My beat has always been American food, and everything that means today…from policy, food access, immigration, history, agriculture and identity, to climate, culture and cooking. I grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina, went to school at N.C. State, and got my first journalism job at a magazine about the state’s oceans, rivers and other waterways, where I wrote my first food story ever, on Calabash, a small town famous for fried seafood just north of Myrtle Beach. Later I got a master’s degree in food studies from New York University, where my thesis was on early immigration patterns and American culinary traditions. (I think I got a B.) Fast forward a few years, and today I am a frequent cookbook collaborator, a professor of food writing at NYU, and a staff writer at The New York Times covering essential kitchen appliances for Wirecutter.
In between all of the above, I was the former features staff writer and later the food editor for the New York Daily News, then one of the country’s top five newspapers, which managed to be a hometown paper that just happened to have a very big home, an approach that suited me perfectly. (My first real story was on the cemita in the city. ) For years afterwards, until the paper killed its features section outright (RIP), my byline appeared on Sundays in a column about eating along the city’s subways. I did one line at a time, one stop per week, three places per stop, highlighting New Yorkers whose roots ran all over the globe. (I continued the spirit of that column with a series on food culture all around the country with the photojournalist John Taggart on Medium.) And for the past 15 years or so, my freelance has also appeared in places like the The New York Times food section, the Wall Street Journal, Saveur, NewYorker.com, Atlas Obscura, Lucky Peach, T Magazine, Salon, Everyday with Rachael Ray and even Parade Magazine.
I also have been on TV — as the host and producer of a weekly New York City food culture segment on the New York City cable news channel NY1 — and run several podcasts (including a canceled before its time quiz show I loved that my bosses didn’t, on Heritage Radio Network), and served for many years as both the deputy editor and the web and newsletter editor of Edibles both Brooklyn and Manhattan, the local food culture quarterlies that won the James Beard publication of the year while I was on staff. (I won my own Beard award for columns in Edible Brooklyn chronicling the emerging restaurant scene in 2010.) I have also worked on more than a dozen books and counting, a lot of them award-winning, many of them in collaboration with some of the country’s coolest illustrators, designers, photographers and cooks who are American-Italian, American-Korean, American-Filipino, American-Caribbean. I have even written a cookbook called Stoned Beyond Belief, with my favorite Albanian-American. Believe it or not, all of these projects informed my own book of reported (and illustrated) essays on all aspects of American Food available now from fine bookstores everywhere.