Where does the time go? Five years ago today I assumed the position of Food & Dining Magazine’s digital overseer with this entirely forgotten post about the arrival of the Peach Truck.
Peaches originated in China and were brought to the New World by the Spanish. Thomas Jefferson raised peach trees at Monticello, but Georgia is the state widely renowned for its annual crop.
Well, most posts are forgotten, but surely we all recall our first experience drinking too damn much peach schnapps or brandy, or overindulging on peach cobbler. Come to think of it, maybe there’s a reason for my indifference to peaches as an adult.
No matter. I’ve written 1,721 posts since that first one, give or take a draft, coming out of a total of 3,861 appearing at this portal. I’d be hesitant to call attention to my anniversary, except I’m the one here with the relevant job description to do it.
(Although caution is merited; when I got to five years of service at my most recent beer biz job, the owner promptly rewarded me with a pink slip.)
But life is always funny, and serendipity determines the course of our time on the planet to a far greater degree than we’re comfortable admitting.
So it was that not very long after F & D’s creation in 2003, founder and publisher John Carlos White called me out of the blue (we didn’t know each other) and asked if I’d be interested in writing a column about beer for the quarterly print issues.
Well, I suppose he called me.
My memories of the exact circumstances have long since evaporated, but by 2004 came the first online-only “Hip Hops” column. After getting comfortable with the weekday web posts, the beer column became digital on a (mostly) weekly basis and was soon joined by the catch-all “Edibles & Potables,” a Sunday space for ruminations about happenings outside our customary Louisville coverage area.
Just out of curiosity, is anyone else writing about beer in any semblance of a traditional format hereabouts? And by “writing,” I don’t mean iPhone photos of a beer with an emoji or three attached.
However, there’s more to this observance than digital self-congratulation. Starting around 2016 when my tenure at New Albanian Brewing Company began winding down, John Carlos began assigning me longer-form profiles and features. I had my doubts as to my abilities, but in the main they’re been a great joy; I’ve learned a lot and met wonderful people.
Then our colleague and F & D’s longtime “Comings & Goings” mainstay Ron Mikulak passed away in January, 2023. Ron was a colossus, and it took two of us to fill his shoes, with Lelia Gentle coming aboard to reinvent Ron’s cooking column, while I dove into his signature account of openings, closings and transitions.
Taking over for a legend? As David Bowie once observed, “it ain’t easy.”
The point of this post is that typically I’m a slow learner and a late bloomer, and at times I need purposeful pushing outside of my comfort zone. John Carlos has not hesitated to challenge me, and as a result my range has widened. I’m grateful to him for that.
Doing these jobs at F & D is not something I foresaw two decades ago, when I penned the first beer column. Things happen, and here we are. Thanks to the boss man as well as my supremely talented cohorts and teammates at F & D for this opportunity to fit into a whole other world.
And, many thanks to our readers. You’re the reason we exist. If you have thoughts, questions or suggestions, please send them to me at socialmedia@foodanddine.com — I try my best to get to them all.
Photo credit: The author. It’s a choice of newspapers in Munich in 2018.
