Are You Really Going to Eat That? Reflections of a Culinary Thrill Seeker

By Robb Walsh

Counterpoint Press, 224 pp., $25

Since Pliny, stories about food have located the reader in time and then, by evoking distant lands, exotic flavors, or lives unlived, taken the reader elsewhere.

— Molly O’Neill

Following this time-honored tradition, Robb Walsh is indeed an explorer — a hungry mind and curious gullet searching out food experiences that, when put to paper, provide vicarious adventures for less peripatetic readers. As Food editor of The Austin Chronicle in the early Nineties, frequent contributor to American Airlines’ American Way and Natural History magazines, and now writer for Houston Press, Walsh has eaten his way around the world, describing what he finds and what it’s like, puzzling all the while about what it might mean.

This collection of previously published food stories is titled somewhat misleadingly. With a few exceptions (like giant, hairy-tongued Chilean barnacles and stinky but heavenly durian fruit), it isn’t about ingesting peculiar, yuck-inducing delicacies in exotic locations. It’s a chronicle of one person’s journey, using food as a vehicle to understand the larger cultural contexts. The stories aren’t presented chronologically, but if read that way, they provide insights into what might be called the education of a food writer.

For several years, Walsh traversed the globe on food-writing assignments. Taking full advantage of this enviable job, he wrote with gusto about everything from the blue-footed chickens of Bresse to Spam musubi on the Kona Coast. He frequently captures his varied experiences eloquently, as when describing a succulent Oaxacan soup, “It tastes like you are eating the entire squash plant and a little of the surrounding field.”

But it seems to me that Walsh finds his truest voice after landing at Houston Press and focusing his attention, close to home, on the food soul of that city. I admit to some bias — Houston is my hometown, and I know it as a fascinating and under-appreciated food crossroads of the world. Walsh’s Press writings definitely nail the city I love, and it’s almost as if writing about food is the excuse to explore and capture vignettes of the complex, multicultural Gulf Coast stew.

The mysterious allure of ranch dressing, the implications of enjoying rare burgers and raw oysters, the paradox of two culturally disparate diners, teenagers eating pizza in their immigrant parents’ Vietnamese restaurant — all these are grist for Walsh’s mill. He ostensibly is discussing food, but is actually taking on far more. A Houston friend expressed it best by opining that Walsh “does his best food writing when he isn’t writing about food.” I agree: Food is the medium, but the message is about emotion, memory, landscape, irony, and human interaction.

This article appears in November 7 • 2003.

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MM Pack is a food writer/historian and private chef who divides her time between Austin and San Francisco. A regular contributor to The Austin Chronicle and Edible Austin, she’s been published in Gastronomica, The San Francisco Chronicle, Oxford Encyclopedia of Food & Drink in America, Nation’s Restaurant News, Scribner's Encyclopedia of Food and Culture, The Dictionary of Culinary Biography, and Southern Foodways Alliance’s Cornbread Nation 1.