Celebritized food profiles—celebrations of, among other things, actual rump roasts—treat their own subjects with a similar mingling of mysticism and frustrated desire. (Just as most of us will never get a whiff of ScarJo’s skin, most of us will never consume the cacio e pepe with the “beautiful sauce, a cremina, thick and round and rich” that Mark Bittman sampled on recent a trip to Rome. And yet, through his words, we get a simulacrum of the experience.) The stakes are lower, of course: Given that their subjects are often actual pieces of meat, hagiographic food profiles are certainly not as objectionable as their human-focused counterparts can be. And they are often—see the breakfast sandwich thing again, which doubles as a thoughtful meditation on food as a shared infrastructure of urban life—quite charming. (The visual apotheosis of the form may still be the Times’s sexy chicken from 2011, which is a winking nod to the rise of food porn and, despite objections from PETA , a delight.)

What these pieces end up doing, though, is the same basic thing that celebrity profiles do: celebrating their subjects not as part of a system, cultural or nutritional or economic or otherwise, but as standalone—and often sui generis—aesthetic objects. The nutritional aspects of food—not to mention the work of food production and preparation, from the cultivation to the distribution to the shopping to the chopping to the roasting to the plating—are often missing from food profiles in the same way that Megan Fox’s and Jessica Biel’s and Rihanna’s backgrounds and personalities are absented, courtesy of the conventions of Esquire, from their own stories. The cheese, quite literally, stands alone.

Karl Marx would have some things to say about that. So would, probably, Walter Benjamin. The disentangling of the food product from its production, though, is generally a matter of journalistic expediency: Food, due apologies to Aqua Teen Hunger Force, does not have a personality, and Safeway-tripping and carrot-peeling are, for most of us, approximately as interesting as exegeses on the American trucking system. There’s a relief that comes with disentangling the products of food from the production of it. Food stylists talk about “making beauties” (as in “we’re making a beauty of that farro risotto”); food profiles render those beauties in words. The results can be immensely appealing.

Which is also to say that “food porn” is a cliché, at this point, precisely because of its widespread usefulness. Food, in the food-porn-y frame—which is also embraced by Instagram and Pinterest and Saveur and Bon Appetit and Smitten Kitchen and thousands of other outlets and platforms, rendered online and in atoms—glistens and oozes and crackles, its surface studded with a wanton sprinkle of chopped parsley or chive or cilantro. Food, in this conception, is alluring; it is intimate yet also distant; it is inaccessible; it is to the average home-cooked meal what Gisele Bündchen is to the average woman.

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You can quite legitimately trace all that back to Julia Child, whose show aired during a time when microwaves were new, when “fast food” was a nascent term, when meal-making—especially for women—was, in addition to its social and sensual pleasures, hard work. (The year Child first appeared on WGBH, in Boston—1963—was the same year, Michael Pollan notes, that Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique.) There was a certain relief that came with treating food not just as quotidian drudgery, but as a creative endeavor that could put families—and the women who managed them—in conversation with the culture at large. The Joy of Cooking, and all that.