A New Ingredient

So you thought writing about food nowadays meant dwelling on the pleasures of domestic repasts, evocative descriptions of fresh ingredients, memories of evenings at restaurants and interviews with great chefs? Not at all: it's about ethics.

And while you're, er, digesting those observations, you can whet your appetite with -- these food metaphors have to stop -- this critique of The Table Is Laid: The Oxford Anthology of South Asian Food Writing: "To read about Indian food in English is also to realize the alienating effect of the foreign language. It makes the ordinary daaler bora turn into unfamiliar lentil cakes, as Buddhadeva Bose pointed out in a delightful essay on Indian food, but cannot distinguish the fried nuggets from the sun-dried daaler bori."