Happy 20th birthday to Gastronomy.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the state of food media on this milestone — what are we collectively saying, what are we prioritizing, and what is our impact? 

My conclusion summed up in 17 syllables: 

food content RN
tastes like reheated nachos
write the obit, Chat.

It’s disheartening that at this exact moment — when AI is breathing down our necks, poised to take over every content creator’s livelihood — we’re letting the algorithm dictate what’s on the page and on our feeds. Ironically, the result is the kind of regurgitated sameness that AI excells at producing. Sorely missing is any sense of risk, weirdness, originality. 

I don’t know what the answer is other than to be unapologetically weirder. To think outside the box and then stretch it a marathon further in every direction. To be so original that the bots have no idea what the fuck to make of what we’re doing or saying. To be more like Soundgarden’s 1994 fever dream of a music video “Black Hole Sun” — AI could never. 

But first, a moment for the past. It’s hard to know where I’m headed without processing where I’ve been. 

Back in 2021, while taking a breather after publishing an investigation into the labor practices at Vespertine, I spent some time reflecting on my journey from food blogger to food journalist. Gastronomy’s 20th birthday feels like an apt occasion to revisit what I wrote, and hopefully learn from it.

—

Originally penned but never published in March 2021

I started Gastronomy while bored at work. I was two years out of college and spending my days as a research assistant at a social policy research firm in Philadelphia. The non-profit, staffed by well-credentialed folks too practical to pursue academia, sought to make meaningful funding recommendations to the government and private foundations by showing statistically significant outcomes through years-long studies. My job was to manage participant data and go on occasional site visits.

Although this do-gooder, academia-lite gig appealed to my idealistic 22-year-old self, the reality of running regressions day after day left me feeling like a tool without a use.

So, it was in a high-rise building at the corner of 20th and Market, inside a dimly lit office with a space heater on high and the door slightly ajar, that I started a food blog. They weren’t respected by the gatekeeping set — and still aren’t given their due — but that mattered very little to me then. 

I killed hours at work browsing through Graham Holliday’s Noodle Pie, drooling over food photos and fantasizing about living in Vietnam. Further fueling my escapism were aggregate hubs like Chowhound, Serious Eats, and Tastespotting. My browser’s bookmarks were bursting at the digital seams with restaurants and recipes to try and new destinations to explore. 

Blogging was the perfect antidote to an uninspiring day job. It was a pocket of creativity carved out in the middle of the day that The Man knew nothing about and was unknowingly bankrolling. It was subversive, it was punk, and it was mine.

Around the same time, I devoured Ruth Reichl’s Garlic and Sapphires. Her descriptions of elaborate feasts — and the equally elaborate disguises she wore to maintain anonymity as the New York Times food critic — captured my imagination. I tore through her other memoirs, then moved on to Anthony Bourdain and Michael Ruhlman. 

Yet, the life of a professional food writer felt entirely out of reach for the child of Vietnamese refugees, conditioned since birth to seek safety and stability.

Blogging while nine-to-fiving would have to suffice.

Even with my rudimentary SEO knowledge back then, I was aware that recipe food blogs attracted more readers than those dedicated to restaurants. Still, I was hell-bent on writing whatever I wanted to write about, traffic and ad revenue be damned. 

Looking back through the Gastronomy archives today, I realize I didn’t fully embrace the freedom of the medium. The sheer amount of Ruth Reichl cosplaying makes me wince. At the time, I wrote in the style I thought was expected of me instead of finding my own voice. It’s incredibly cringy to reread my old stuff, and I have to remind myself that it just means that I have grown as a writer. 

It’s still wild to think that years of balancing a day job with blogging, freelancing when the opportunity arose, and sharing countless meals ultimately shaped me into a food writer. I may not have become the next Ruth Reichl, but I carved out my own lane as Cathy Chaplin. 

And it all started right here.