How cool that would be! To be a respected blogger, and get paid for my leads via lunch too. Instead of having to do footwork, interview startups, come up with inside information worth blogging about by talking to all those boring people.
Just like the engineer gets paid $1 for the chalk and $49999 for knowing where to put it, he supposedly worked to be a respected blogger and now he's rewarded for that.
Supply and demand makes that the situation that he can tell people if they want his attention they need to buy him lunch, what it doesn't do is make him any less of a douche for doing so.
He brings value to the startups, seems perfectly OK to me to ask them to pay him back for his time, and a lunch is hardly expensive in exchange for the publicity.
Maybe it's some social convention I'm missing, but personally I have no problem with what he's doing.
Doing my best to not read you as snarky.