Food videos might be trending, but their popularity alone is not enough to save traditional news outlets that are struggling financially. Nonetheless, these outlets hope food can play a central role in their media revenue models—for example, the Times announced in May that it is partnering with a meal delivery start up. I wasn’t the only one to gulp a few times when I saw that headline. If the Times has to sell food to sell subscriptions, what does that say? People want more food with their news? Or more news with their food?

Then Time, Inc. launched Extra Crispy, a breakfast-focused (sorry, not joking) vertical run to develop marketing for advertising partners through native and branded campaigns in addition to traditional media. (In case you missed it, the site’s first sponsor was Arla Foods, the fifth-largest dairy company in the world.) And the venerable Economist is launching a campaign “encouraging consumers to try free nutritious smoothies made from fruit and vegetables destined for the rubbish bin … to increase subscriptions through bringing its content to life in the real world.”

Meanwhile Condé Nast brands, including the New Yorker and Bon Appétit, have been working with sponsor Chase Bank to launch a series of native ads called Conscious Cuisine. The ad-articles, which so far have rated meal delivery services and provided a glossary of sustainable food terms, are light on content, but cast a feel-good glow while “exploring the relationship healthy eating has with the ecosystem at large.”

Even Arianna Huffington, sniffing a ripe opportunity, is launching a new site, focusing on health-related wellness (and one would imagine, food). Let’s hope she pays her contributors this time around.

The implicit message here? Food might save media. But it’s unclear what kind of media might actually save food? What will it take to go beyond recipes and Snapchat? Is it possible for young people to translate some of that boredom-turned-food-obsession into something more impactful? Say, thinking critically about—or perhaps even changing—our food system for the better (even if it’s on their lunch break)?

Is there space for thoughtful food journalism? The kind that digs deep, doesn’t rely on clickbait, and asks hard questions? “Tweeting is not eating,” my friend and colleague Rob Trice of the Mixing Bowl Hub recently said. And I agree. Sharing images of food on Instagram will not save food media. Watching food videos will not save the future of food. In order to really understand food, and the way it touches every aspect of our existence, we need real discourse that examines an increasingly complex system largely controlled by a small number of powerful players. Some of those players would prefer if we all just kept up our insatiable clicking on those scrumptious images, rather than understanding what’s at stake or asking hard questions.

But that kind of food media requires investment.

Joshua Topolsky wrote: “What will save the media industry — or at least the part worth saving — is when we start making Real Things for people again, instead of programming for algorithms or New Things.”

Not unlike the quest for “real food” in the landscape of highly-processed convenience food, creating a landscape where people can “make real media” might require that readers slow down and consider from where their media diet is coming and who is making it. And it might also require us to re-consider our relationship with media as a solution to boredom.

Subscribing to our ad-free, independent site is just one way to do that.