TV DINNERS.

The first sign that I'd been unknowingly affected by cooking shows occurred on a Sunday morning when I realized I was talking to myself. I'd been making toast. "First, we cut our bread," I whispered. "Do you know why?" I stopped what I was doing and looked up. "Let me tell you why." It was eight-thirty. It was also Hour 25 of a seventy-two-hour commitment I'd made to watch continuous food television (sleeping only when the shows began repeating at midnight).

I'd begun the venture on a lark, curious about what I'd discover. This, for instance, is what I had learned about the hazelnut: "They grow on hazel trees. . . . They're super-duper rich." That was from the Food Network's "Everyday Italian," with Giada De Laurentiis. (The following week, on a show hosted by Sandra Lee, I heard, "Do you know when the first cheesecake was ever documented as being eaten or served? It was in 776, or 776 B.C., by the Greeks at the Olympics. Isn't that pretty cool? Say that at a dinner party and everyone's going to think you're brilliant and well read.") I don't want to sound harsh--this wasn't the History Channel--but, on the evidence, there was a surprisingly strong affinity between preparing food and talking baby talk.

At around Hour 36, a more illuminating sign occurred. It was during a rerun of Bobby Flay's "Throwdown." Flay is a veteran food-television personality. "Throwdown" is his seventh show, and it involves Flay's challenging old hands at their game: making Jamaican jerk chicken with a jerk-chicken diva, say, or taking on Cindy the Chili Queen, whose Cin Chili clearly rocks. Flay is then usually humiliated, and the old hand--Butch the pit master, say, with his secret spice rub--gets pumped beyond reason, the little-guy view of the world is vindicated, and everyone feels good. I set out to prepare some supper, and as I removed a loaf of bread from a paper bag I was struck by an unexpected sound: the dry, crisp noise of the bag being disturbed. I'd never noticed this before. It was loud and crinkly: so utterly brown paper. I shrugged (was it a lack of humidity?) and proceeded to dress a salad, in a bowl next to a candle. I cut up a lemon and squeezed a slice. The fruit, crushed in front of the flickering light, was magically transformed. I squeezed again: juice beaded up and fell in a stream of bright droplets. I squeezed one more time, enjoying what I now regarded as a citrusy translucence, a candle by lemon light. "Veeeeeery pretty!" I said to no one, feeling sixteen and having a late-night-munchies perception moment. I'd been brainwashed, in a fashion, my senses heightened by this long, uninterrupted session of food television. It wasn't an unpleasant state (apart from the consequences for my salad, now inedible).

I had fallen victim to what is called, by its detractors, "food porn." Its creators usually refer to it as "making beauties"--as in "Hey, Al, let's do a beauty of those pecans." Bob Tuschman, the Food Network's head of programming, had described the concept when I visited him in his office, above the Chelsea Market, in Manhattan. The point is to get very close to what you are filming, so close that you can see an ingredient's "pores" ("You should believe the dish is in your living room"), which then triggers some kind of Neanderthal reflex. "If you're flicking from channel to channel and come upon food that has been shot in this way, you will be hardwired as a human being to stop, look, and bring it back to your cave."

Earlier in the week, I'd watched that same Al--Al Liguori--film some of those beauty pecans at one of the Food Network's studios. Al worked the jib--a high-powered camera at the end of a twelve-foot arm. The pecans, surrounded by five spotlights, were resting on a bent piece of Plexiglas, for a hundred-per-cent reflection (pecans both in a bowl and somehow below it, like mountains on a placid lake), while Al inched closer and closer ("getting tight"). He then manipulated a knob so that some nuts were in focus, while the ones behind, backlit, receded into an arty blur.

Al has shot a lot of food. ("More diced onions than anyone on the planet.") He is thirty-six and has been behind a food camera for ten years. I'd watched him before, during a taping of ...