Foodies are the New Blondes

I often stumble across articles, blog post comments, and other assorted sermons decrying America’s discovery of taste and mocking the foodist sentiment that “foodliness” is next to godliness. (I’m not mocking it mind you)

Here is one such website devoted to such diatribes.

Conspicuous culinary consumption does have its excesses, no doubt. But Pete Wells, food critic for the NY Times, has the right response to these jeremiads.

I’ve read a few of those criticisms, too, and I have found them as puzzling as their authors seem to find food culture. They tend to start well, because they’re mocking the excesses of people who take food too seriously. It’s easy to mock people who take anything too seriously. That’s why mockery was invented.
But when the mockery ends, the pieces I’ve read eventually grow indignant at the very idea that people care about something as insignificant as pleasure. Pleasure is only insignificant if you’re not having any, and I have started to suspect that the people who write these critiques are just upset because everybody else is having too much fun. And then I start to feel sorry for them, and want to send them a dozen cookies from Beurre & Sel in the Essex Street Market. But then I decide that cookies would be wasted on people who don’t know how to have a good time.

Yup. My sentiments exactly.