While television cooking shows and cooking magazines polish food to a high gloss, Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture has been exploring the erotic, quirky and even gruesome aspects of what we eat.

"The Gastronomica Reader" represents the range of articles published in the 10 years since Darra Goldstein, a professor at Williams College, founded the quarterly magazine. Sometimes called The New Yorker for food, Gastronomica has developed a following as an edgy, intellectual alternative to more mainstream magazines.

The book's opening photo of a horned worm devouring a tomato hints that crowd-pleasing marinara sauces are not likely to follow. In fact, Gastronomica seldom contains recipes, the better to use the space for footnotes or poetry by luminaries including Pulitzer Prize winners Richard Wilbur and Louisa Gluck.

Essays in the "The Gastronomica Reader" are grouped by themes including "Social Constructs," "The Art of Food" and "How Others Eat." This format intersperses memoirs with more journalistic accounts and scholarly examinations. Topics circle the globe, from the American pop culture phenomenon of competitive eating to the politics of genetically modified food in Zambia.

Some of the most effective pieces in the book are the most understated. The Q&A format of an interview with primatologist Richard Wrangham looks unpromising, but Mr. Wrangham's theories about how and why primates learned to cook open fascinating, largely unexplored territory in food history. History is also colorfully explored in "The Egg Cream Racket," a down and dirty tale of organized crime in the soda-syrup business; and "Alkermes," a liqueur made from an insect in the Mediterranean. Fred Chappell's appreciation of Southern ice tea ("anyone who pronounces the successive dentals of 'iced tea' is regarded as pretentious") packs history, humor and regional color into just a few well-crafted paragraphs. James Nolan's "One Year and a Day," a meditation about making gumbo on the first anniversary of his mother's death, manages to alternate between food history and memories of his mother without becoming too sentimental.

More often, however, Gastronomica's origins in the academy set a tone of smug expertise, giving the collection a sophisticated but also haughty edge. Robert Pincus' "Wine, Place and Identity in a Changing Climate" deadens the potentially interesting subject of the effect of global warming on terroir with scholarly sentences such as, "Appellation regulations are intended to make it easier to fashion wine that suits the physical characteristics of the region." Even a potentially lighter piece, Carolyn Theriault's "Waiting for Cappuccino," goes into an extended history of the spice trade, and comes off more like a lecture than a bit of well-observed travel memoir.

Other selections try too hard to be just too outre. Voyeurism accounts for the appeal of artist Robert Kushner's story of how he clothed models in not much more than raw collard greens, Froot Loops and asparagus spears. Titillation comes in a different guise in Andrew Chan's account of cooking shows as pornography. The examination of great apes as food carries reportage to the point of revulsion. So does Merry White's first-person account of preparing for a colonoscopy, crassly titled "Evacuation Day."

Reading "The Gastronomica Reader" feels a bit like spending an evening at a salon. The conversation is elevated, educated and philosophical, but feels more like an intellectual parlor game than anything that makes a long-lasting, emotional connection. Part of the problem might be the magazine's self-concept. After all, the editor says in the book's introduction, "We want to reflect back on our writers' exquisite offerings, which represent some of the best articles and essays about food that have appeared anywhere." After wading through too many highbrow examples in a row, the reader is likely to be hungry for something that takes itself less seriously.

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