If spring is the culinary New Year, let’s make a resolution to make shit happen
Mar 15, 2009 St. Louis, general food, missouri
If everyone shuts up and plays nice, how will we ever get there?
It’s damn nice outside and spring is in the air. It’s a time for new beginnings in the food world so today seems as good a day as any to take a crack at dusting off my keyboard and actually writing something to post onto what has become a rarely posted to website.
Lately, I’ve actually thought a lot about the name stlbites.com and, I honestly don’t know if it’s the most accurate title for what’s been on my mind. The viewpoints are certainly from a St. Louis perspective–as I live in St. Louis–but many are about issues that people are faced with nationwide as Americans awareness of food continues to blossom.
When I am thinking locally, however, the issues are leaving me pretty fired up, and my pretty fired up can get offensive.
As a result, there are some seriously long blog posts that simply sat in the draft bin as I became increasingly unhappy with the output as I tried to water it down so as to not (a) offend anyone with the overall tone of the opinion being expressed or (b) not offend someone by dropping an F-bomb or two.
The latter is something some in my family believed I should not do—and made me feel bad when I did. The former seems to have happened gradually over time because of self-censorship. So many St. Louis food folks seem to know who I am now–some of which I respect greatly and count amongst my friends. That’s made it difficult to sometimes be as honest as I’d like to be whether it’s something like talking about a friend who’s fallen off their A-game or, a friend of a friend who never had one in the first place.
So the new deal—as much as possible–is this: fuck censorship (sorry Dad)
I have strong opinions about some things and, apparently, those opinions counted for something or nobody would have read what I had to say in the first place. Those opinions might not be popular, and they might just offend you in content or tone, but it’s the truth as I see it. Unless you want to debate it publically, I don’t care what you think. My name has always been attached to this webpage, I don’t delete comments unless they’re rival businesses slamming each other, and I’ve always been open to having my mind changed with a persuasive argument.
All of this does not mean, however, that I’m going to publically bash every chef in town when they whip up a bad dish—or even a bad stretch of dishes. Shit—after all–does happen. But it does mean I’m going to try and get back in touch with why I started doing this in the first place. Ultimately, it was my being pissed off about what I saw in the St. Louis food scene.
Certainly, the opinions and food coverage are much better than they were when I first started posting here but, overall, they continue to placate and coddle instead of telling it precisely how it is and pushing people to do better.
We have one seriously long way to go before we get to where we need to be and, if everyone is too afraid to tell someone they’re just good, how can they ever hope to truly be great?
From the mountains of Panama and Ethiopia, to the urban-jungles of Portland and Chicago, journalist Michaele Weissman takes us behind the scenes for a look at the world of third-wave specialty coffee. How did we get to Starbucks, and where we go from here?
March 15th, 2009 at 7:04 pm
I always have a lot of respect for your perspectives on local dining, and find your tastes to pretty much always be on point. So let’s hear some of this uncensored business!