Why is it that the same people who drool over so-called “food porn [1]” often eat obscenely bad food? Andrew Scrivani, a food stylist/photographer, put down his camera and picked up a pen (or more likely, a laptop) to provide this portrait [2] of our dietary disconnect for Wednesday’s New York Times.
 
I rarely watch the Food Network [3], and now I realize why; I’m too busy actually cooking. According to Scrivani, all those celebrity cooking shows are for people more enthralled with the concept of cooking than the actual pursuit of it. They’ll watch Alton Brown [4] braise a braciole while they pick through the container of Moo Shu pork they had delivered because they’re too tired and it’s too late to cook by the time they get home from work.

And those esoteric and expensive cookbooks designed more for the coffee table than the kitchen? They’re Scrivani’s bread and butter, but he doesn’t hesitate to bite the hand that feeds him, dismissing them as “extraordinarily beautiful advertisements for very successful restaurants.”
 
For mealtime inspiration, Scrivani turns instead to the cookbooks of Jamie Oliver [5], whose simple, unpretentious recipes make him want to “shop, cook, and sit down to eat.” Scrivani reminds us that “mealtime was once sacrosanct, that life revolved around food and the family dinner table.”
 
The culinary chasm between the food we fantasize about and what we’re really eating seems to grow wider every day. Scrivani’s essay is a plea for people to get off their treadmills – on the job and at the gym – and get back to the kitchen to cook a real meal, because eating well shouldn’t be a spectator sport.