Oh poor me, I have to earn my living eating great food and writing about it. Woe is me, when will I be able to give this up and find a soul-crushing 9-5 office job with a lousy commute?

As a food writer and former reviewer, I sympathize with Bauer's disillusionment with restaurant-going. Turning anything that you love into a professional gig can be disappointing and you don't get a lot of sympathy from people who don't understand why you might rather be home eating chips and salsa for dinner on the couch instead of downing another organic pork chop with polenta and grilled fennel. What I don't quite understand is how she ended up with the job. She admits that she's not a foodie (oh, loathsome word!) so why the food reviewing? There are a lot of people, myself included, who just love to yammer about food, who enjoy discussing a slice of cheesecake or a pastrami sandwich the way Bill Simmons enjoys describing a double-play. For better or worse, we care terribly about what we eat, and I'm sure there are food writers out there who are as thin as a stick and those the size of a house, but they are all, in their way, obsessed. We all love to have dinner with interesting people or with friends and family, but if you want to write about the quality of the company and not the quality of the cheese plate, you should be doing interviews or writing a novel. There are too many people out there who love to write about what's on the plate in front of them to waste the opportunity on someone who's just doing it for the paycheck.

Bauer is right on. I was a food writer for five years and finally had to quit because I was, frankly, more than a little ashamed of what I was writing.

It's not that food isn't interesting or delicious or soulful or a beautiful means of connecting with loved ones and culture. It is all of those things. And I admire talented chefs. But the pretension and elitism that fuel the highest levels of foodie culture become tiresome in the way that overexposed celebrities grow tiresome. It's also hard to justify the idolatry when millions make do with very little food at all.

Furthermore, the act of feeding our bodies, even though we do it publicly all the time, is a very intimate thing. Mouths are sensual organs, and I doubt there's a food writer alive who's resisted the lure of easy innuendo. Some of us purposely employ syntactical rhythms that mimic lovemaking. We might use words that sound like more colorful words and are meant to evoke the naughty version in the reader's mind. Eventually the "ick" factor creeps in. For a food writer, detailing, say, the flick of a tongue against a fork or the earthy scent of a truffle feels creepily akin to exhibitionism.

At the end of the day, much of it is blatant pandering, and not in a benign form: I firmly believe that our elevating food to such absurd levels of specialness has fueled eating disorders and obesity in this country. Food, for many of us, is no longer just pleasant bodily fuel -- it's struggle, reward, entertainment, esoterica, spiritual quest, status symbol, invention, art, foreplay, orgasm, and even love -- with all of their attendent neuroses engaged. Many of us are unconsciously feeding voids that have nothing to do with calories.

Bauer wasn't complaining about being spoiled, she was confronting a vortex of emotional conflict. Like her, I enjoyed food more when it was incidental to the task of everyday living, not the star of a media peep show.

I think you said it brilliantly. Your words weren't so much harsh as a wake up call to all reviewers (and wanna-be reviewers like Ann Bauer) to put a little passion into their work.

Being a reviewer does not allow you to switch off as and when you get a little jaded. It requires a depth of thinking and feeling that would make anyone feel tired. Without getting too personal, I'd say I know what a good reviewer is from 3 lines of writing - they need to put a lot of careful thought into their summaries.

Ann Bauer wants to be a good food WRITER; she's obviously not a very good REVIEWER. So let's give her the space to go write stories about hundred-dollar organic pumpkins and cultivated crops. And leave the proper reviews to writers who love their food and their jobs.

And let readers like me admire the craft of those who care more about their meals than the size of their dinner companions.

(Editors are usually wise enough to know their writers' capabilities - the one who fired Ann knew what he/she was doing.)

The ferocity of attacks on Ann Bauer surprises me. She's a writer who took a job to pay the bills, got burnt out on it, and is telling us about the experience in a funny, nicely paced article that provides an outsider's perspective on what is, in many respects, a silly little world. That's all that's going on here, yet some letter writers are responding as though she has betrayed the craft.

Remember the publication she was writing for. Every major city has one or two. They indeed feature food on every other cover: Best Cheap Eats! Top Ten! Best New Restaurants! Fast-Rising Chefs! What's inside aren't even articles. Instead, it's all photos, lists, bullets, and sidebars ("Where Local Anchors Like to Eat!"). Half the time the content is heavily influenced by the writers' and editors' personal connections to various restaurateurs and other advertisers. Ever wonder why your favorite restaurant doesn't make your city magazine's Top 50 list? Probably because it doesn't advertise in the publication.

All you have to do is leaf through this kind of magazine to know that they provide a less than hospitable environment even for dedicated, passionate, professional food writers. Food porn is exactly what these publications are peddling. Bauer couldn't sustain her jones for it. Does that turn her into a ranting bitch?

By the way, it would be nice if her detractors at least acknowledged the article's readability. Whether or not they like Bauer, they certainly seem to have devoured her writing.