Thank you for introducing us to this blog. I agree with the writer on all points, but I have to say the post is still a bit disingenuous in my eyes. Of course dogs have to eat, and therefore are motivated to eat food to survive! but when people say "my dog isn't food motivated" regarding training, they usually mean that they can't readily use food during training. This may be because the only food that motivates the dog cannot be consumed in amounts needed for reinforcement reps (due to the type of food, the health of the dog, or the size of the dog), or the situation in which you want to do your training makes food a very low value reward, or very hard to use.
I'm of two minds in terms of using the dog's meal as training. I think that a minority of dogs 'eat to live' rather than 'live to eat' so purposefully waiting until they are more desperate for food is a little murky IMO. I don't like the idea of keeping the dog hungry until she's so hungry she'll work for kibble, if she'd never work for kibble otherwise. Now that I have a smaller dog (14 kg/30 lb), I do sometimes use his wee cup of kibbles for training sessions, and I (obviously) don't have a problem with that. He's very food motivated and will work hard for just his kibbles. I wouldn't like to use his whole meal for counterconditioning, however, because I think it kind of stinks if you only get to eat when you're in view of something scary.
I also think some dogs benefit (emotionally or mentally) from having the safety of a routine which includes a bowl of food set down at the same general time, once or twice a day. I think that feeding the dog's meals through training 70-100% of the time leads to a dog who feels she's got to be 'on' all the time, alert to see if there is something she can do to get her meal.