{"id":18195,"date":"2011-02-16T12:00:36","date_gmt":"2011-02-16T18:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=18195"},"modified":"2011-02-16T11:01:25","modified_gmt":"2011-02-16T17:01:25","slug":"18195","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=18195","title":{"rendered":"The Depraved Gourmet"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Call the dour Calvinism of my Scandinavian anscestry rearing its head, but the wave of epicureanism &#8211; the Food Network&#8217;s various paeons to gluttony &#8211; have always rubbed me the wrong way.\u00a0 Part of it is that the whole notion of glorifying ostentatious consumption strikes me as just wrong; you&#8217;re taking what you just plain don&#8217;t need (rural Scandinavians were crunchycons long before there was a term for it).\u00a0 Part of it is the the way some &#8220;foodies&#8221; have turned gluttony into a secular religion, a cult of satiation.<\/p>\n<p>B.R. Myers, writing in Atlantic, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/magazine\/archive\/2011\/03\/the-moral-crusade-against-foodies\/8370\/1\/\">tackles the cult<\/a>.\u00a0 It&#8217;s a long read &#8211; four jumps &#8211; but very, very worth it.<\/p>\n<p>Conclusion?<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I used to reject that old countercultural argument, the one about the difference between a legitimate pursuit of pleasure and an addiction or pathology being primarily a question of social license. I don\u2019t anymore. After a month among the bat eaters and milk-toast priests, I opened [former Motley Crue drummer] Nikki Sixx\u2019s Heroin Diaries (2008) and encountered a refreshingly sane-seeming young man, self-critical and with a dazzlingly wide range of interests. Unfortunately, the foodie fringe enjoys enough media access to make daily claims for its sophistication and virtue, for the suitability of its lifestyle as a model for the world. We should not let it get away with those claims. Whether gluttony is a deadly sin is of course for the religious to decide, and I hope they go easy on the foodies; they\u2019re not all bad. They are certainly single-minded, however, and single-mindedness\u2014even in less obviously selfish forms\u2014is always a littleness of soul.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Jumping to the conclusion, though, shortchanges you of a great read.\u00a0 Go do that when you get a moment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Call the dour Calvinism of my Scandinavian anscestry rearing its head, but the wave of epicureanism &#8211; the Food Network&#8217;s various paeons to gluttony &#8211; have always rubbed me the wrong way.\u00a0 Part of it is that the whole notion of glorifying ostentatious consumption strikes me as just wrong; you&#8217;re taking what you just plain [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-universe-and-everything","category-geekery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18195"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18198,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18195\/revisions\/18198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}