MOLLY O'NEILL ISN'T happy about the present state of food writing, and bully for her. O'Neill, longtime food writer for the New York Times, lets it rip in a recent piece in the Columbia Journalism Review (available online at www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17037), arguing that "entertainment, rather than news and consumer education, has been the focus of food stories for nearly a decade. Food porn – prose and recipes so removed from real life that they cannot be used except as vicarious experience – has reigned."

A word here in defense of vicarious experience: It is fine, even life-enhancing, if it is added to, and not substituted for, actual experience. Vicarious experience can stimulate one to action, and the journeys of other people, reported to us through the written word, can – should – broaden our own sense of life. Looking at recipes can inspire you to cook something. The human imagination needs to be fertilized, whether by reading fiction or cookbook recipes or some other means. A life without imagination is no life at all, really.

O'Neill notes that the term "food writer" first appeared in the Times in 1950, but she gives no comparable history for the livelier expression "food porn," which is a pity, as it is a term (along with its close relation and a personal favorite of mine, "lifestyle porn") of surpassing relevance. When O'Neill tells us people buy professional-grade ranges in the hope that they might one day use them, she is plopping herself down right into that Boston Market television ad in which the yuppie matriarch calls out "dinner's ready!" while setting the big bag of takeout on the pristine -- clearly never used – $4,500 Viking range.

Of course it is sick, not to mention funny, that people spend so much time yearning for, and reading bad-food-writer bulletins from, as O'Neill puts it, "a land where pies [cool] perpetually on windowsills." But it is more: it is revealing as to the nature of the culture we have built around ourselves – a culture that moves too fast for human comfort, a culture in which machines are tyrants not servants, a culture that does not question its ethos of more, bigger, better, faster and so cannot understand why its constituents have become unhappy and prone to porny woolgathering.

It is all deeply decline-of-the-West, the honoring of form without substance, the $30 cookbooks with recipes no one makes, the fancy ranges no one uses. Slow asphyxiation by affluence, that is what I see – but I am Spenglerian. O'Neill isn't, and she sees something else: hope, in a renewed connection between ethics and expertise. I hope, but doubt, she is right.