Is there too much sanctimony in today’s food writing?

Stephen Budiansky in The Wall Street Journal has a thought-provoking article about today’s food writing. Among the disturbing traits he notices is the use of the word “preferably,” as in “1 teaspoon paprika, preferably sweet Spanish pimentón dulce”  –  a sure sign of pretentiousness. And there’s the hectoring that accompanies too many recipes, “½ cup brown sugar, preferably fair-trade organic.”

To expand upon his argument that food writing is missing an essential element of humor, he reviews four new cookbooks: Change Comes to Dinner by Katherine Gustafson, Culinary Intelligence  by Peter Kaminsky, The Locavore’s Dilemma by Pierre Desrochers & Hiroko Shimizu, and The Taste of Tomorrow by Josh Schonwald.

Budiansky introduces the books with a note that “Making a cause out of epicurean pleasure has become equally de rigueur in food books. Four new ones all follow the basic template: to amalgamate personal stories of culinary discovery with exhortations to treat food as something meaningful and earnest.”  Among the themes he finds in these books are a surprising dislike of eating, self-absorption, and a nanny approach. In short, as he writes, “…even with the best of intentions, making a cause out of what we eat has a way of coming back to bite us. And likewise that in place of so much earnestness, the ingredient modern food writing could use more of is wit – preferably, the dry kind.”

Together, these four short book reviews provide a lot of food for thought.