Last week, we read an article in Columbia Journalism Review in which Molly O'Neill, food writer for the NY Times Magazine argues that there has beena shift in food writing from the hard-hitting journalism that characterized the content in the early days of food sections to a more lifestyle-focused, foodie-oriented fashion food writing, which while it may offer possibilities for more artful writing, misses the relevance of it muckraking companion.

Part of the problem with this writing, O'Niell suggests, is that lifestyle writing that keeps its pulse on the latest trends in cuisine, are likely to end up tools of various marketing machines. In essence, food writing, because it responds both to buzz (created by advertising and PR) and to direct lobbying of food writers by food producers, is in bed with it own advertisers, a pay-for-play relationship that she believes compromises her journlistic ethics.

On the other hand, she refuses to question the almost certainly anti-business ethics of the journalistic approach she prefers. Now, I will admit, I'd prefer a journalistic establishment that keeps a challenge of large scale institutions central to its mission, but I am perhaps more skeptical of a notion of objective truth that gets deployed in newspapers and elsewhere. This may be a case where the false-neutral of the "objective" may serve liberal aims, but the epistemological cost is one in which power relations are almost always going to be obscured.

My solution? Aw hell, I don't know. It's just tthat this example shows how fraught even a throwaway section of the newspaper like the food section can be. While I'm trying to spend some energy de-bunking objectivity in my students' writing, I'd also like to see the very same critical interventions that O'Neill's ideal style of food writing proposes, the kind of writing that Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, which we're reading right now in class, attempts to do.