In this week's New Yorker, Adam Gopnik muses on the role food and cooking play in fiction.

Gopnik is a very smart fellow, loves food, and is often a lovely, affecting, clear-eyed writer (I remember a wonderful story he wrote about his late mentor Kirk Varnedoe teaching his kids to play football in Central Park), but for the life of me I can't figure out what he's trying to say in this piece. Maybe I'm not well-read enough. So if anybody else can figure it out, please comment.