Celebrating the extinction of cookbooks

Over at Slate, L.V. Anderson has stirred up a lot of controversy with a provocative essay on why she’s OK with the extinction of cookbooks. In her article, The Future of Cookbooks: They’ll Go Extinct. And That’s OK she makes claim to a number of controversial statements. Among these are: the primary reason people buy cookbooks is to give them as gifts; “The Internet is far superior to cookbooks for helping readers suss out recipe quality;” and those who claim to enjoy the aesthetics of cookbooks are really just expressing some nonsensical sentimental musings.

Her concluding paragraph sums up her case, “Will some cookbook lovers resist these improvements? Yes, but eventually they will all be dead. Will some rich people always seek out obscure memorabilia to display as status symbols or art objects? Yes, but in the future, cookbooks will be quirky art objects in the same sense that typewriters are today. Their value will be in their history, and the rest of us will wonder how anyone ever cooked from them in the first place.”

Needless to say, there are protests — join in the skirmish here.