About

My name is Jay.

By day, I am a pharmacist.  Pretty much the rest of the time, I’m thinking about food.  It started with travel journals.  I lived in the Middle East for the better part of ten years, and got to see a lot of the world during that season.  Pretty soon I realized I was recording less about what I saw and more about what I ate. Thanks to the influence of Calvin Trillin, I found myself strategizing family trips based on what we could squeeze in between restaurants.  Shortly before we returned to Amreeka, I put together a little cookbook that was about half recipes, half stories.  A year after our return, back in my Mississippi hometown, I tracked down the lifestyles editor at our local daily news and handed her a stack of those stories.  I guess my timing was good.  I started the first week of October, 2010, and four or five lifestyles reporters later, Eats One Ate is still going.  It’s pretty simple: I am the one writing about the eats I ate.  The newspaper column led to Till We Eat Again, the back page of Eat.Drink.Mississippi magazine.  Before I knew it, I was blogging and tweeting.  I try to get around to as many local food events as I can, and even get behind the judges’ table every now and then.  I’m not a chef by any stretch, but I like to play with food.  Mostly, though, I like to write about it.  And here we are.

Oh, and what’s the deal with the camel? Yes, it is indeed a template that I picked from the WordPress options.  I had visions of replacing the picture with an amazing lucky shot I got of a spice market in Yemen, but that picture is buried in a grocery bag full of negatives (I hope) and it is yet to be uncovered.   But it’s not just laziness – I can relate to this camel.  I saw the pyramids in Giza once.  From the back of a camel.  I could have taken this picture.  I may have one in that same grocery bag.  So I kept him to remind me of the day I ate at Chili’s on the banks of the Nile.