More than just food

by Anton Zuiker on September 26, 2025

My friend Kelly Alexander, between her food-and-culture classes and writing routines and preparing to make a presentation about a competitive seed grant she and a colleague had won, agreed to meet me for coffee this morning at Carrboro’s Gray Squirrel cafe. We sat at the window bar, next to the front door, and got to talking.

When Kelly uttered the words ‘food porn’ (one of the many themes she explores with her students), I opened up my backpack and retrieved my blogging archive, the printed collection of my online writing since 2000. The other day, I told Kelly, Anna and I had been reading through the posts from when we first moved to North Carolina, in Anna’s first year of life, and I had been reminded of the day that the cable guy had come to the apartment and how excited I was to be able to watch the Food Network.

I’ve kept a printed version of my blog writing for many years, mostly from the Zuiker Chronicles and mistersugar sites, but this summer I put extra effort to digging up posts from all the other places I’ve written in these 25 years. At the moment, the 400 pages are kept together with a large alligator clip; eventually, I may make this into a book with a spiral binding and a fancy cover, if only as a keepsake for me and my family.

Kelly picked up the bundle and opened it randomly, just happening to find a 2017 post titled So long, Saveur, where I questioned saving my collected issues of that amazing food magazine. The busy, noisy cafe masked Kelly’s surprise, but I heard it. Kelly had been an editor at Saveur, and had continued to contribute her writing even after she had moved to Chapel Hill. I became aware of Kelly in 2006, and even included her in an idea for a food blogging event, but I didn’t meet her until she and Michael Ruhlman were on the radio together in 2011. Saveur helped me learn a lot about food around the world. That publication was an even more important part of Kelly’s career, which has continued to blossom, and Kelly is a big deal.

Meanwhile, Hicham Elbetri walked into Gray Squirrel.

Hich was formerly a chef. He had a catering business, then a restaurant on Franklin Street called Sandwhich, for which I had helped set up a website. That foodblogging idea had happened, albeit without Kelly; I organized a foodblogging dinner in 2007 featuring Ruhlman, and later I pulled off the inaugural Long Table dinner in 2009. Hich and his mother and sister made a delicious meal for that. All that is in my blogging archive.

I look up as one of my DCRI colleagues sets up at a table outside, and a Hollywood actor/director who recently moved to Chapel Hill sits inside at a table behind me and Kelly, who is giving me a great idea for what to do with this archive and how I might find a way to write about it.

Then I see Henry Copeland come to the cafe. Henry and I met for coffee in Chapel Hill in 2004 to talk blogging and BlogAds and more, and he was an early supporter of my BlogTogether activities and even inspired the Triangle Bloggers Bash at WUNC’s studio where I would meet Kelly 5 years later.

By now, the Gray Squirrel barista was propping open the door because the air conditioning was clearly not working, explaining why I was dripping in sweat. Sweating in street clothes makes me very uncomfortable, but I was so distracted by all the eddies of memories and connections that I didn’t mind.

“Food is always about more than food,” Kelly reminds me. There’s a lot of food in my blog archive, she said, and what might it all mean?

One hour at a Carrboro cafe on a warm Friday and I was spinning with curiosity.

Smooth pages

by Anton Zuiker on August 24, 2025

The Aug. 25, 2025 issue of the New Yorker was delivered to the mailbox yesterday, but I only retrieved it this afternoon, just before Erin and I were to go to an early dinner at próximo, a newish tapas restaurant on Franklin Street. I had an hour before we were to leave for our impromptu date, so I sat on the side porch under the fan, and started to read the magazine.

Looking at the table of contents, I thought I’d first read the Takes piece by Adam Gopnik, about Joseph Mitchell’s classic observances of the eccentric Joe Gould. Instead, I turned deeper in the pages to read the feature, by Paige Williams, about the new UNC football coach, Bill Belichick. Mitchell was from North Carolina, and I smiled at the cleverness of the New Yorker editors for putting the pieces in the same issue. I only realize now that the cleverness really comes from the parallelism of Gould and Belichick, two “characters” profiled in the magazine’s pages.

Williams piece about Belichick, college athletics and N.I.L., and the UNC environment is quite good.

… Franklin Street, the backbone of Chapel Hill’s historic core, where one need only step over a low stone wall to be on campus. U.N.C., the oldest public university in the United States, opened in 1795, predating the town that grew up around it. Chapel Hill, which is closer to Virginia than to South Carolina, sits midway between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean, in forests so dense that, this time of year, one can lose sight of the horizon amid a disorienting spectrum of sun-soaked green.

Having spent a few hours today clearing piles of dead branches beneath the tall oaks and pines around our house, I appreciated this description of the dense forest. And after a delicious meal at próximo, Erin and I walked to our car parked on Franklin Street next to the low stone wall Williams describes. We had parked just a few feet past the historical marker explaining the 1795 founding of the university.

In the car, Erin said she wanted to stop in to talk with her sister, who lives down the gravel road. (They have less trees on their property, and so can have a proper garden for vegetables and flowers.) I needed to get back to my desk, to write this post, because I wanted to describe the sensation in my fingertips as I held the magazine in that first hour of reading. The paper had felt so clean, so smooth, so silky. Opening a new issue of any magazine, but especially the New Yorker, is always a joy for me. Partly this is because my first jobs were for magazines, so my body remembers the writing, the late-night story designs and proofreading, the press checks and the boxes of each issue delivered to the office.

As I read about Belichick, I was aware of the narrative flow of the article and how I was responding, emotionally and curiously, to this subject so close by, and at the same time I was observing the sensation of touching the pages. I know that in the days ahead, as I read more of this issue, some of the facts and the stories inside will stick in my brain (see my own take on a classic New Yorker piece, in my post A return to El Mozote) even as the pages get sticky, creased, and dirty as I take the issue from my backpack to the lunch table or outside bench. Now I’m holding the Aug. 11, 2025 issue, it’s cover curling in one corner and loose from one of the staples, the piece inside about perfectionism one that helped me see how self-oriented perfectionism often contributed to my procrastinating on finishing my magazine assignments.

First goal

by Anton Zuiker on August 23, 2025

Recently, I joined a pick-up soccer game in Cary, my first time with this group for their Friday mid-day game. I arrived early so I could introduce myself to the players before they got started, so I chatted up the first guy, wanting to show that I was a friendly bloke. I asked him when he got started in the game, and he said he’d been playing since his youth, and I told him I first kicked a soccer ball in Idaho, when I was 11 or 12.

The game that day in Cary was fast, fun, and hot. I returned home, showered and dressed, and got back to work.

The next time I played, at the regular Wednesday night pick-up game in Chatham County, I took a ball to the face, my glasses smashed against the side of my head. I took myself off the field, cleared my head, drove home. In the mirror, I saw a bright bruise at my temple. Later, my ophthalmologist checked my right eye for damage, gave me an ‘all clear’ but suggested I take a break for a month. It’s going to be hard to stay off the pitch.

Today, while I was digging into the bins that hold the papers and books and mementoes of my life, I came across the photo at top, me with my first soccer team, in Caldwell, Idaho most likely in summer 1982. I’m in the top row, second from left, with the long blonde hair. I can still remember the first goal I scored in that uniform, a clumsy breakaway on a dusty field.

Suspended in the world

by Anton Zuiker on August 23, 2025

Pleasant weather this past week allowed me to take my morning coffee onto the porch, where I positioned an Adirondack chair to look out through the wire railing into the forest behind the house. Inside, I’ve been reorganizing my desk space to address the clutter, and I’d uncovered a small book with a blue cover, Think Little, by Wendell Berry. I first encountered the farmer-novelist-poet Berry in the pages of Modern Farmer magazine in 2016 (a quote about the joy of “people who talk for pleasure, as opposed to people who talk to communicate”), and I’ve had this book for a few years, so it felt right to spend a few minutes each morning reading the two essays in lieu of of my normal meditation.

The second essay, A Native Hill, was the more interesting of the two. Berry wrote that in 1968, two years before I was born, but the essay felt fresh, as if Berry was telling me in real time about his walk along the creek near his home in Kentucky.

I began more seriously than ever to learn the names of things – the wild plants and animals, the natural processes, the local places – and to articulate my observations and memories.

That reminded me of Verlyn Klinkenborg’s instruction: “It’s your business to know the names of things, to recover them if necessary and use them.” I blogged here about how Klinkenborg’s book “Several short sentences about writing” inspired me to look closer at the trees and plants and animals around our house.

What I noticed this week while reading from the porch was that our forest is currently inhabited by many American robins (Turdus migratorius), which hunt along the ground and then hurriedly return to mid-level branches in the tall oak trees (many different varieties of white oak).

I also noticed how different I felt by the end of the week, having finished the book, spent time outside, and realized I had had the space, both physical and mental, to be suspended in the physical world. On page 88, Berry writes about humankind’s conceit that we can make and mold the earth to our violent wishes.

We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us.

I enjoyed my morning seated reading meditation this week. The woods beyond kept calling me to walk, so that’s what I plan to do next week, with early-morning tour of the forest as the robins begin to stir.

Teeth talk

by Anton Zuiker on August 21, 2025

After two and a half years, I’m finally done with the Invisalign orthodontia that aligned my teeth. The buttons and clips came off today, the doctor said my bite looked great, and I walked out satisfied.

Read | posts, or go to the ARCHIVES.