It's refreshing to see a food writer who understands just how tiresome and tiring food writing has become. Most current restaurant reviews are nothing more than a crush of adjectives and bad metaphors. What's more, food writing has degenerated into a sort of cartoonish erotica.

The thing that bothers me most, though, is the fact that so little food writers seem to grasp the concept that food is much more than what's on the plate. Ann Bauer's observation that people relax and become gregarious over good food is an important and often overlooked element of dining. The very best food writers - M.F.K Fisher, Ruth Reichl, and Ernest Hemingway spring to mind - have an earthy, gut-level quality that is the polar opposite of the fussy, precious gastroporn that's currently in vogue. For them and others like them, food is inseparable from other basic pleasures: company, conversation, creativity, warmth, sustenance, comfort, memory.

The very term "food porn" is telling. Porn has less than nothing to do with real sex, doesn't it? It's a glossy imitation of reality. Porn has its place, but it's certainly no substitute for actual, messy, affectionate lovemaking between people who care for one another a great deal. Food porn is to food what porn is to sex: a slick, stylized, empty version of something meant to be vital and sensual and filling.

Bauer's article reminded me of something I read years ago by C.S. Lewis. From Mere Christianity:

You can get a large audience together for a striptease act--that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us?

One critic said that if he found a country in which such strip-tease acts with food were popular, he would conclude that the people of that country were starving. He meant, of course, to imply that such things as the strip-tease act resulted not from sexual corruption but from sexual starvation. I agree with him that if, in some strange land, we found that similar acts with mutton chops were popular, one of the possible explanations which would occur to me would be famine. But the next step would be to test our hypothesis by finding out whether, in fact, much or little food was being consumed in that country. If the evidence showed that a good deal was being eaten, then of course we should have to abandon the hypothesis of starvation and try to think of another one...Starving men may think much about food, but so do gluttons; the gorged, as well as the famished, like titillations.

Gorged gluttons, titillated by tidbits. Glossy magazines devoted to the same sort of "bacon striptease" Lewis described. Cooks have given way to chefs, who in turn have given way to "foodies", food stylists and photographers. It's not food as food, or even food as entertainment; it's food as fetish. Statistics about eating disorders indicate a bizarre, unhealthy fascination with food among Western women in particular - a sadomasochistic approach/avoidance mentality that is distinctly at odds with actual pleasure or nourishment.

I'm glad that Bauer has decided not to waste her talent by contributing to the gastroporn machine. May she eat well and with renewed relish!

I'm a devout listophile, and I look forward every year to the flurry of lists that come around the holidays.

Considering Salon's new letter format, I'd love to see some reader recommendations posted here. I'd read several of the books mentioned in the article - "Never Let Me Go" and "White Teeth" are two I particularly loved - but I'd really appreciate some top 10 lists from Salon readers as well. Even more fun would be some "worst" lists.

Not to dwell on the negative, but I read two books that I considered to be highly overrated. One was "Prep", by Curtis Sittenfeld. It's all over "best of" lists - including the NYT list - and I just hated it. I thought it was maudlin, and I can't remember reading a novel that had a falser ring to it. Just horrible.

Another book that arrived with much fanfare was Elizabeth Kostova's "The Historian". At first I thought it had to be a gothic parody - it trotted out every dusty old stereotype from that genre - but the only horror that it elicited was the dawning realization that it was meant to be a straight-faced Dracula novel. I can't remember the last time I actually quit reading a novel, but this one made me fling it to the floor in disgust after about 600 pages. It makes a lovely doorstop, by the way.

On a sunnier note, I thought that Doris Kearns Goodman acquitted herself from that nasty plagiarism scandal quite admirably with the nonfiction "Team of Rivals: the Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln". It was factually dense but as readable as a good novel, and it helped me to finally make sense of the 1850's, the fateful decade that led up to the American Civil War. It also spotlighted Lincoln's gracious and magnanimous nature, attributes that made him the perfect man for the office of President. Lincoln stands in such stark contrast to the dwarves we presently have in high political office.

So - any takers among Salon readers? What were the highs and lows from your year in literature?