All I'm saying is that only in the last few months have we seen the words "steel-cut" regarding oatmeal, at least here in LA. Whether home made, steel-cut, rolled, flattened, kicked, or beaten, it was always just oatmeal. It's like everything else here - all these trendy little words and things added to what used to be simple dishes. There was something else I noticed - something called aioli - I'm telling you, I never heard the word aioli until last year and now it's on every menu everywhere.
This just means that LA is finally catching up with the rest of the world.
Part of this labeling that you're noticing is due to people wanting to know where their food is coming from. This is a good thing in many ways, because it means they are paying attention to how their food has been processed before it gets to their table. Knowing how the oatmeal was processed is becoming important to more people that it was before.
It's like seeing something labeled as a "free range chicken." A chicken is a chicken, right? Not so fast. Most of the chickens that we are eating these days have been raised in gigantic barns, in very small pens, where all they do is gorge themselves on grain while waiting to have their necks wrung. The grain they eat is loaded with chemicals to make them grow faster, chemicals to keep them healthy, chemicals to make their breasts get big and fat.
In comparison, a free range chicken has been raised in a yard or a field, feeding on not just grain, but bugs and other juicy tidbits. Because they have been given range, they don't need all the chemicals. The result is a chicken that tastes more like chicken, rather than the cardboardy mush you find in most supermarkets these days.
But beware! Federal regulations only mandate that the chickens be "given access to the yard." This means that, in some cases (and more than I care to admit) the birds were kept in those same barns for the first five weeks of their lives ("the better to keep them safe from disease" is the excuse given), and then their pens only have one small door leading to the outside, which the birds usually never discover, and since chickens aren't known for their curiosity never use even when they do find said door. So some of the birds being labeled as "free range" have, in fact, never ranged at all.