Post Taste: Intro

The culinary world isn't at all what people would expect. It's not a hot bed of squeaky clean TV chefs making neat portions of 30-minute meals for stay-at-home Moms. The industry is grittier than that. Each kitchen I've ever walked in is an orchestra of discipline, populated by people who came to the industry as a result of hard lives and hard ways. They are speed jockeys transforming death, decay, and fermentation into something you would want to put in your mouth and chew. If they really did their job well, including the guys that call in the big bucks, they go so far as to make something so incredible you actually want to swallow it. Trust me, in a world where McDonald's is king, you wouldn't think that would be very hard to accomplish, but every year a new restaurant opens, another closes and I, the lowly food writer, is paid to write up another story about the well-seasoned world of grub.

Being the fly on the wall is never a bad thing. It keeps me out of the way of sharp edges and open flames, which I am totally fine with. Not to say I couldn't handle it, but I've done my tour of duty and I'm happy to resign that spot to a someone else with better knife skills and better equilibrium on a grease splattered floor. There's still, as a writer, an element of danger I'm exposed to. Every word that lands on a page has to be met with a certain degree of accountability. I find it hard to forget that chefs, if you push them far enough to make them care, are still the ones that know how to butcher half a cow in less than 30 minutes - the fact they possess that skill terrifies me to a certain degree. Thankfully, most chefs don't give a damn about writers, overzealous foodies, or their blogs. Writers are a hazard of the trade, like grease fires or steam burns and I can accept that. Being a minor annoyance as I rock out on borrowed time on the pedestal of the culinary underbelly hasn't been the worst thing I've ever done for a paycheque, I'll tell you that right now.

But food isn't "just" food. Some of the most memorable meals really don't have anything to do with what's on the plate at all. We as a culture of human beings are bound by an insatiable lust to eat. Food is the gateway drug to good times, good friends, and, occasionally, good sex. It's no wonder that on the flip side to the chefs is a community of swing-shift connoisseurs who restaurant-hop with the frequency of barely legal university kids on a pub crawl. These individuals surf on the highs of good taste and seek to enshrine local delicacies, evangelize the best restaurants, and enthrone the creators. They are, "The Foodies" and for me, I live in constant competition with them in the ever so blurry world of online food coverage.

This is the world of one lonely food writer battling to document the edible landscape of Canada's largest city with post haste, post taste.

Image courtesy stock.xchng.