There's a common theme on the Pittsburgh Chowhound board. The post goes something like this: Someone writes in to ask, "Can I survive a move to Pittsburgh from Manhattan/San Francisco/wherever? Will I ever taste good food again?" And voluminous responses follow. (One such post recently elicited 66 replies.)

Chowhound.com is an Internet posting board focused on discussions about food. People can ask questions, make suggestions and rant or rave about restaurants. I'm not the primary Chowhound user in my household, but I have benefited from useful advice on everything from the most authentic Chinese food in Boston to the best wine store between Buffalo and Erie.

When I started my dining column I suggested that a restaurant review can be a way of starting a conversation about food. But the truth is, the conversation is already going on. Pittsburgh is full of people eating, talking about, thinking about and -- most significantly -- writing about food. Some of them are food professionals. Others somehow carve out hours from their days and weeks to write about food, doing for fun what many would consider closely akin to homework.

Bill Fuller, corporate chef for big Burrito Restaurant Group, acknowledges that his interest in creating his own food blog might seem a little odd. "I have this life that is just completely wrapped up in food, not just from a normal perspective of eating a couple of meals a day but in the sense that everything is food, food, food; so I swim in this bath of food."

Mr. Fuller also frequently contributes to Table magazine, a quarterly food magazine about Pittsburgh and the surrounding countryside, and writes a column for big Burrito's newsletter.

For Mr. Fuller, "Hungry, A Process" (hungryfuller.blogspot.com) and other literary-pursuit outlets may not be so much a place where he gets to engage with food, but rather a place where he gets to write about it, which is extremely different from cooking, or talking, or even thinking about food. Mr. Fuller readily shares, "My career goal in high school was to be a novelist. I'm writing on a blog and a newsletter and that's the closest I've ever gotten.".....

Sarah Miller, the voice behind the blog Food and Paper (foodandpaper.blogspot.com, and Lauren Bracey, who pens Burghilicious (burghilicious.com), both do plenty of writing in their day jobs.

Miller is a graduate student in comparative literature whose blog started in North Carolina but has survived a move to Pittsburgh. "I try to make stories out of food. The interest to me is more relating a recipe to greater ideas that I've been thinking about," says Ms. Miller, who connects food to subjects as disparate as Dido's death in the "Aeneid" and thrift-store shopping in North Carolina.

Ms. Bracey works in the marketing department at the Carnegie Science Center. At first she was turned off by the idea of a blog. "I don't want to have an online diary," she remembers thinking. Then she began to read a few.

"Pretty soon I had 80 different feeds in my reader," she says, even though at the time she didn't really know what a "feed" or a "reader" was. (A "Web feed" notifies readers when a blog has new content. A "reader" allows a user to collect a list of feeds in one place on his or her own site.)

Ms. Miller views the blog as a break from school-related writing, "It's an outlet for me to talk about something other than academics in a semi-public arena." But as Ms. Miller writes obliquely yet candidly about her marriage, her job and her family, she unconsciously evokes food icons such as M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child.

Ms. Bracey describes her blog loosely as a collection of recipes based on seasonal food. When she describes saying goodbye to the last summer tomatoes, she is describing the result of eating seasonally, but I am thinking about my own passionate feelings for tomatoes, wondering if Lauren also eats tomatoes like they are apples. For these bloggers, food is a uniquely powerful metaphor for life.

Chowhound may not reveal a great deal about individual contributors' personalities, but the best Chowhound boards create a sense of community, a feeling that we're all in this together, as we seek out the best, most exciting, most affordable food we can find.

After all, wasn't this what the Internet promised us in the first place? A chance to connect with someone you would otherwise never meet. A feeling of community that cuts across our physical social groups. A place, even if it is purely metaphorical, where we all sit down to the same table.