Letter to a Young Food Writer (in Asia)

Dear Rob, You know me, but we’ll never actually meet. My name is Robert McKeown and I’m writing to you from cold, icy Ottawa in the year 2016. Yes, that Robert McKeown; I’m you, 14 years on, with a touch of grey in my stubble and a longer name in honor of my/your/our entry into the world of scholarship. I’m guessing you’re probably on the move, chopsticking noodles or bargaining for mangoes or crossing a border somewhere in Southeast Asia, where the weather is sticky, the sunsets magnificent, and the food spicy, sour, or sweet and redolent with members of the ginger family, depending what region you are in at the moment. It’s the fall of 2002 for you. You’re the Asia correspondent for Gourmet magazine – and a regular contributor to the Boston Globe and Slow Food - and you are just finishing three spent months living in an old Indochine town in Laos called Luang Prabang. There you’ve picked up some of the rhythmic local tongue which, like the simple salads and grills of the local cuisine, has a kinship with Northeastern Thai culture in both taste and sound. Things are about to happen very fast for you – and maybe even faster to the world you inhabit. I’m hoping you’ll take a break from your ambitious travel, reading, and writing schedule to ruminate on what’s about to come, to re-tool before a perfect storm of mass travel, the all-access, all-the-time internet – and the never-ending engagement and commentary of its inflammatory cousin, social media - and cultural curiosity strikes all around you. Let me start with the big picture: Ten weeks from now – after a combination of classes with missionary students and a private teacher from the legendary Southern Thai food hub, Nakhon Si Thammarat - you will speak Thai incredibly well for a first-year expatriate resident of the Kingdom, at least well enough to interview people around the country and talk to locals in a loud whiskey bar at the Sunday Market despite the DJ-fueled din. You will move into a studio above a 150 year-old market in Bangkok. You’ll use a seemingly boundless energy and passion for gastronomic discovery to chase down and – I am choosing this word very carefully - expose to your million or so readers some of the first-generation of street foods and cafes untouched-by-foreign-guests the magazine Gourmet will ever cover. You’ll discover and record, in some cases for the first time widely and publicly in the English language, the beta generation of local foods cooked from Chiang Mai and Taipei to Penang and Singapore. Your decisions to cast a Western tourist light of availability on these far-off culinary corners will have consequences. So, I’m hoping you listen to some of the advance notice I want to give you. Broadly, it’s about how the landscape of food, travel, and media will change dramatically, and what that means for how people relate to food. Why don’t we take your beloved Thailand as an example? Tourism will become the biggest business in the world, and Thailand’s arrivals will mount every year, no matter if there’s a political coup or tsunami (yes, those happen too). Thai food will become one of the most recognized in the world. Michelin-starred Thai restaurants pushing ‘authentic’ food cooked by Caucasian chefs will pop up in London, New York, Copenhagen, San Francisco, and many other cities. The most critically acclaimed Thai restaurant in the world will be in Bangkok, but be helmed by an Australian. This will all happen so fast that the complexities behind what makes something …