The announcement officially ends O'Donnel's 12-year run at the Post, the last three as the Mighty Appetite blogger.

The veteran food writer, now based in Seattle, won't be without a home for long, however. On Wednesday, July 15, O'Donnel will launch her new column/blog, "Licking Your Chops," on the online start-up, True/Slant, an innovative media business in which “Entrepreneurial Journalists” can brand themselves and drum up advertisers to sponsor their work (for which the writers receive a cut of the revenue).

O'Donnel is interested in the branding side of True/Slant more than the self-marketing side. In fact, she doesn't plan to sell advertisers on her work. She instead will earn a stipend, which she labels a "big pay cut."

The branding side of the equation is important to O'Donnel as she expands her freelance empire. She's already hosting a new cooking chat at Culinate.com, and she's close to signing a deal to publish her debut cookbook, which she describes as a "meatless guide for meat lovers." It'll include 52 separate meat-free menus, one for each week, so that "Mr. and Mrs. Sausage [can] take a pass one day a week," she tells Y&H. It's based on O'Donnel's Meatless Monday series, which she launched last fall.

So what does this have to do with O'Donnel leaving the Post? Well, it seems that, as part of O'Donnel's arrangement with the paper, she couldn't promote her work in other media. True/Slant has no such qualms.

"I've found a new partner who is very happy to do that kind of stuff," O'Donnel says. "I really want to grow. I was looking for a partner to help me do that."

But there were other issues in writing A Mighty Appetite, O'Donnel notes. Its daily updates required a ton of time, despite the fact she was paid as a part-timer, and the column didn't get much promotion on the Post's home page, which meant it was often buried deep within the site.

O'Donnel will have to pay a price, at least at first, for more control over her content and its promotion. She'll sacrifice page views. She says that a Mighty Appetite drew between 100,000-140,000 page views per month. She knows that she won't match those numbers at True/Slant, at least initially. "It'll take time to rebuild," she acknowledges.

But the change of pace will also give O'Donnel more time — to freelance elsewhere and to work on her cookbook. Her True/Slant column, which will also focus on recipes and mindful eating, will be published only three times a week.

A Mighty Appetite was published five days a week. "It was like you couldn't have a weekend," O'Donnel says, noting all the time needed to source recipes and test them. "After more than three years of daily deadlines, I'm a little fried."

Photo by Karla McDuffie

A couple of Y&H's favorite foodies, Kim O'Donnel at A Mighty Appetite and Lynne Rossetto Kasper from The Splendid Table, have been harrumphing recently about the sexist connotation of "gastrosexual," a word that practically has more definitions than "set" or "run" or "dick" (small "d" version). The definition that has these fine foodies up in arms is this one, according to Urban Dictionary, that OED of the online word:

"Gastrosexual Men who use their culinary skills to impress their friends and potential love interests." (Don't ask Y&H why this word is capitalized, as if it were the proper name of a department store where men could shop for all their gastrosexual needs.)

The definition they downplay, however, is the more telling one:

"Gastrosexual [There's that damn cap letter again.] A man who sees cooking as a hobby and not just a chore. Deeply passionate about analysis and innovation and creativity in cuisine."

This definition, in other words, has little to do with sexism and everything to do with the still-lingering idea that male chefs—despite a long, long, long history of men as cooks—might as well wear a tutu in the kitchen. There's a contingent of males out there who haven't watched Iron Chef , read Kitchen Confidential, or learned to equate cooking with 12-inch knifes, scars, and butchering large bloody carcasses. They still think of a chef as Felix Unger in an apron, trying to explain the difference between spaghetti and linguine to the big bad brutes around him.

The term "metrosexual" was created as a way to describe men, both gay and straight, who were interested in satisfying their own pleasures, whether shopping, dressing, clubbing, or getting their hair done. The term, of course, was particularly helpful to marketers who wanted to target straight men without suggesting they were (gasp!) feminine or gay. Suddenly, there was a whole sub-genre of American males, heterosexuals who could shop their brains out without fear of being denied entry to the country club. The self-denying man of the '50s was dead.

Gastrosexual is obviously an extension of metrosexual. It de-stigmatizes the idea of straight men who love to cook. It tells them that they aren't Felix Ungers. Frankly, I think the term is both unnecessary and infantile; it assumes that men are still afraid of aligning themselves with a skill, an art even, that is nurturing, satisfying, loving, and passionate—that they still need a term to distance themselves from these touchy-feely emotions.

Folks, can we please grow up as a culture?

Frankly, if I were O'Donnel and Kasper, I'd revel in the fact that no one needs to apply a new word to women who love to cook or love to cook for others, seduction or not. It's just part of the female DNA. I wish it were considered part of the male DNA.

Photo by Tracy Hunter