fever4flavor

Are there five basic tastes? At this point, I can tell you only two things definitively about flavor and the pursuit of unwinding exactly what it is and how we can all appreciate it more. Thing one: Flavor is complex. And thing 2: I’m going to keep asking questions of the people who inhabit the world of flavor for a long time to come. Which is my way of saying… season 1 has come to an end. BUT the...

You’ll hear me reference my travels quite a bit on this podcast. I always feel a little bit strange talking about the places I’ve been; I don’t want to sound like some kind of elitist, jet-setting, wealthy 1% kind of person who spends his weekends in Bali. I’m not that. But I did have the luck in my 20’s—which was a couple of decades ago for me—of falling backwards into an opportunity to live in B...

I don’t quite remember when I started drinking coffee, but I suspect it was at some point in college. When I needed to stuff as much caffeine into my underslept and over-hangovered face to make it through midterms. But back then, coffee was simply a vehicle to transmit as much caffeine into my bloodstream as I possibly could. Now, coffee is an entirely different source of joy. I set the machine ev...

As a working professional, my very first day at my very first corporate job, I stuffed envelopes. But the job was at a medical publishing company, and eventually, I worked my way up the ladder to spend a whole bunch of years there as a medical journalist. And if that sounds sexy to you, trust me, it’s a lot less sexy than it sounds. The good news is that eventually, I went on to other even less se...

I have a wicked sweet tooth. As a kid, I’d take every single quarter or dollar I earned from raking the neighbors’ leaves, and I’d cut through the woods down the street. On the other side was an Acme, the Ritz theater where I saw Tim Burton’s Batman four times in the summer of 1989, and a 7Eleven. At the “sev,” the money would get spent on exactly two things: a Gauntlet arcade game, where the Warr...

In one hand, imagine I’m holding a slice of cake; in the other, a slice of pie. I’ve got a pair of reflective glasses on, and I’m asking you to choose. Which one are you going with? For me, it’s going to be cake all day. I’m not a discerning person when it comes to cake; I’m going to eat whatever you put in front of me for dessert, and I’m probably going to enjoy it. But if it’s a one and a half p...

Do you have a relationship with social media? Because I do, and like all relationships I’ve ever had throughout my life with people, places, and things, it’s not a simple one. On one hand, I think that humanity is someday going to look back at this age of social media that we’re currently in—assuming we haven’t nuked ourselves into oblivion or heated up the planet to an impossible degree, or both—...

Let’s just go ahead and get this out of the way: I’m a meat-eater. I love a filet mignon and the smoked buffalo wings over at Ice Line. But I’ve often wondered how vegan or vegetarian restaurants approach their food. I’ve always kinds of assumed that they try to approximate the flavors and textures that us meat-eaters experience on a daily basis. Meaning, they’re probably trying to make a portabel...

I’m an obsessive food label reader. As a human concerned with my health and my longevity, and as a consumer trying to make sure I’m limiting the amount of hyper-processed garbage I put into my body, I’ve taken to reading the label on just about everything I buy. I do still buy and eat junk food, for sure. I love Oreos and Nutter Butters and don’t plan on not eating them anytime soon. But I also tr...

Simply put, chocolate is one of the most important substances in the known universe. To say that I love chocolate is an understatement, and I know I’m not alone. You know you love chocolate. And everyone you know loves chocolate too. Or at a minimum, they don’t hate it. But what do you actually know about chocolate? And what do you actually know about the way that fine chocolates are made by a cho...

There’s something to be said for that feeling when you’ve unearthed a kickass tucked-away neighborhood bar. Where you can belly up to the rail with your friends, get a beer, watch a game, and grab a bite to eat. There’s something even more unique about that same neighborhood joint when it doubles as a hidden gem of a restaurant and has a regularly changing dinner menu driven by complex flavors. Th...

There are five basic tastes. You've probably heard of them: Sweet, Salty, Sour, Bitter, and Umami. But there's an incredibly vast world of food and flavors. So what exactly is flavor? And can I, just a regular guy, really figure out how to understand and enjoy food even more than I do? So I talked to some experts and it turns out that I can, and so can you. But you have to start somewhere. I'm Eva...