More food stuff

I'm so old that I can remember a time when the Times-Picayune actually printed an entire "Food" section every week. In its heyday, the T-P Food section served as a living document of and monument to the unique food culture of New Orleans. Since the Federal Flood, that section has been folded into the Thursday "Living" section where a food-related feature would run as main item. This week, what remains of the "Food" section are Judy Walker's and Marcelle Bienvenue's modest recipe exchange columns. Marcelle's appears on page 3 while Walker's has been relegated to the teeny tiny bottom left corner of page 1; crowded out by a generic national celebrity news-wire and a massive feature story about a country music festival... coming to Baton Rouge... in May.



Losing the Food section means losing an established vector for the transmission and preservation of our local food culture. Without robust local media, we rely more and more on national outlets and are thus more and more subject to the same rootless trendy post-modernism that has come to define the lost world of American decadence. I watch Food Network too. Some of it is entertaining but most of it is about conspicuous consumption first, faux drama second, and actual food something like ninth. This can't be all there is. This isn't all there is. But more and more our local paper seems to be telling us that's all we're going to get.