End of Days
My mid-life crisis was a strange one. After 25 years working in professional kitchens, I started a blog, quit my job, wrote some books and inconvenienced the careers of a few diet gurus. Although I upset a lot of people and it all became weirdly stressful for a while, in the end, things turned out pretty well. Creating the Angry Chef was (probably) safer than buying a motor bike, healthier than a middle-aged cocaine habit, and cheaper than having an affair.
My furious little culinary companion changed my life for the better, and hopefully did some good. He exposed a few charlatans, swore at the world and helped one or two people have a better relationship with food. But I am largely done with him now. The trilogy of books is complete. I no longer have the time or energy to write excoriating 5000-word blog posts about carb avoiders. Interactions on diet Twitter are pointless and exhausting these days, with little reward. Most diet positions are entrenched, with everyone preaching to an already converted choir. No good can come of that. It’s time for something new.
So today, I am relaunching this website and changing its reason for being. There’s a new design and there’ll be a different sort of content. Blog posts will be shorter, with a focus on things that are interesting rather than controversial (although I cannot promise I won’t upset anyone). There’ll be video content, some interviews, even a few guest posts from a small selection of colleagues and friends, mostly on biomedical and nutrition stuff. As ever, I promise there will never be any adverts*, paid promotions or monetised content. Despite what the Guardian might tell you, I run this site for fun alone, and those Big Food millions have never reached my account.
The new website will focus on demystifying the world of food, explaining a little about the sort of work I do, and looking at ways of creating a healthier, more sustainable food system. It will pick apart the health and environmental claims made about manufactured food products, including those which are misleading or disingenuous. It will explore some tricks of the food manufacturing trade, report on interesting new technologies, and take a general warts-and-all look at what’s going on in the world of food. And no doubt there will be occasional features on nutrition and diet, particularly when the latest Ultra-Processed stories hit the headlines.
There’ll also be plenty of interesting stuff on agriculture and food supply. We’ll be talking about new crops, new farming methods, agricultural policy and food system logistics. There’ll be occasional forays into food history too, looking at how and why we came to eat the way we do. And you’ll still be able to access all the old Angry Chef posts. We’re even trying and make them more searchable, which has always been the most regular criticism of the site.
My social media will also change over the next few weeks, from an anonymous cartoon chef, to actually having my name and picture. This might suggest that the Angry Chef is finally dead. Or perhaps not. He lives on in his books, old blog posts and the use of creative swearing to describe diets. And he helpfully appears on Google every time someone searches Deliciously Ella or the Hemsley Sisters, which is exactly the sort of immortality he would have wanted.
*Most videos will be linked to YouTube so may have some adverts, because that’s how YouTube works.
