbered with the “superfood” tag in 2014 when the World Bank and United Nations identified its potential as a food substitute for Asia. It followed evidence that climate change-linked rising temperatures and changing rainfall were already reducing wheat, corn and other staple crop yields.

The superfood tag led, inevitably, to jackfruit being elevated from an underdeveloped country’s alternative staple, to suddenly appearing in dishes at some of the world’s leading restaurants. Then jackfruit recipes – pulled and not pulled – appeared in a few glossy celebrity chef coffee table/lifestyle books, on local cafe menus and in upmarket greengrocers, on to the level of caring parents/home cooks like my friend, and finally to me at the Asian grocery store on the Easter long weekend.

Which, I’m afraid, means the trendy jackfruit era is over. We’ve reached jackfruit end point. The nadir. Once I’m aware something is a foodie “thing” it means it’s over. Do you get served foams when you go to a restaurant anymore? No. I didn’t think so. I heard of foams in July, 2017, the 23^rd, I think. The day the foam died.

So I’m reasonably certain we reached peak jackfruit trickle-down a week ago when I looked up “pulled pork jackfruit” on Google. Rich countries are just going to have to find a new developing country food staple to call “superfood”, until we get bored and it starts all over again.

The Asian grocery store is very popular. It was established after the decline of another ill-fated species – the video store. Where a busy Asian grocery store now stands is across the carpark from two former video outlets that battled it out for customers for more than a decade.

And it was in the video stores that I experienced another phenomenon debated by economists for the past couple of decades – when consumers can have so much choice that they become paralysed and don’t buy anything. The video stores did that for me.

I’d go in keen and willing to troll through 200,000 different videos, become defeated by the time I’d worked my way up to “J” in the drama section, and walk out too often with Beaches. I’d failed as a consumer yet again, but had no energy to search out the much more interesting videos only a few aisles away.

It was like that in the Asian grocery store. Too much fantastic, exotic choice and I retreated to what I knew, white rice – the Beaches of the food world, minus, thankfully, Wind Beneath My Wings.