Lifestyle journalism often suffers from ambiguities in the ordinary language use of universal quantifiers. “Everyone reads The New York Times,” is the kind of thing you might say in casual conversation. But of course it’s not actually the case that all people read The New York Times. In fact, rather few people read it. It’s just that in certain social classes, NYT readership is so nearly universal that it feels as if everyone does it. Which is about how I feel about Top Chef on Bravo and the Food Network in general.
Meanwhile, Michael Pollan’s work is always interesting but at times lacking in a certain hard, quantitative rigor. And his latest, a big NYT Magazine article that “everyone” is talking about on how food became a spectator sport is a good example. He goes on and on at quite some length with a detailed exegesis of Food Network programming as if it were the greatest cultural force on the planet. I think this seems plausible to NYT Magazine readers because it fits in with their/our social universe. An essay that tried to explain changes in law enforcement doctrine almost exclusively through references to The Mentalist would, by contrast, strike people as bizarre. But according to Nielsen in the week of July 27 The Mentalist had 160% the viewers of any Food Network program.
And that’s during the summer, when the Food Network’s not competing with a-list first-run programming.
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