Edward Behr once fought a woman over a loaf of bread. It happened at Old Sturbridge Village, a replica of an early 19th-century Massachusetts town where amateur actors portraying blacksmiths, coopers and cobblers go about their preindustrial days for the benefit of visiting schoolchildren. It was August, and Behr, one of the world’s most exacting food writers, had been traipsing around with his wife and kids as part of a family holiday. Everything was going swimmingly until he noticed a Sturbridge matron laying a loaf of freshly baked bread by the hearth. After another visitor asked if it was sourdough, Behr overheard the matron explain that sourdough was not baked in the New England of that era.

“I was so nonplussed I could barely marshal my argument,” he recalled with pure astonishment, as if the woman had claimed that the world was flat, or that the moon was made of cheese. Behr tried to correct her, but the matron dug in her heels, insisting that she had done copious research for her role. An aggressive discussion ensued. Soon people were looking over and Behr’s wife, Kim, and stepson, Zane, were sneaking out of the back door. The matter was eventually resolved, but only after Behr listed the Latin genus and species of the actual New England yeast used to bake sourdough bread – candida milleri, in case you care – and the matron was left thoroughly defeated.

“She was wrong,” Behr shrugged a week later, still incredulous, as Kim rolled her eyes and shook her head in a universal gesture of spousal embarrassment.

For the most part, Behr is a mild, self-deprecating man – a soft-spoken listener more than a talker. But when the subject turns to food, he becomes both encyclopedic in his knowledge and absolutely unyielding in his views. Twenty-two years ago, he founded a small, quarterly publication, The Art of Eating, devoted to good writing about good food. Working almost entirely by himself, and from the rural outpost of Peacham, Vermont, Behr’s high standards and refined taste buds have helped make The Art of Eating a cult favourite among serious foodies and professional chefs. “It’s sort of the gastronomy 101 that Americans never learned,” Alice Waters, founder of Chez Panisse and regarded as one of the most influential American chefs of the last 50 years, said of The Art of Eating. Of Behr, she added: “He certainly feels like a colleague of mine on any subject of food. He could come cook at Chez Panisse.”

Charlie Trotter, owner of the eponymous Chicago restaurant, not only reads The Art of Eating but tears out articles and faxes them to friends and colleagues. And at Kitchen Arts & Letters, an austere bookstore on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that bills itself as a place “for professionals and others seriously interested in food”, customers snap up Behr’s back issues as if they were old vinyl albums.

“Doesn’t everyone in the food business read him?” asked Dan Barber, founder of New York’s Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns restaurants, who praised The Art of Eating’s restrained design as “quietly spectacular”.

Behr’s shyness and his Peacham home base, a six-hour drive from the Michelin-starred restaurants of Manhattan, have made him something of a mystery on the food scene. Mitchell Davis, a friend of Behr’s and vice-president of the James Beard Foundation, which is dedicated to promoting culinary excellence, said fellow food writers were eager just to catch a glimpse of Behr at industry events. Yet far from hurting The Art of Eating’s standing, its founder’s low profile seems to have enhanced the magazine’s credentials as a thoughtful and serious outsider. That is a particularly useful thing at a time when the food media is boiling over with money and celebrity and – some say – fluff.

The Art of Eating stands out, for example, as the rare place, where one can find a 15,000-word exposition on goat’s cheese or sausage. (Not just any sausage, mind you, but the Andouillete de Troyes.) Pictures are sparse and tend to be black-and-white. “It’s PhD-level food writing,” said Belinda Chang, wine director at The Modern, the Danny Meyer-owned restaurant at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. “It’s kind of like reading The New Yorker, where the articles just go on for page after page.” Chang had just returned from Australia, where she discovered that a recent issue had made its way to the coffee table of Chris Ringland, one of that country’s most respected winemakers.

Such fans are more passionate than numerous. The Art of Eating boasts just 6,000 subscribers who pay $48 for its four annual issues. That circulation makes the quarterly less than a speck compared with established heavyweights, such as Food & Wine and Gourmet, which sell nearly one million copies. Yet Behr says that a small readership is precisely what gives him the editorial freedom to write about whatever interests him and at whatever length he pleases. That is just one ingredient in an unorthodox publishing recipe that begins with an almost total disregard for reader surveys, includes a dash of scepticism about the internet and a sprinkling of disdain for potential advertisers and corporate sponsors, who have been turned away from The Art of Eating as a matter of policy.

“A magazine without a point of view – a magazine that just sucks up to its readers – is so uninteresting to me,” Behr told me, trying to explain his editorial philosophy from his Vermont back yard. “And I don’t want to do that.”

. . .

The present-day food media boom began bubbling in a place not often associated with great food: Victorian England. It was there, in 1845 – amid the kidneys and gruel, that the poet Eliza Acton acceded to an editor’s demands to try her hand at a more practical subject and produced Modern Cookery for Private Families, one of the first English-language cookbooks.

Modern Cookery went through several printings before giving way to an even bigger hit – Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, by Isabella Beeton, a sort of proto-food journalist who taught striving Victorian women to cook, entertain and keep a proper home long before Martha Stewart and Nigella Lawson. These days, the heirs of Acton and Beeton are all around us, filling bookstore shelves and crowding newsstands. They also dominate the airwaves, where it is difficult to turn on a television without bumping into the likes of Emeril Lagasse, or Jamie Oliver, or Gordon Ramsay, or Stewart or Lawson smiling into a camera while beating an egg.

“There’s never been more interest in food. There’s never been more people who wanted to get involved in food. And there’s never been more celebrity and glamour in food,” says Alan Richman, a writer for GQ and one of America’s leading food critics. Americans felt their first gourmet stirrings in the 1970s. Just as the Cuisinart food processor was making its way across the Atlantic, Julia Child invited public television viewers into her kitchen to discover the joys of French cooking. The 1980s featured a restaurant boom – and Wolfgang Puck, who created the idea of chef as business mogul. Then, in the 1990s, the Food Network TV channel came along and transformed cooks into legitimate, multimedia celebrities. “Even if you don’t cook, you know more about food these days,” said Christopher Kimball, who publishes the Boston-based magazine Cook’s Illustrated and hosts a cooking programme on public television.

But food media’s rise has stirred mixed feelings among many in the industry, not unlike the idea of foie gras on a hamburger. While there is appreciation that people are more interested in food, and that once-exotic items such as sushi are now commonplace in middle America, there is also a fear that some element of quality is being lost.

It is a media dilemma that will be familiar to anyone who has watched cable news, and discovered that more media does not necessarily result in better media. One of the chief complaints is that the crowded field has become obsessed with celebrity in order to sell its goods – be they subscriptions, or advertisements or television ratings – and is trading substance for a meringue of gimmickry. Five years ago, Molly O’Neill, the longtime food writer at The New York Times, worried in an essay in the Columbia Journalism Review about the rise of “food porn”, in which food writing was loosing its moorings and becoming more entertainment than journalism. That was even before the emergence of the Food Network’s biggest star, Rachael Ray, who now has her own syndicated talk show and appears to have rebalanced the relative weighting between “celebrity” and “chef”. (“At least Emeril could cook,” as one critic sniped.)

“I still think there is a little sense of desperation,” Behr said, when I asked him about his glossy counterparts, and the ever-increasing demands of corralling a mass audience. “I feel that they are afraid of the reader. Maybe I am, too, a little, but in a completely different way. I’m afraid that I’m not giving the reader something good enough, useful enough, practical enough, high enough quality. And they’re just afraid that the reader won’t resubscribe. It’s similar, but it’s not the same thing at all.”

. . .

The Northeast Kingdom is the name George Aiken, a mid-century Vermont governor and US senator, bestowed on the state’s three most northerly counties. It is a cultural location as much as a geographical one – the rugged Vermont where snow that falls in October does not melt until May, where Wal-Mart has been kept at bay, and where, even after enduring decades of frostbitten winters, a resident can still be considered “from away”.

Behr, who was raised in the suburbs of Washington and boarded at the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, moved to the Northeast Kingdom in June 1973 after attending two colleges without managing to graduate from either. “I ended up here because it was the cheapest land in the state,” he explained.

He and Kim, his second wife, now live on the unpaved Aiken Farm Road in a modest, two-storey, white clapboard house that Behr designed himself. The house, which only recently sprouted a satellite television dish for Kim’s sons, is set on a hill that was lush during my August visit thanks to an unusually rainy summer. Out back is a vegetable garden, and a creek hidden by a stand of trees can be heard as it works its way to the Connecticut river. There is only one other house nearby, and it looms as a constant reminder to Behr that he should have bought the neighbouring property years ago.

On a recent evening, Behr stood in his kitchen, working on a courgette soufflé that he would serve for dinner that night, along with a platter of chicken and heaps of carrots and beans picked from his garden that day. Fingerling potatoes came from a farm stand down the road. He is 57, tall and lanky with tanned forearms and designer spectacles – more the organic gardener than pot-bellied food lover. He blushed as Kim, who is as outgoing as her husband is introverted, affectionately called him “antisocial”. Although he laughs easily – especially at himself – Behr did not deny the accusation. He admits that he is useless at a cocktail party.

Behr grew up in a family of serious eaters, where lamb kidneys and herring were not unusual breakfast-table companions. He was in something of a lost phase before he started The Art of Eating. He had been working as a carpenter for a dozen years, and also dabbling in painting and printmaking. After attending culinary school, he toyed with the idea of opening a restaurant. “It would have lost a lot of money fast,” said Behr, who is a good cook, but not a terribly efficient one. He was eventually encouraged to try writing about food after a Vermont friend succeeded at launching a construction magazine.

The first, eight-page, black-and-white Art of Eating newsletter debuted in November 1986. A note from the editor declared its earnest intention as “a letter for people who take notable pleasure in eating”. Readers were forewarned that the articles might occasionally take “the meandering direction of a personal interest”.

Behr’s then-girlfriend was part owner of a nearby shop that handled the layout and printing. His father, a former rewrite man at The Wall Street Journal, did the sub-editing. There was no binding so they folded and collated the pages, then mailed them to a few hundred friends and relatives.

Though it was amateurish in appearance, that first issue contained a sensibility and approach that still define The Art of Eating. Behr focused on a single subject – in this case, bread – and the prose was precise and unadorned, reading less like that of a food lyricist than a curious carpenter seeking to understand exactly how something is constructed. “For the next three years or longer, with each issue … we would say: ‘Shall we do one more issue?’” Behr recalled. That kept The Art of Eating going, he said, “in spite of its economic illogic”.

Gradually, word of mouth and small-space ads in the back of The New Yorker started to gather a following. Behr refined his approach, increasing pages, replacing drawings with photographs and adding a cover. “There was a point when I began to see some names of people – some big names – [on the subscriber list]. Probably there was a slow awakening on my part that these people were paying attention to me,” he recalled.

In his writing, and his eating, Behr focuses on taste, as opposed to particular chefs or restaurants. He tends to gravitate to traditional dishes that have been rendered by generations of culture and geography. One favourite is gran’ arso, an Italian pasta from Puglia made from the scorched bits of wheat left over after the farmers burn their fields. “Every now and then you encounter those things, and it’s the taste of history,” Behr says.

By the summer of 1999, Behr had honed his craft, and published the pork issue. It featured a 24-page exploration of the meat, launched by a succulent chop Behr encountered at Chez Panisse. That meal made him wonder why pork in America had become so rubbery. So began a months-long odyssey to family farms across Iowa and organic ranches in California. Along the way, Behr explored everything from historic breeding strategies and butchering techniques to the impact of factory hog farms, commodities markets and environmental issues. He also found the occasional moment of poetry in a pigsty, likening dozens of sows chewing corn at once to the sound of “running water”.

“That was wonderful because everything – taste, politics, environmental issues – everything was all wrapped up into one. I loved that,” Behr told me. His work is painstaking – not unlike the artisan cheese-makers of Franche-Comté and Jura whom Behr chronicles. Before arriving at a finished feature, he can go through around 30 drafts. Mitchell Davis, who has also written for GQ and other mainstream titles, said his experience of writing for The Art of Eating could be occasionally maddening. In the end, the publishing schedule is driven less by fixed deadlines than by Behr’s own conviction that the magazine is ready. Think of an obsessive chef who refuses to release an entrée from the kitchen – one whose diners, as a result, sometimes go hungry.

Surely, it would all be much easier if Behr would accept advertising, I ask? Over the years, several companies have called requesting editorial calendars, he said. While The Art of Eating’s readership is small, it tends to be clustered in wealthy pockets like the Upper East and Upper West sides of Manhattan; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and northern California. Behr, however, argues that while more money might have allowed the magazine to develop faster and pay its contributors a bit better, it would not have led him to change the finished product in any fundamental way. And at the same time, he fears that dealing with advertisers would tarnish a pristine relationship with his readers. “If you think of it as selling content to readers and then you think of it as selling eyeballs to advertisers, your whole experience of the day – everything you do – is different,” he explained. His concern is not that olive oil purveyors and other food companies would seek to bribe him or influence his copy – although food publications have been caught up in such scandals in the past. Rather, he believes overt pressure has given way to a more subtle, but still corrosive, variety.

It comes in the form of deep-pocketed lifestyle advertisers – carmakers, credit card companies and hotel chains. Their patronage, he believes, has encouraged many publications to treat food as an accessory to a luxurious lifestyle, and write about it and photograph it in breathless ways that complement the latest BMW or designer handbag. Kimball, the Cook’s Illustrated publisher, explained it this way: “Ultimately, the question is, how do you make your money? If it’s lifestyle advertising, then there must be a patina of luxury.”

When it comes to the internet, Behr is also sceptical. In recent years, a smorgasbord of food blogs has proliferated, holding forth on everything from neighbourhood restaurants to veganism and the slow-food movement, and adding to the general cacophony of the food media. Websites have neutralised one of the food magazine’s most valuable ingredients – the recipe. Whereas they were once selling points for magazines, they are now available in infinite variety and for free online. Like shrimp cocktail, a luxury has become a commodity.

“I’ve always loved ink on paper – just, physically, loved it,” Behr said when I asked if The Art of Eating might make more sense as a website, given its tiny budget and narrow readership. He went on: “It would be hard to go digital because we’re writing about craftspeople, and I think it’s important that we have a well-crafted object.”

For all his stubbornness, Behr would not mind both the ego boost and the extra cash that would come from a wider audience. He and Kim live modestly and were recently forced to put off plans to extend their home. It is an open question whether the quality of The Art of Eating can be made compatible with a more lucrative form of mainstream publishing. Or is the price of Behr’s artistic freedom that he must live like a poor (but well-fed) artist? I considered this as I suggested possible revenue-generating opportunities – ways to “leverage the brand”, in the parlance of the modern executive. How about Art of Eating food tours to Italy and France, or monogrammed aprons, or a cooking seminar in Peacham? I could easily imagine a white tent against the green grass, and co-sponsorship from Ben & Jerry’s, another product of Vermont eccentrics. Surely, some of Behr’s wealthy readers – the ones who have already turned up at his home uninvited – would lap this up?

Behr was polite enough to indulge me, but he could not conceal a queasy expression that came over his face, like an agoraphobic at a toastmasters’ meeting.

Still, he has made some concessions lately in the hope of moving The Art of Eating beyond the realm of an obscure but cherished literary journal. He recently contracted to sell it at certain Whole Foods Markets, the organic supermarket chain whose customers are willing to shell out $6 for a box of cereal. And last September, he hired Winnie Yang, a 28-year-old graduate of MIT, to be his managing editor, after concluding that too many issues were coming out late. Yang, who sports a punk hairdo and wears a length of zipper as an earring, is e-mail to Behr’s fax machine. She discovered The Art of Eating during a childhood in the culinary hinterlands of St Louis, Missouri, before she moved to Brooklyn and became a food blogger herself. “I don’t know what it is about food, but people for some reason are just drawn to these eccentric people with really defined tastes, and a really clear idea of what they like and what they think is good,” she said of her boss’s appeal.

Meanwhile, in what must offer some validation to Behr, other serious and quirky food journals have sprung up in The Art of Eating’s wake and seem to be finding an audience among readers disenchanted with the food media’s celebrity turn. There is Meatpaper, an offbeat quarterly devoted to all things flesh; Gastronomica, an intellectual food journal that promises “reflections on stuffed cabbage”; the hipsterish Diner Journal; and the erudite Art Culinaire, among others.

Even if riches elude him – as seems likely – Behr can count on the admiration of his readers. “He’s just the real thing,” Alice Waters said, likening Behr’s work to favourite books that people return to again and again. “This is what the food movement used to be about – honesty and integrity – not hype. He’s never sold himself. He’s sort of quietly sitting there on the shelf.” And, after 22 years of writing about food, his passion for his subject is undiminished. “If you examine a few topics at a time, in depth, there’s an enormous amount to write about,” Behr told me. It was late in the day, and the summer sun had turned golden and was sinking. But his eyes twinkled with enthusiasm. “I’m just thinking of all the great cheeses of the world we haven’t written about yet.”

Joshua Chaffin is the FT’s Brussels correspondent

The FT’s restaurant promotion ‘Take a Friend for a Fiver’ launches on Saturday. For details see the cover story on Life & Arts: How to beat the lunch crunch