conservative eating and cooking

In the last several years there have been a few articles observing the phenomenon of the rise in media related to food despite the apparent lack of any cooking action. It seems that people are interested in watching cooking but they're not actually cooking in their own homes.
I was a regular reader of Serious Eats until I began to notice the visible presence of sponsor ads interspersed with regular entries. I'm not too happy to see these ads. I recognize that they're a necessary evil--the writers of Serious Eats need income after all!--but I can't help but feel that they detract from the regular content. I'm talking about the entries that introduce readers to new foods. They have Chichi Wang's column, "Nasty Bits," and the Culinary Ambassadors series for example. But then as you scroll down the screen, you are confronted with the occasional sponsor recipe for something like "beef taco skillet." Is this what the readers of Serious Eats really eating at home? When I think back to some of the comments I've read on the site, I recall being surprised at the number of "conservative" eaters--I mean people who turn up their noses at anything that seems gross, foreign, or exotic. I am not the only one surprised to see this ad/recipe, given the comments submitted. I guess Serious Eats attracts a more or less diverse crowd of tastes with a tendency towards those newly exposed to "new" foods.