“Our growth depends not on how many experiences we devour, but how many we digest.”

This is a quote from the pastor-author Ralph Sockman, and it might not surprise you that his congregation was in New York. In many ways, this blog felt like a very necessary endeavor; I have been eating other people’s cooking almost exclusively for a decade all around this town. My one source of trepidation comes from my antipathy towards documentation. There’s a great shot in Forgetting Sarah Marshall where Jason Segal’s character–depressed and emotionally slacked like a windsock in the eye of a storm–looks over from his table in a Hawaiian resort and sees a Japanese couple taking pictures of themselves beaming and fake-eating at their table. I think the director, Nicholas Stoller, was simply trying to twist the knife with Segal, adding this visual taunt of happiness, but he also alludes to a great fault in our technologically stunting age. Put simply, we don’t actually think about the things we’re seeing anymore.

Last Sunday I went to a D’Angelo concert out in Forest Hills Stadium. It was a nearly transformative experience in many ways. Before his set this torrential downpour enveloped the area for about 10 minutes. Everyone tucked under eaves and tents or even locked themselves in port-o-potties. I found myself under a hospitality tent with a bunch of staff members happy to avoid getting truly soaked. But nearly all of them were looking down at their phones. Some took pictures of people running in the rain, but most were just mindlessly scanning facebook. During the show, which went from overwhelmingly groovy to achingly beautiful (and often at the same time), people held up their phones to video for almost the entire time! I myself was guilty of taking a couple short videos, but that was only because my girlfriend couldn’t make it and I wanted her to feel bad about it. But the act of looking at the stage through this shitty little recording made me quite sad. I started to wonder how many of those recordings were actually going to be viewed, or if they were destined to sit in digital storage.

I guess this post is an entreaty of sorts. I really want to share my love of food an drink with anyone willing to wade through my purple prose, but I also want them to realize that the world existed before the camera. In fact, one could argue that it existed more, if that makes any sense. I remember when I was living in Spain and I saw a double decker bus with tourists simply holding their cameras up to film the trip. I couldn’t help but think about Orwell and Hemingway, who came to the peninsula and wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls and Homage to Catalonia, respectively. Not only are those titles incredible in their own right, they’re passionate investigations into the Spanish state. How the fuck do you think you are going to understand anything from filmed, hour-long bus ride?

So some of my posts will be woefully de-visualized. I am going to try hard to take pictures when I am out to dinner, but I am just so utterly conscious of how fucking banal the enterprise of taking pictures of your food and drink looks to other people (even though those same people have probably done the same thing at some point). I really want to deliver a quality product to you, my most excellent reader, but it is difficult to accomplish this without looking like a Japanese tourist.