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I typed the word FOOD into Google images this morning.  The images above are the first two that appeared in the search results.  The one on the left, a congested stage set of the "classic" food groups with, of course, a hunk of pork, jar of milk, and a bagel balancing on good ol' wiener dogs as the center piece of the scene.  The second: food as clip art.  The question arises: what is our relationship to food? The distance created here is done through aesthetics (though poorly executed).  On the left, an overload of semi waxy, dried out, and highly saturated (color as well as fat) food products (because they are food as products more than food as nourishment (if that is what food should only be)), and on the right, image of food product generated by computer. What is our relationship to food brings us then in this case to the semiotics of food.  "Claude Lévi-Strauss used cooking as a metaphor for the way the 'raw' images of nature are 'cooked' in culture so that they may be used as part of a symbolic system. Food can function as a commercial strategy (the business lunch), a social event (the feast), a gift, or a means of telling fortunes (plum stones, fortune cookies)." (source: http://www.eng.umu.se/culturec/FOO.htm).  Typing FOOD into Google gives me the same result as going to the food court at my local mall.  I'm not sure what our relationship to food is, but it seems that FOOD as a word needs to be redefined before this debate can move on.