I am an introvert. I realize of course that it is popular to say this on "teh Internets" nowadays, but there ya' have it.

For you weirdos out there (i.e. you extroverts), let me explain the difference between us. Generally speaking, an introvert can socialize quite well, but the process can be exhausting, and to re-energize, we need to go some place familiar, with familiar people, to hang out and relax. This is different from those of you out there who can go out on a moment's notice, and are invigorated by meeting new people and engaging in conversations with near complete strangers.

It's not that we introverts are shy. It's more along the lines of the idea of being outgoing produces some measure of anxiety even before such social discourse becomes necessary. The introverts out there reading this will understand. Everyone else probably works in pubic relations or marketing.

So what has this to do with food? Think about this a moment. Eating in restaurants is, almost by definition, a social activity. How we feel about a restaurant, or in other words, how we rate our restaurant experiences, are often determined by our relationship with our fellow diners.

While I wouldn't dare speak for other introverts, I should still provide you with my dining partner preference, in order to illustrate to you extroverts an idea on restaurant experiences.

1. My intimate partner
2. Me, myself, and I
3. Close friends
4. People I loosely define as "friends"
5. Co-workers
6. Complete Strangers

For the first three categories up there, I can go into any restaurant and have a good time. People in these groups provide enough familiarity that no social anxiety exists in these situations.

The fourth category is a gray area, where any anxiety can be diffused by members of categories 1 and 3 participating in these dining experiences.

The fifth category are generally dictated by corporate culture. Sometimes category four can seep into category five and help temper any social anxiety.

The idea of dining with people who fit into category six exhausts me just to think about it. I can do it, and have done it. But lord do I feel relieved when such experiences are over.

Again, I can hear some of you thinking, "Yeah, okay. What does this have to do with restaurants?"

I would rather have a dinner in a greasy spoon with members of categories one through three, than have a dinner at Per Se or The French Laundry with members of category five or six. I can say unequivocally that the food will be better at the latter restaurants, but I know I would have a better time at the greasy spoon.

Knowing this about myself, it makes me question the importance of the quality of the food I am eating. Sure, I would love to head to Alinea in Chicago. But getting members of category one or three to go with me is a logistical nightmare. Many of my close friends have no interest in taking three days off, and dropping $600 dollars to go out to eat. Hell, I am barely able to convince my partner (who is a admitted picky eater) to regularly visit the places that only I enjoy. Therefore, the quality of the food is often a smaller variable than who I am eating with when deciding where to go out to eat.

Every time I read a restaurant review, there's a nagging question I have in the back of my mind. "Yeah, okay, you liked/disliked the food. But what did your dining companions think?" Because if bad food can ruin an evening, the converse must also be true - that great company can improve or outright save, a mediocre (or even bad), meal.

I believe this is one of the failings of the American style of restaurant reviews. We focus so much on the food or the chef, that we can forget that the most important part of the meal is who you're sitting with.

Ha... revisited something I wrote from three years ago,

The second point that interests me from a practical point of view is how a combination of twitter/blog/flickr/crowdsourcing can aid the reporter in best reporting the raw facts and then help develop a story. I think the idea of a Twitter network has legs for journalists/editors. Blogs are well proven as are Flickr, YouTube et al - and remember if I hadn't uploaded these pics to Flickr I might never have found out (or it might have taken me longer to find out) that the police were actively deleting digital images in Toulouse on Sunday. For the journalist, the skill is in meshing all these tools together in a meaningful way. link

Ha... Like that was ever gonna happen.

MSG: Is This Silent Killer Lurking in Your Kitchen Cabinets?. (Huff Post)

One of the best overviews of the very real dangers of MSG comes from Dr. Russell Blaylock, a board-certified neurosurgeon and author of “Excitotoxins: The Taste that Kills.” In it he explains that MSG is an excitotoxin, which means it overexcites your cells to the point of damage or death, causing brain damage to varying degrees — and potentially even triggering or worsening learning disabilities, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease and more.

Part of the problem also is that free glutamic acid is the same neurotransmitter that your brain, nervous system, eyes, pancreas and other organs use to initiate certain processes in your body.[4] Even the FDA states:

“Studies have shown that the body uses glutamate, an amino acid, as a nerve impulse transmitter in the brain and that there are glutamate-responsive tissues in other parts of the body, as well.

Abnormal function of glutamate receptors has been linked with certain neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease and Huntington’s chorea. Injections of glutamate in laboratory animals have resulted in damage to nerve cells in the brain.”[5]

Although the FDA continues to claim that consuming MSG in food does not cause these ill effects, many other experts say otherwise.

Of course, I don’t think so.

If we're going to discuss food snobbism, I think it's best for me just to state that I am a snob, that way we all know where I'm coming from. I don't believe myself to be, but I'm sure there's enough evidence out there to support that claim.

The question of what is a food snob came up while I was reading Joanne Chen's wonderful book The Taste of Sweet. One of the questions she brings up in the book is why so many people with "sophisticated" palates dismiss sweets such as cake, pie, or even candy, migrating towards upper end chocolates and tartlettes from a trendy bakery to fulfill our desires. The answer lies in something called "aesthetic distancing".

The idea is that common experiences, such as, say, eating an apple pie or consuming a Snickers bar speaks to an experience that, for the most part, everyone can participate. Because the pleasure associated with these activities are common that the experience is then devalued. Look at it this way - When you find a special restaurant that few people know about, your more likely to have an emotional attachment to it. When that place becomes crowded, it loses a bit of what makes it special. The food may have stayed the same in quality, but it's uniqueness, an aspect that has nothing to do with the quality of the food, is now gone or less.

People do this all the time when they look at art. They ascribe meaning to the aesthetic. Don't worry, this is what people are supposed to do whether the artist wants them to or not. By ascribing meaning to an object far beyond the immediate, the aesthete gains both distance to the piece of art, and a connection and appreciation to their own intellect that allows them figure out how to understand that distance. It's, as Chen writes, an intentional "snubbing (of their) most instinctive emotions and basic thoughts (those they share with the masses) in favor of the unusual and unexpected". It's this sort of behavior that allows a two layer chocolate cake to be common and demeaned, while a bittersweet cube of rich dark chocolate graced with cayenne, spicy almonds, cocoa nibs and burnt meringue is exotic and desired.

Food snobs work in the latter tradition, where they wish to eschew the common and intellectually justify their exotic choices under the cover of "quality". It's different, therefore it must be better.

But, as Chen points out, what they are often doing in these instances is demonstrating some measure of luxury, in the form of money, time, or education. Someone telling you of their dinner at El Bulli fits well into this territory. Yes, there are novel and wonderful things going on at this restaurant (a restaurant, by the way, that can't afford to keep itself open). But there are novel and wonderful things happen at restaurants everywhere. The question is, who gets to decide what's interesting and wonderful?

Let's get back to the two-layered chocolate cake - Say you lived in a remote village in Tibet, where chocolate cake is rare, and thick, gooey icing is even rarer. In locations such as these, that two-layered cake is as exotic as the bittersweet cube of rich dark chocolate mentioned above. Does the rarity of a product make it inherently better in Tibet than in Toledo, Ohio? There may be a value assigned to it due to its rarity, but the quality in of itself hasn't changed. And there's the trick: the value assigned to a product is due to it's rarity, not its quality. The food snob sees value as equating to quality, which allows them to justify their intellectual distance to the product. The lack of commonality allows them to explore their own aesthetic, their own sense of fashion.

In the end, it's nothing more than a two-layered chocolate cake; a delicious, moist chocolate cake with thick, rich, icing. It's quality comes not from its rarity, but because it addresses our biological need for something sweet and does so in such a way that is satisfying. The additional value of the cake, as I see it, is that it also brings forth the idea that most people reading this blog can understand: most of us have had two-layered chocolate cake. And food is at its best when it speaks to the many, rather than the few.

This is the opposite of what the food snob advocates. The value of food to them is that it justifies their distance from the common.

Don't get me wrong. I love true balsamic vinegar, wagyu beef, or dinners at five star restaurants. But the best food experiences I've had in my life is when I've shared foods with others, including those experiences mentioned above. The more people with I can share these experiences, the better.