So the Web didn’t beat the system after all. It didn’t become the essentially socialist forum so many envisioned, one that would turn intellectual property into a global commune. Instead, it proved to be the next boob tube. By now, most Americans have accepted this, and we’ve assimilated the Net as we have other devices that facilitate communication or provide information, like voicemail and pocket dictionaries. In other words, the Internet has become part of our lives — but it hasn’t profoundly changed our lives.

Unless, that is, you’re into food. In that case, the Web may well have occasioned a cultural revolution — or a least a collective culinary revelation. More specifically, the Web site known as www.Chowhound.com has induced thousands of Americans who eat, sleep, and drink food (so to speak) to write and learn about it, too. Daily. Hourly. They ask questions like "Best retail place for large quantities of pork?" and get answers involving Brazilian butcheries in Framingham and wholesalers in Roxbury. They start debates over "mind-altering sandwiches" (Vietnamese bahn mi is a favorite) or dearly departed eateries (subject line: "Hey Dude, Where’s My Restaurant?"). They meet, finally, over stromboli or empanadas, and no longer feel like odd ducks. Instead, they have become a whole different animal. They have become Chowhounds.

But how IS it that these food fanatics constitute a counterculture, as opposed to merely a group of enthusiasts? Part of the answer is simple: in many implicit ways, it is un-American to love food, to linger over food, to schedule your day around meals. Maybe it’s in our Puritan heritage to deny or at least distrust sensual pleasure. Certainly it’s part of our Puritan work ethic to, well, work right through lunch, taking bites here and there from a mass-produced doughnut or burger — which, for all the attention we pay, could be interchangeable with each other. Maybe it’s in our links to the British and their notoriously withered taste buds, as food historian Waverly Root has argued (in far more complex fashion). At any rate, in America, an active and sustained interest in food must mean that you’re a) a chef — which is okay, because for you food is work; b) a chronic dieter; or c) a closet European (or flaming Europhile).

It’s not the food-centric Europeans, however, who are obese and cholesterol-ridden. It’s us (with a capital US): the latest figures indicate that a majority of Americans are now overweight. Even so, I have yet to meet a hefty Chowhound. Clearly, it seems, adopting Zen-like mindfulness — being attentive to and respectful of both food and the body it nourishes — is a healthy thing to do.

Of course, we mustn’t forget the foodies, by now a rather mainstream bunch; where do they fit into this picture (or enlargement, as the case may be)? Here the answer becomes more nuanced, as Jim Leff, founder of Chowhound.com, makes clear. Foodies, he explains, aren’t so passionate about food as they are about conspicuous consumption — about, as he puts it, "hype, trends, star chefs, et cetera." They’re the ones who "get all swoony about ‘glorious artichokes’" and install convection ovens in their condos (but never use them). In short, they’re products of a system that values the sale more than the thing sold — "hypnotized consumers," says Leff, who take the disembodied voices of marketers and PR machines at their word.

Mind you, he doesn’t mean to demonize foodies so much as convert them. Leff realizes that "as [Chowhound.com] gets more attention from the mainstream media, there’s a danger of having our more subversive goals co-opted — I keep bracing myself, waiting for teeming hordes of people who want to talk about Olive Garden." But he remains optimistic, having found that "the community is so strong, and its values so contagious, that the corruption runs the opposite way. Trend-mongering foodies come onto the site, and before you know it they’re driving concentric circles around obscure ’burbs looking for ambrosial blueberry muffins."

Olive Gardeners might here be inclined to remind us of another long-since-shattered assumption about the Web — that the creator of a site on any given subject is an authority on that subject. (Tempers can and do flare within this pack of food-loving wild dogs.) But as the original Chowhound, or "Alpha-Dog," Leff knows whereof he barks. In his 10-year career as a food writer, he has worked for NPR, Slate, and a dozen other magazines and newspapers; co-authored a number of food-and-travel guides; and published his own guide to New York’s "eclectic" eateries (an adjective he apparently uses where others — ahem — would say "ethnic." "What is ‘ethnic food’?" he asks, explaining that the treatment of first-world cuisines as somehow fully evolved and individuated, while "everything else ... belongs in a miscellaneous ‘ethnic’ drawer, is offensive and wrong. Deliciousness is deliciousness, regardless of cuisine, price, neighborhood, or reputation").