Propaganda by Proletariateats

This blog is about food.  Not the food of privilege.  Not haute cuisine.  This blog concerns itself with street food in its many permutations and sundry forms. The people’s food. The food that feeds the working classes of this sometimes-great nation. This blog also celebrates those culinarians—the street vendors, the food truck operators, the journeyman cooks—who busy themselves with the noble toil of feeding people like you and me, often in complete obscurity, and whose culinary excellence deserves–even demands–its rightful place in the sun.

I work in the food business. For my work, I travel city to city, across the breadth of America, working with chefs in some of the most celebrated kitchens in all gastronomy.  As careers go, few have been more enthralling than mine.  Many of the chefs with whom I’ve worked over the last twenty years are famous.  Most have Beard Awards or Michelin stars pocketed in their whites. Any of them can make you go weak in the knees with a single bite of food. 

Therein lies the rub. Therein lies the impetus for this blog.

I’m a victim of my own success. After a career spent eating shoulder-to-shoulder with some the best culinary talent this country has yet produced, I find myself strangely bored with–sometimes even hostile to–the idea of sitting down to meal plated with tweezers, or one curated with an austerity only the rich would suffer. Utter the words molecular gastronomy in my presence, even ironically or in jest, and I’m likely to put my fist through a wall.  Serve me a dish that might be consumed in less time than it takes for the server to finish his spiel about what I’m eating, and I’m just as likely to hurl my chair across the room.  

In truth, my career has been an embarrassment of riches. I’ve eaten more than my share of everything I’ve ever wanted to shove into my face. Culinary privilege has turned me into one of those gout-addled jagoffs you encounter, now and again, in the fine-dining scene, the dude disingenuously protesting too much caviar on his plate; the guy biliously declaiming how tonight marks the third time this week he’s been served black truffles.  Yep.  At various points in my career, that’s been me.  

In the pages to follow, I’ll be chronicling my quest for redemption from the kind of eater I’ve long been: that entitled dilettante endlessly yammering on about the current state of modern gastronomy while shoveling chef-comped foie gras into his crumb-flecked maw. Redemption is something I’ll be seeking well away from fine dining. I’ll be seeking it inside the American street-food movement, inside the gustatory revolution that strives daily to elevate the quotidian into something truly sublime. No doubt I’ll find what I’m looking for in all the unlikely places—the man selling boiled peanuts on the side of a Georgia road; the grill-cook ashing into my corned-beef hash as he sweats into my eggs—but find it I will. And when I do, I’ll be sure to celebrate it here, in this binary space, for all the blogosphere to see.

I hope you come with me.  I’ve packed my appetite.  I know my shit.  It should be fun.

And power to the people, yo.

contact: christopher@proletariateats.com