Food for Thinkers: Shooting Sustainably Sourced Fish in a Barrel

With a name like Food & Think, the Smithsonian's food and culture blog was a no-brainer for inclusion in Food for Thinkers week. Fortunately, it's also one of my favorite food blogs—well written, well researched, and enjoyably eclectic. Recent posts have included a look at the people food is named after (who were Sara Lee and Dr. Pepper, anyway?) as well as the history of the soup kitchen (it was invented in Munich by Count Rumford, as part of a scheme to rid the city of beggars).

In her Food for Thinkers post, Food & Think's Lisa Bramen asks whether the "Food Fetish" has "Gone Too Far." Unsurprisingly, like me, Bramen is not churlish enough to knock the trend that means she gets "to make part of my living researching, thinking about, writing about—and even occasionally cooking and/or eating—food." But she does have a lot of fun detailing the signs of rampant food fetishism, which include horchata cocktail served alongside gourmet poutine, eating nose-to-tail out of a dumpster, and "backlash sites devoted to mocking extreme foodies (which is kinda like shooting sustainably sourced fish in a barrel)."

Visit Food & Think for more, and hang in there—we've got some great stuff still to come in the final hours of Food for Thinkers week.

Food for Thinkers is a week-long, distributed, online conversation looking at food writing from as wide and unusual a variety of perspectives as possible. Between January 18 and January 23, 2011, more than 40 food and non-food writers will respond to a question posed by GOOD's newly-launched Food hub: What does—or could, or even should—it mean to write about food today?

Follow the conversation all week here at GOOD, join in the comments, and use the Twitter hashtag #foodforthinkers to keep up to date.

Image: A dandelion salad with bacon and ramps: food fetish apocalypse on a plate or locavore's delight?