November 6, 2002

ONE COOL MORNING last week I opened my San Francisco Chronicle and out tumbled, like one of those wretches who stow themselves away in the wheel wells of jumbo jets, the latest issue of 7x7, the socialite-porn rag that so strikingly resembles a Macy's flyer. I was a little surprised; didn't that funny-money party end many, many months ago? And yet here is a last, bleary-eyed malingerer, sprawled on the sofa amid a welter of empty Skyy bottles as the cruelly rising sun peeks through the miniblinds.

7x7's self-appointed mission might indeed be to "celebrate" San Francisco, but the magazine apparently has a serious civic mission, too. Publisher Tom Hartle reminds his readers that they should not "forget to vote on Nov. 2" – presumably by absentee ballot? Or is 7x7 now published several years in advance?

Amid the titillating fluff (A's pitcher Tony Zito doesn't wear underwear; ripped Levi's fashion exec Junior Pence shows off his belly Sundays at the Lone Star), we find a faux-substantial piece by senior editor Sara Deseran, worrying about the city's sagging national reputation for food. We came in fourth in a Food and Wine readers poll at the end of the summer, it seems (behind not just New York but Chicago and New Orleans too), and now the great hand-wringing begins.

The title of Deseran's piece is "Why We'll Never Be New York City." For some reason the subtitle isn't "And amen to that!" New York may indeed be, as Deseran puts it, a "massive metropolitan area made up of people who never cook at home" whose chefs "have plenty of room to play around with new ideas," but we are never told why this is a good thing – a central question that seems to have escaped the writer's notice. The piece simply assumes that innovation and newness are good and does not recognize that trendiness and fashionability are marketing techniques that play on people's insecurities.

New York is, of course, the globe's capital of status marketing – of selling people the newest, the latest, and the most exotic, and of enriching itself thereby. San Francisco's ethos, by contrast, has generally been less intense and mercenary, and our food culture has been driven less by the lust for celebrity – endless clowns ringing countless bells in frantic bids for attention – than by the transcendent facts of earth and climate and the ingredients they produce. Our food culture is, in an important way, more humble than New York's, and to the extent that a certain modesty about what chefs should be doing to food costs us a place or two in some bogus poll, I am willing to say it's a good thing.