Josh Ozersky found dead in Chicago

Well-known food writer Josh Ozersky found dead in Chicago

Josh Ozersky, a rabble-rousing food writer for Esquire magazine whose prose reflected the pleasures and excesses of his eating adventures, was found dead Monday morning at a hotel on the Near North Side, according to the Cook County medical examiner's office.

From The Wrap . . .

Josh Ozersky, Acclaimed Food Writer, Dead at 47

The founding editor of Grub Street died at a Chicago hotel while in town for the James Beard Foundation Awards

Josh Ozersky, acclaimed food writer for Esquire and founding editor of Grub Street was found dead at a Chicago hotel on Monday. He was 47.

=R=

Consider the Food Writer Because the future of the art means (please!) leaving M.F.K. Fisher behind wriiten by Josh Ozersky.

M.F.K. Fisher, the most influential of all American food writers, can’t be blamed for the wreck she made of her chosen field. It wasn’t her fault. Strong-minded and fearless, she was and is a heroine to many of the people who afterward controlled American food writing in print. Everyone has to eat, but to write about food for money in America, you have to fit in a very narrow place, and that place is a chalk outline of MFK Fisher.
Which is a problem.

Thanks for posting this, Cathy. I saved it to read carefully later this evening.

Glancing through, I didn't see a mention of my favorite American food writer, A. J. Liebling, but then he didn't dedicate his career to food writing. (But then, neither has "the odious" Elizabeth Gilbert.) I also don't see a mention of my other favorite, a prolific food writer, Jeffrey Steingarten, whose style of writing doesn't seem to me to fit the premise --one might say, the straw man -- of the essay.

The title is yet another example of something that has become a pet peeve for me: I wish food writers and their editors would stop plagiarizing David Foster Wallace and "consider the" option of coming up with their own original ways to title their essays. Talk about writing inside someone else's chalk outline. Maybe the title was a conscious, tongue-in-cheek choice. But I doubt it.

I believe quite strongly, de mortuis nihil nisi bonum, but the essay itself is food for thought and discussion, possibly in a different thread.

Surely Ozersky's allusion was to M.F.K. Fisher, Consider the Oyster, 1941.

Ah! I am wrong then, and thank you for setting me straight. Skunked, as my dad would say in cribbage.

Katie wrote:I wish food writers and their editors would stop plagiarizing David Foster Wallace and "consider the" option of coming up with their own original ways to title their essays. Talk about writing inside someone else's chalk outline.

Sick burn! =)

As Amata pointed out, it is in fact MFK Fisher who's being plagiarized, and knowing that now, I can readily believe Ozersky tipped his hat to her in using that phrase in the title of an essay on too many people imitating her.

Consider the asparagus, consider the mushroom, consider the brisket, consider the peach, consider the chickpea, how many dozens of these titles have we seen, seems like one in every monthly food magazine or Guardian food section, and no one (including David Foster Wallace, if I remember the essay correctly) acknowledging that wasn't their own clever and original idea. I don't know about you, but I see this all the time in food writing specifically, and not in writing other fields (Consider the Euro? Consider the Tea Party? Consider the superhero? Consider the filibuster?). It has become a crutch for many food writers.