I sometimes read the New York Times weekend magazine online.

I skimmed this week's. It's "The Food Issue." Really should be titled, apparently, "The Food Guilt, Rules, And Feeling Superior Because Of What You Eat or Won't Eat Issue."

Seriously. I miss just being able to read a story about food where the person talked about enjoying the food in question, without talking about how before they started eating the way they did, they had "blimped up 50 pounds" or without them going into a discourse on how you are apparently a very, very bad person if you don't seek out local foods. (Um? Where I live? No Whole Foods Market? No organics store? No Farmer's Market that's open at a time when I'm not in class?)

Seriously. Did we used to be this screwed up about food? I don't think so. (Maybe it was sex we used to be so screwed up about, and now all the anxiety has been transferred to food. Well, that's not an improvement. It's possible to live without sex (regardless of what the television programs seem to claim) but it's not possible to live without food).

I am just SO TIRED of it. So bleeping tired. I just want to be able to sit down and eat a meal without feeling the conditioning nibbling at the edges of my psyche: "Are you eating enough vegetables? Why are you putting butter on your bread? Shouldn't you be drinking a non-caloric beverage?"

I just want to watch a news program and not get some kind of a scare-story on how we're all going to be dead in a matter of years because of our combined lardiness and the unhealthfulness of our diet.

(And I think of pioneer days. Laura Ingalls and her family ate prairie chicken and cornmeal mush for weeks at a time and survived. While it had the benefit of being "local" food, it had very little in the way of vegetables. And they probably would have jumped at every opportunity to eat more fat and sugar).

I'm tired of worrying about vitamins and fat grams and sugar content and all that. And I don't even "diet" in the sense that many (most?) American women do. If I were to "diet," I think that would send me into an unhealthy level of compulsiveness.

I just want to read a simple honest magazine article praising, I don't know, chocolate chip cookies or potato soup or SOMETHING without that specter of "don't enjoy it too much; it's baaaaaaad for you" floating around the edges of it.

Yes, yes, yes. Too many chocolate chip cookies are bad for you. Heck, probably too much asparagus is bad for you. (Too much water is: ask Percy Shelly, ask Virginia Woolf)

But I also think NEVER being permitted unalloyed pleasure, always having to hold in the back of your head the idea that what you are consuming is somehow shortening your life, must also be bad for you.

Maybe that's the real reason Gourmet folded: they had begun running the occasional guilt-inducing story. And they'd lose subscribers for that every time. Because I think the vast majority of people (a) Know what's good and bad for them but (b) do not like being reminded of it.