Readers, I have failed you.

At the beginning of the summer, I thought it would be a cool idea to eat some 17-year cicadas. I’d heard that they had a nutty, avocado-y flavor to them, and furthermore, it would have been pretty adventurous and out-of-character for me.

Sadly, they never reached the Chicago environments in which I maneuver. Co-workers of mine who commute from the suburbs described scenes of bugs carpeting their lawns, but the urban neighborhoods where I live and work were un-cicada’d.

Would I have been able to do it? I don’t know. The one cicada I came in contact with was a dead one that had been in the backseat of my friend’s car, and I had a hard time convincing myself to pick it up by its wing. But if this column is still running in 2024, I will give it another shot.

Of course, then I run the risk of failing Mr. Paul Levy, a food writer who recently distanced himself from “foodie shock jocks” and gross-out culinary literature. In a piece he wrote for Slate called “Food, Inglorious Food,” he begins by touting the trails he blazed as one of the few male food writers in the 1970s, then launches into a snippy tirade about the filthy compost heaps where subsequent men have dragged the art form.

“When I think about how I'd have to rewrite some of my earlier pieces for today's market,” Levy writes, “I feel queasy.” He cites a description he wrote in 1984 of an Asian fruit called the durian, known for its magnificent stench: “Some find the smell excremental, some find it reminiscent of sick.” But today, he fears, he’d be required by some theoretical editor to use the words “shit” and “puke.”

Well, that’s what you get for submitting an erudite haut cuisine article to Maxim. But wait – most of Levy’s examples are from The New Yorker.

“Even The New Yorker has succumbed to fashion when it comes to food,” he grouses. “In its recent food issue, John McPhee describes durian as ‘a fruit that smells strongly fecal and tastes like tiramisu.’”

First, someone is going to have to explain to me why “a fruit that smells strongly fecal” is more lowbrow than “some find the smell excremental.”

Furthermore, this huffy dismissal ignores what a wonderful article John McPhee actually wrote. “My Life List” chronicles McPhee’s lifelong obsession with eccentric foods, not in a reality-TV way, but in a way that demonstrates endless stores of fascination and curiosity. Yes, he discusses trying hornet juice and “mountain oysters,” but also moose, sea cucumber, and white-pine-needle tea. It’s all about breaking free of your food boundaries.

In that same issue of The New Yorker is a piece from the opposite end of the spectrum: “New York Local,” by Adam Gopnik. Gopnik finds food that is exotic and adventurous specifically because it comes from so close by. He tries his hand at “localism,” a food movement in which you sustain yourself eating only food that hasn’t had to travel great distances (at a great waste of money and resources) to get to you.

The local “foodshed” Gopnik decides to eat from consists of the five boroughs of New York. This brings him to a community farm in Brooklyn that grows greens fertilized partly by droppings from the Bronx Zoo.

Gopnik asks if he’ll be able to taste the presence of the elephant dung residually in the food grown at the farm. The farmer replies, “Yes, you can.”

Levy, from his perch at Slate, rolls his eyes.

Well, of course you can taste it. The idea of terroir, a unique sense of personality bestowed on a crop by the soil and climate of its geography, is a vital part of the discussion of wines. It’s part of why a California cabernet tastes different from a French, Australian, or Argentinean cabernet. I imagine the same concept can be converted to arugula, and while elephants are not native to the Bronx, the Zoo is undoubtedly native to New York.

William Buford, another New Yorker contributor, comes under fire for his book Heat. Almost literally: Levy objects to Buford’s “macho” description of a kitchen scald as being somehow wrong in a work about food.

But Heat is all about the injuries, the physical and psychological wounds you leave yourself open to when you decide to take food preparation to the next level. Buford, who starts the memoir as a guy who considers himself something of a casual home chef, learns the grim brutality of a restaurant kitchen under Mario Batali, a chef of all manner of enormous appetites, and a man who I think must create his dishes through a perpetual grimy hangover. Then Buford works as an apprentice under a butcher in Tuscany, slaughtering and dismembering animals, finding out what meat comes from which part and how it’s best enjoyed.

It’s about getting into the meat, the tendons, the bowels, the smells, the biology, and through the journey coming to a deeper appreciation of just what food is.

Levy, in presenting himself as above all of these gruesome examinations, comes across as a man who, both literally and figuratively, doesn’t want to know how the sausages are made. Instead, he longs for “readers who would understand cryptic puns and whose jaws would not slacken when asked whether they knew 'the land where the lemon trees bloom?'”

Sir, you’re talking about The New Yorker. People will get your Goethe joke. (Full disclosure: I didn’t.)

Granted, my most adventurous food excursion of recent memory was when, pressed for time, I decided not to bother rinsing my pre-washed mixed greens before making a salad with them. But I appreciate the adventurousness in today’s food writing, not because of its gaudy, manly food-dares, but because it gives me a taste of the process as well as the finished dish.