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.

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