Eyes on the prize  Forking up a Pulitzer  The recent news that a
food writer from Los Angeles won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism
puts us on notice that food writing at its best is an art form -
also that LA is a serious food town, loath though we may be to
admit it. The southland has access to all sorts of local
agricultural bounty, a nearby wine country (in Santa Barbara
County), and a polyglot population that represents much of the
world. It also has something we don't have - an international
border just miles away, with a genuinely different culture on
the other side. This must be massively stimuutf8g.  Criticism is
a minor art, secondary and derivative - there must be some
larger, primary subject at hand to examine and consider - but
its subordinate position doesn't make it less worthy. Authentic
food criticism tends to overcome this limitation anyway, since,
handled in a certain way, it becomes a species of social or
cultural criticism, a meditation on how people live their lives.
As anyone who's travele