Are foodies gluttons?

By now, the no-longer-new food movement has provoked files full of skeptical responses. Most follow familiar scripts: foodies are elitist, or environmentally ignorant, or impractical about global hunger.

So you have to admire the originality of B. R. Myers's "moral crusade against foodies" in this month's Atlantic. His major concern is not for the hungry or the planet. He does indulge in a bit of anti-elitist rhetoric, but it isn't the thrust of the piece (fortunately for him, since his complaint that food writers never bring up Proust except to "[talk] about that damned madeleine again" doesn't exactly paint him as a person of the people).

Instead, Myers offers this: foodies are gluttons. He rejects the idea that gluttony is about overindulgence, pointing out that "the Catholic Church's criticism has always been directed against an inordinate preoccupation with food--against foodie-ism, in other words." He spends much of the article affixing this foodie-glutton label to chefs and food writers who tend toward unabashed gourmandism.