What proportion of our interest in food has to do with taste? Would you say 30% or 40%? There’s the level of hunger to take into account, too. Whether or not you had breakfast, and whether or not it involved an egg. And then the remaining 60%, that’s to play for. It depends on whether or not you’re dining with someone you’re trying to impress, or get off with, or hate. Whether or not you’re getting over a cold. I watched an experiment on kids TV this week, using a cross-section model of a human head to explain why a nose full of snot (they used handfuls of green slime which the polystyrene smell molecules got stuck in, preventing them getting to the olfactory receptors) affects the eating experience. Fascinating. Disgusting. Then there’s whether or not the people next to you have got something better. Where it came from. What it looks like. What you earn. What it cost. Whether or not you’re alone. Whether or not you’re happy. And on. Food is never simply a pie on a plate.

A similar template can be placed on food writing. Recipe books tell us a hundred tiny stories about journeys we might make. Last week the New Yorker reprinted Nora Ephron’s love letter to cookbooks. “The point wasn’t about the recipes,” she wrote. “The point was about making people feel at home… about giving up neurosis when food was concerned. The point was about finding a way that food fits into your life.” In newspapers, stories about stockpiling baked beans or the rise of food banks teach us about the state of the world and who we are, as do reports about inner-city kids making honey on their roof, and memoirs about veganism or meat, or sugar and kids, or well-lit horror stories about gluten. Restaurant reviews unpick class and ethnicity and authenticity and gentrification, while advising on whether or not this place is worth risking your birthday dinner on. Theirs is a rare corner of the media not controlled by PR – critics say what they really think, and sometimes they think about more than the salad they’re served.

In the New York Times, food critic Pete Wells reviewed the “second coming” of the Four Seasons, one of “the most important restaurants in New York”. In 2016, the co-owner, Julian Niccolini, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanour assault after being accused of violently groping a young woman, in a way that caused “scratches and bruises to her hip and thigh”. The first five paragraphs of Wells’s review detail and expand on the charges against Niccolini – which include two other lawsuits alleging sexual harassment, both of which he denied at the time and were subsequently settled – before he even mentions the restaurant. Wells explores the question of separating the artist from the art, or the chef from the food, one that feels particularly exhausting as we examine every morsel of culture we consume for dirt.

“The Four Seasons offers an escape from the outside world,” Wells writes. “Escaping from what’s inside, however, takes a mental effort that is beyond me and will probably be beyond many others as well, whether Mr Niccolini is in sight or not.” The food is good, he says, but not so good that you forget the hands that helped make it. “Restaurants, even grand ones like the Four Seasons, are intimate places; eating is an act that requires trust and a sense of safety,” but, Wells claims, Niccolini has “done serious damage to his power to provide that feeling.” He liked the food; he gave the restaurant one star.

We’re seeing the trickle-through effect of #MeToo in places many would never have expected. This winter Bernardo Bertolucci’s obituaries all included Maria Schneider’s admission that she’d felt humiliated and “a little raped” while shooting Last Tango in Paris. Opening the Hollywood Reporter’s Women in Entertainment gala last week, Hannah Gadsby interrupted a room of actors’ breakfasts with a welcoming speech about the problem with “good men”. “You know why we need to talk about this line between good men and bad men? Because it’s only good men who get to draw that line. And guess what? All men believe they are good.” The audience froze, forkfuls of omelette hovering an inch from their mouths – this was not the jolly roast they were promised.

It makes sense, though, that a piece of food writing should inadvertently become a watershed in how critics will grapple with work touched by abuse. Unlike art or literature, food is something we cannot avoid – we all have skin in this game. We grow up with comfort foods, the cooking smells of kitchens reminding us we’re home, with food at the centre of every important conversation we’ve had since we were four, cooling in front of us, its smell on our hair. Even if we don’t know we know, we know that food carries us through our lives in more ways than simply keeping us moving. Which is why it’s apt that a restaurant review contextualises the meal served – a room, a man, a city, a time. The best food writing tells us the temperature, not just of the soup, but the world.

One more thing…

‘I quite like the idea,’ said lovely Belle and Sebastian frontman Stuart Murdoch, of the indie cruise he’s planning to launch next summer, ‘that after three or four days some kind of madness will take place.’ He also reassured vegans that there will be Oatly on board. This whole thing, so much joy.

Oh my God, have you been listening to The Teacher’s Pet podcast? A (rambling) report about a mother, Lynette Dawson, who went missing in Australia in the 1980s, only for her husband Chris to move his teenage lover into the house days later, it has come to a shocking conclusion, as he’s finally been arrested for her murder. Justice via podcast: my favourite kind.

Archaeologists have discovered a 500-year-old man’s skeleton in the mud under the River Thames. He’d died in his leather thigh-high boots, which means now I must learn everything about him.

Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter@EvaWiseman