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• Monday, January 2, 2006 09:21 PM

  just eat and write, already

  As a food writer and former reviewer, I sympathize with Bauer's disillusionment with restaurant-going. Turning anything that you love into a professional gig can be disappointing and you don't get a lot of sympathy from people who don't understand why you might rather be home eating chips and salsa for dinner on the couch instead of downing another organic pork chop with polenta and grilled fennel. What I don't quite understand is how she ended up with the job. She admits that she's not a foodie (oh, loathsome word!) so why the food reviewing? There are a lot of people, myself included, who just love to yammer about food, who enjoy discussing a slice of cheesecake or a pastrami sandwich the way Bill Simmons enjoys describing a double-play. For better or worse, we care terribly about what we eat, and I'm sure there are food writers out there who are as thin as a stick and those the size of a house, but they are all, in their way, obsessed. We all love to have dinner with interesting people or with friends and family, but if you want to write about the quality of the company and not the quality of the cheese plate, you should be doing interviews or writing a novel. There are too many people out there who love to write about what's on the plate in front of them to waste the opportunity on someone who's just doing it for the paycheck.

  —silvertone Read silvertone's other letters
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