my introduction

I would say I’ve always been a food lover, but that’s not entirely true…not the way I am today, anyway. While food has always held a significant role in my life, its place and meaning are constantly shifting. My evolution from picky little shit to simply a person who enjoys eating and tries to do it well has been a long process.

I’m still evolving, and I’m starting this blog to write about that and some other things…meals I cook and meals cooked for me, meaningful pieces of food journalism I’ve read, and Proustian memories of tastes and smells that have shaped my appreciation for eating. Writing and food are two of my greatest loves, so this is my little project to try and combine them. I hope that people will read it and be able to relate their own experiences to mine.

Beyond these personal reflections, I have a fascination with food and its relationship to daily life, not the least of which has to do with its consumption, an intensely personal yet inherently public part of living. So much of our time is spent thinking about it, buying it, savoring it, struggling with it. We treat it differently depending on the family we grew up in, the culture we live in, and a myriad of other influences that often go unnoticed. And food is at the forefront of popular culture right now in a way that it never has been, enjoying a celebrity that translates to your average person being much more likely to know what sous-vide means. All worth talking about, in my opinion.

I should mention that I’ve been chewing on the idea of this blog for about two years, either too busy or preoccupied with things like it’s “voice” to get it started. I had the same nasty little procrastination habit with papers in college, but deadlines eventually force you to write, and the words come, and the result is usually pretty consistent assuming you’re not running on Red Bull fumes. In this case, I have no imposing deadline, but I’m operating on that same principle.

Yesterday I was scanning a list of potential topics I’ve been keeping, looking for some linearity or theme among them, when I felt a rush of that same ephemeral New Years motivation that gets people in the gym for about three weeks. Riding that wave, I wrote this post. Fair enough.