We are all food-obsessed these days—or feel we ought to be. Now, it seems, intellectuals are getting in on the act. The Spectator has just made the left-wing sociologist Richard Sennett—author of The Fall of Public Man and The Corrosion of Character—its food columnist; historian Simon Schama is soon to be employed in a similar capacity by American Vogue. Whoever next? Will Tariq Ali land a restaurant reviewing gig at the Evening Standard? Will Noam Chomsky soon be instructing readers of Vanity Fair on how to perfect a steak au poivre? Could the reason for this dumbing up of food columns be that intellectuals no longer feel that they can get into print by writing about “serious” topics? If so, they should be reassured that, at Prospect, there will always be an appetite for meatiness of a metaphorical kind.
