Allen Salkin
While, yes, I’ve been a New York Times staff reporter and written for lots of other outlets (New York Magazine, Details, Edible), I’ve also done a lot of different jobs and been a lot of places: cast industrial films in Hong Kong, wholesaled rubber duckies in Las Vegas, picked oranges in Crete, and peddled oil paintings door-to-door in Western Australia. I have a hobby of attending Summer Olympics (been to 7), most recently visited Ikaria, known as the island where people live forever, attended Calabasas High (pre-Kardashians), U.C. Berkeley (Go Bears! — graduation dinner Chez Panisse downstairs) and N.Y.U. for a Journalism Masters, and I’ve since taught Journalism there.
I should also say that I like whirlpool bathtubs a great deal. I do not require a super-large one that fits in a corner. A large, but regular bath-shaped tub is fine. I strongly prefer bathing to showering. It is a daily luxury available to the non-rich only recently in historical time.
From Scratch: Inside the Food Network is my second book. I wrote Festivus: The Holiday for the Rest of Us, a bit of a lighter affair, a few years ago and still pay the fee to keep festivusbook.com alive. A few other interesting topics I’ve written about are Annie Leibovitz’s finances, the last waterbed salesman in the San Francisco Bay Area, and men over 40 in summer share houses. The trail that started me towards From Scratch probably started in earnest with an article I wrote about the man who runs the South Beach Wine and Food Festival.
website: allensalkin.com