Colman Andrews, one of the co-founders of Saveur and currently the restaurant columnist for Gourmet, has a short essay in defense of (over)eating at the New Republic that feels, in a good way, like an excerpt from Between Meals:
It is my opinion that whoever said “Nothing tastes as good as thin feels” has probably never sat down with three ounces of Iranian osetra, a stack of freshly made blinis (the kind that aren’t made with pancake mix), a small bone spoon, and nobody else in the room; or attacked a steaming plateful of fettuccine alfredo made the right way (with only very rich butter and the best parmigiano-reggiano, no cream); or addressed a big, juicy bacon-cheeseburger with homemade fried onion rings and a bottle of Cornas on the side.
Or maybe that person has done all or some of the above and just didn’t like the experience. It’s possible, I guess. We all have blind spots in our appreciative abilities. Vladimir Nabokov apparently didn’t see the point of music. François Truffaut, in so many ways the quintessential Frenchman, considered food a necessary annoyance, and probably would have preferred watching an Ozu movie for the fourteenth time to eating lunch. Me, I wouldn’t care if I never saw Cirque du Soleil again in my life.
Is Andrew’s ode to gluttony just a pleasant personal essay from the man who wrote an entire cookbook on Catalan cuisine (which he described as “monochromatic, murky-looking brown…food made to be eaten, not admired from a few steps back”)?
Or is The New Republic implicitly siding with senior editor Michelle Cottle over senior editor Jonathan Cohn on the issue of the “Twinkie Tax”? For irregular TNR readers: in 2002, Cottle wrote a piece critical of the tax. (It’s available as a PDF.) Cohn, whose excellent book Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Health Care Crisis–and the People Who Pay the Price came out in April, has defended the idea of a tax on junk food.