GoodEater plays with your food

Local blog examines how to eat gooder

By RYAN ROSE WEAVER

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A few weeks ago, Kenji Alt killed a duck. And it won't be long before he kills again.

"I'm going to do a chicken in a few weeks," he says.

But Alt isn't a serial animal killer. He's a rare kind of carnivore, the kind who thinks that if people are going to eat another animal, they need to be prepared to deal with all the implications—including getting their own hands bloody.

Alt, a former restaurant chef who spends his days editing at the Brookline-based magazine Cook's Illustrated, chronicled this experience on his new blog, GoodEater, which aims to explore the intersection of food and politics on a global scale.

Alt co-authors the blog with his former neighbor, Joshua Levin, now a Manhattan-based vegetarian entrepreneur with a wholly different, but complementary, perspective.

Via email, Alt writes, "Josh, who's in business school, tends to focus on broader-picture-type things, while I, as a chef, am more interested in the practical cooking side of it. Though Josh and I may individually advocate things (local, seasonal, organic, vegetarian, kill-your-own, etc.) as a site, we're not aiming to advocate one philosophy over another, more just to get people to realize [...] that every time they make a food choice, they are affecting more than simply what they're going to have for dinner."

So what kind of food system does Alt advocate in the long run? "I don't think I'm smart enough to come up with a solution," he admits. "I figure, if we can convince people to stop spending their money on a system that they don't believe in, there are people who can figure out what the new system should be."

[goodeater.org]