YEARS AGO, in my late-'80s days as the bearer of an American Express card, I started receiving an AmEx publication called Food and Wine. I think the magazine was sent free of charge to card carriers, perhaps to boost circulation, or perhaps to cushion the blow of the card's annual fee – a $35 assessment that rather breathtakingly jumped, in the space of a year or two, to $55, at which point I bailed.

For some reason I kept those first few issues. Maybe there were articles I expected to refer to at some later date, or maybe I was just being sentimental. Or maybe I just forgot to throw them out. But I thought of those yellowing, stapled volumes last week, when the latest issue of the magazine arrived in my mail slot – "Food in America" being the cover story. I turned back the cover to find myself staring at a two-page, full-color spread for ... a vineyard? Of course not! This is a magazine about food and wine, after all. The spread was for the new Hummer H2 – a civilian version of the Gulf War pseudotank that's now, we are wittily told, "perfect for rugby moms." The colossus is photographed from a point on the ground just off the right bumper, which gives one the sense of being tied to railroad tracks with a train fast approaching.

Waded in a few more pages. Found another SUV spread, this one for a GMC Denali, a vehicle approximately one-half block in length being breathlessly parked by a mom of some sort – a hurling mom? Then, not far past that, a single page for the huge Ford Expedition (no driver visible – shades of Stephen King's Christine?), then another spread, for the immense Lincoln Navigator, which a woman in handsome pumps is struggling to get into, with the assistance, thank goodness, of power running boards.

There is something pummeling about this sort of advertising – the good life depicted not as enjoyment of food and wine but as ownership of vehicles vast and brutal beyond all reason – and I returned to my dusty back issues (April and May, 1987) to see what I might see. Didn't find a single SUV ad, just a light scattering of rather wordy pitches for BMW and Mercedes. But there were lots of ads for stand mixers and dishwashers and knives.

Quaint, really, to revisit the images of a world in which appearance and reality hadn't entirely lost sight of each other – a world in which a magazine called Food and Wine might actually have ads having something to do with food and wine.

Paul Reidinger