Leonardo da Vinci, detail of The Last Supper (1498)

The first answer to our rhetorical question is indeed that food has always been big. From the struggle for life as a struggle for food to contemporary food crazes, nourishment has always been a big issue for our bodies and our minds. But only of late has it become respectable to write about food, coinciding with a tsunami of eating coverage in the media. Hoping not to get lost in this maze of information and opinion, I offer ten sketches that may serve as guiding threads in the labyrinth...