Built for Eating

Identifying a preexisting condition

Author

Jesse Raub
August 11, 2025

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Down the Hatch

Chicken Parmesan Caesar salad station from Saturday night.

There’s a dining influencer that my partner watches regularly for her quick hit reviews of classic New York City restaurants. Every time one of her YouTube shorts pops up on our TV or one of her Instagram reels sounds off from my partner’s phone in the background, I lose my mind just a little. The influencer is quick to tell you exactly what she did and did not like at each spot, but never describes why she likes something. In reviewing Bernie’s Restaurant, the influencer says that their Vinegar Chicken is one of her all-time favorite meals. Then she moves on to the next dish. It makes me wonder what this internet persona’s passion truly is: making short videos, or deriving pleasure and joy from food.

I derive pleasure and joy from food. When my brother visited me a few weeks back, we gushed about everything we recently ate, were about to eat, and were planning on eating together in the future. Eating, or talking about eating, made up the bulk of his weeklong visit. And when he left for Japan, he immediately sent me photos of sushi, commenting on how great it was to have access to that level of fish quality again.

Though I had a stint as a picky eater through my childhood, food has been the primary motivator for me in day-to-day life for the last thirty-odd years. I have every meal for the day planned out by the time I’m drinking my morning coffee. I think about tomorrow’s dinner while cooking tonight’s. My home office is just steps from the kitchen, where I constantly cycle through for snacks during the workday. Out to dinner with my partner at one of our favorite local restaurants, a phrase bubbled up somewhere from my subconscious that became a mantra I intoned for the entire meal:

“Built for eating.”

In elementary school, a friend’s dad often lamented that I didn’t play football. “You’ve got the frame for it,” he’d say off-hand as he brought down bags of chips to the basement. He was right that my frame was designed to fill out. He was wrong about what my frame filling out was best suited for. I wasn’t set to be a guard or a tackle; I was a budding gourmand, just looking for new ways that the tangy cheese dust on Doritos could set off fireworks in my brain.

It took me a long time to realize that I’m just better at eating than most people. I’ve got a strong palate, but I also have a conscious one. It’s one thing to pick out that a dish might be missing something. It’s another thing, however, to be able to pinpoint exactly what’s missing. Give it up for Samin Nosrat for identifying the default categories, but, then again, give it up for me for being able to apply her prescriptions on a whim in my own cooking. After all, I’m a great cook.

But let’s not get it twisted. I’m not a great cook because I love making food. I’m a great cook because I love eating food. And I’m great at eating food. In fact I’m so good at eating food that it turned me into a food writer. I ruminated on this a bit last December when I lamented that my career as a culture writer hadn’t taken off the way I had wanted it to. I just hadn’t realized why. Yes, I can analyze a movie just about as good as most other culture writers. But I’m, like, way better at eating than all of them. I’m so good at eating that I became a good cook. I’m so good at eating that I learned enough about cooking techniques and kitchen equipment that I became an authority in this world. I’m so good at eating, I can describe why a Damascus-patterned nakiri knife with a VG-MAX core might not have the correct edge geometry to properly slice a tomato compared to the san mai VG-10 gyuto with more curve to its belly. And that’s because I want to eat that tomato.

I’m built for eating.

On Saturday morning, I knew exactly that I wanted to eat a crispy chicken Caesar salad for dinner. I’ve been making a version of it for years, and now I’ve finally dialed in the recipe to its best and current state. I make the chicken parm cutlets from a chicken piccata recipe; I mix crisp romaine with earthy lacinato kale; I build a Caesar dressing from a mayonnaise base by adding minced anchovies, lemon juice, grated garlic, lots of black pepper and a shit ton of Parmesano Reggiano; I toast cubes of my homemade sourdough bread drizzled with olive oil and salt for homemade croutons. The end result is sheer heaven. The hydrophobic nature of the mayo-based dressing keeps the salad greens from wilting while packing a bright and savory punch. The cutlets are juicy, crisp, salty, and light. The croutons pop with a light sour tang while adding a hearty crunch to the whole dish. It’s exactly what I want to eat, and I’m so good at eating that I turned hand-breading cutlets into a regular weeknight meal.

The old adage “write what you know” always felt trite to me. And yet, here we are. I love books and films and music and videogames, but all of those things play second breakfast to food in my day-to-day. After all, you gotta eat. Writing about a film takes hours out of a day, my mouse hovering back and forth over the play button in another window so I can reanalyze the scene for the sixth time. Even then, I might find myself struggling to connect the dots the way I imagined I could. As soon as I start tugging on a thread, another one fully unravels, leaving my piece with glaring paragraphs that need to be rewritten for anything to make sense. With food, writing comes naturally, the words flowing out in a near-trance state. Because writing about food requires the author to care about food. Caring about food means loving every minute of eating. And, need I remind you:

I’m built for eating.

I never imagined myself a better eater than the bulk of the population, but that’s because I assumed everyone ate like me. They don’t. Hardly anyone eats as good as I do. I’m thinking about eating right now. We’re making steak frites tonight, and then I’m off to Fort Wayne all next week for work. I’m thinking about eating the very serviceable bahn mi from the place right next to the office in Fort Wayne. I’m wondering what restaurants they’re going to take me to for dinner. I’m already planning where I’m going to stop for lunch in Chicago on my way down.

So here’s to eating, I suppose: may every meal bring joy, pleasure, and professional success. May eating be forever part of every waking day. May you one day even dream of enjoying a chicken Caesar salad as much as I do.

Read

There’s no author quite like Mary Roach. As a researcher, she loves digging into the weird science of the mundane. As a writer, she’s sharp, funny, wry, and understands narrative construction better than anyone else. Roach has a tendency to hyperfocus on one aspect of a subject for a book, zoom out a little in the middle, and then pivot gracefully to something completely different. In Packing for Mars, you won’t have a pure scientific understanding of space travel to Mars, but you’ll be connected to the human details around that type of endeavor in a way that makes you feel so much more informed than you probably will be. Her books are a joy to read, and you might learn something, too.

Watch

Soderbergh has a way of cranking out movies at a breakneck pace, but he’s a very interesting director. Stylistically, it can be hard to pick out his movies just based on their aesthetic. Somewhere at their core, however, you can just feel it. Black Bag is a tight 90 minutes or so, and it’s a fascinating take on a modern spy thriller. Its twists and turns are conventional until they’re not; its construction is unique until it becomes conventional. Centered on the plot of a spy investigating his wife as a traitor, Black Bag gets in and out of the concept of relationships and monogamy in a way you wouldn’t expect a spy thriller to do. And yet, I couldn’t help but want another 20-30 minutes to let the tension build a little more. Complaining that you wish a movie had more movie, however, means it made a positive impression.

Listen

I’m a sucker for fat guys playing some version of metalcore, and Walking Wounded nails it all on “Unholy Bargain.” There’s nothing better to me than hardcore guys dabbling in black metal riffs with punishing dreams and lyrics about fantasy bullshit. The official live performance video captures everything you need to know about the band: nerds who lift weights and can play the shit out of their instruments, finding a weird spot between all-out aggression and catchy grooves. The whole EP is great, but “Unholy Bargain” is the song I can’t stop coming back to.

Consume

As of today, it’s still on the menu, though things can change quickly at Mint Mark. At dinner the other week, we ordered the chicken-fried schnitzel on a lark, and were blown away. The pork chop itself was incredibly tender and flavorful, the breading and the fry on it were light and crispy while still delivering that delicious fried sweetness. All of that was covered in a light brown gravy and topped with chantrelles and stewed apricots. Each bite was a true revelation, and if you have the chance to eat at Mint Mark in Madison, don’t miss the opportunity to have all your expectations of a dish be upended by how well it was executed.

Artwork by Ashley Elander Strandquist. You can view her illustration work here and check out her printing business here.