To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living.

It would be an egregious mistake to ever refer to me in the same breath as most of the people I write about.

I'm a comic nerd. I'm a former serious collector for much of my childhood and early teen years I wanted to draw underground comics.

People are generally proud of their food. A willingness to eat and drink with people without fear and prejudice... they open up to you in ways that somebody visiting who is driven by a story may not get.

I wanted to write in Kitchenese, the secret language of cooks, instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever dunked french fries for a summer job or suffered under the despotic rule of a tyrannical chef or boobish owner.

When you're shooting that fast end to end, you wake up in a hotel and you don't know where you are. You're dreaming of Singapore, you wake up in Hong Kong. Or you just lose track. It's one of the reasons I'm staying in hotels that I know I've stayed in before, and they don't look like other hotels.

It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn. Maybe that's enlightenment enough - to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, at least for me, means realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.