How to trivialize everything

Food magazines are scaling back the recipes they’re recommending to more manageable budgets, reports the New York Times, in view of, you know, the excruciating disembowelment of the economy:

After covering eating trends that have included haute pub food, exotic fruits like yuzu, and restaurants that dehydrated, foamed and froze everything from meat to dessert, upscale food magazines are writing about an even more unexpected topic: cheap home eating.

Reflecting the bad economy, Gourmet, which usually writes about expensive restaurants and faraway travel, has added a feature about what to do with leftovers, and put a ham sandwich — albeit a fancy one — on its March cover. . . .

As the high-end magazines try to survive a shaky 2009, it is out with the truffles, in with the button mushrooms.

It seems harmless enough — a recession angle story on food magazines in the media section — but it comes across as impossibly obtuse. There’s something about the way the Times reports these stories that just manages to trivialize everything in sight. It’s like “European Designers Introduce More Modest Lines for Prisoners at Buchenwald” or something.