The rise of the foodieodical Saying that food is fashionable is a bit like saying there's a trend for breathing. But food has definitely become something of a fetish among the young and cool. 'Now, instead of going out, they just want to go home and experiment with Korean chilli sauce,' says a baffled academic I know who has been teaching undergraduates for 20 years. The writer Steven Poole, who decries foodism in You Aren't What You Eat (Union Books, £12.99) notes that the kind of hipster who would once have been an indie-rock fan is now a 'foodier-than-thou' critic at a 'Food Rave', obsessing over arancini (Italian rice-balls). Another sign of food's cool status is the rise of the 'foodieodical'. These are specialist magazines, as visually intricate as graphic novels, devoted to the minutiae of meals. Meatpaper, for example, 'is a print magazine of art and ideas about meat' (a surprisingly good one, too: subscribe at meatpaper.com and enjoy features on the horror of veggie bacon and 'the rise of meat glue'). These food mags tend to be made from paper so thick and creamy you could eat it for dessert, and they cost around £10 - more than twice as much as a copy of Vogue magazine. Given that the coolest food in the world is currently Nordic, it is no surprise that the coolest Foodieodical should be Swedish. Fool describes itself as 'food insanity, brilliance & love'. With its intense chef portraits and minimalist layout, it won 'best food magazine' at the Gourmand Awards this year. But trying to buy a copy feels a bit like trying to book a table at an exclusive restaurant. Issues one and two are completely sold out on the website though you can pre-order issue three, due in June. Easier to get hold of, and always a pleasure to look at, is the quirkily stylish Fire & Knives, a hub for young food writing in Britain. There's also a brand-new food and travel periodical called Cereal, inspired, it says, by the childhood joy of reading the backs of cereal packets. Issue one looks great - exquisite photos of crumpets, green tea and Danish pottery - but I don't remember my childhood cereal packets discussing 'hipster weekends' in Copenhagen or telling me that handkerchiefs are 'poised for a comeback'. Less self-consciously cool is The Foodie Bugle, a successful online magazine edited by Silvana de Soissons that has just launched into print. I should express an interest here: the first issue features Annabel Lee, an artist who illustrated my latest book. In any case, I was beguiled by the tranquil mood of The Foodie Bugle's photography - an orange nestling in a drinking glass, a scorched wooden spoon in an enamel jug - and the eclectic range of enthusiastic writing on everything from how to temper chocolate to pairing foods with certain books (fruitcake with Jane Austen, apparently). But I was starting to get 'fooded out' by all these 'zines. Enjoyable as it is to read long articles on the Nordic Food Lab or the history of cornflakes, it doesn't leave much time for actual meals. And as someone who has always thought food was pretty important, it makes me anxious to think of it as fashionable. I mean, what happens when it goes out of vogue again?