"The two biggest sellers in any bookstore are the cookbooks and the diet books. The cookbooks tell you how to prepare the food and the diet books tell you how not to eat any of it." So observed Sixty Minutes commentator Andy Rooney (quoted by Fred Lyon in "The Savior Life Diet," Lectionary Homiletics, August, 1997, p. 21). I made a trip to the discount bookstore this past week to see if Andy Rooney was right. I discovered he was at least partly right. There were lots and lots of cookbooks there. I stopped counting at 250 different titles – because at 250 I was only half-way through the cookbook section! And, that didn't count the bargain bins!

There was an astonishing array of topics and titles. I found cookbooks for Christmas. And, it's only August! I found Visible Vegetables, The Terrif…