NYTimes takes on food

Hats (and heads) off to the New York Times for publishing an excellent Jewish food photo: Meet Andy Kastner, 28, who was dismayed that contemporary rabbinical training doesn't include lessons on how to slaughter animals for kosher consumption, as it once did before Jewish mass-meat-production made local butchers unnecessary. Mr. Kastner goes to a live animal market in Yonkers, chooses a chicken, whispers a blessing in its ear and slits its throat. Talk about a kosher beefcake.

This week's Times magazine is all about food - beginning with Michael Pollan's letter to the future president, also known as Farmer in Chief (we need to solarize our food, he says, instead of eating oil). Other choice pieces are on a San Diego restaurant where no tipping is allowed, on the Vietnamese catfish industry and on a cantankerous restaurateur who kicks customers out of his 20-person eatery if they criticize the food, take cell phone calls or waffle indecisively over his 900-item menu, including 300 varieties of pancakes. It's a feast for the senses, and one of my favorite magazine issues of all time.

However, when I finished the magazine I wandered into a bookshop where one of the newest arrivals was on the meat industry. I began to think about the serious glut of food articles, books, magazines, television shows, and any other kind of media expression of our obsession with dinner. While this is good on the one hand, because our heavily sprayed, high-oil food system is broken and needs help, I worry that saturating every media outlet may cause a public fatigue and we won't have the patience to contemplate yet another craven animal feedlot. And more importantly, my potential readership may grow sick of reading the awful stories behind their shopping carts.

Ironically, the majority of food crisis writers call into question our American propensity to overconsume - we eat too much meat, too much corn syrup, too many imports and too much period. Yet the only way we can process this information is by eating too much news.