Update 2013: Behind the Words and the Cutlery

I rarely find anything loathsome about food. I like to grow it, buy it, cook it, eat it, talk about it -- and now -- I write about it.

Sometimes, though, food is frustrating: Recipes brimming with expensive ingredients implode in your oven; a restaurant botches a simple dish; or insects invade your vegetable garden. Alas, the loathing creeps in.

I am a professional freelance writer and onetime PR person who took a long hiatus to raise two kids. During my carpooling years I developed a love of cooking, cookbooks and the Food Network. (Remember when the Food Network taught people how to cook and skipped sparring over inane cupcakes?)

After leaving wardrobe cartons in my wake throughout Florida -- from Ft. Lauderdale to Tallahassee, Ft. Myers to Jacksonville -- and savoring five biscuit-filled years in a suburb of Atlanta, I moved to Tampa for the second time in 2007. My how things have changed since 1995! 

I started this blog in 2010 posting recipes and other food-related tidbits, but my restaurant reviews are the draw. As usual, the last thing a struggling restaurateur needs is bad publicity. I strive to be truthful and fair, reporting the good and bad as I see it, rooting for success and loathing failure.

Despite the fact that I'm a huge fan of capitalism and a free-market economy, I will not blog for food. If you follow my blog, you want to know what I like and what I loathe. How could I bite a hand that feeds me? I have ethical standards, fellow food lovers, and cannot be bought with a burger and a beer or lobster and Champagne. Thanks but no thanks to invitations to review restaurants or attend blogger events. I do, however, welcome press releases and restaurant news.

If you'd like to reach me for a legitimate writing assignment, shoot me an e-mail at foodandloathing@gmail.com.

I hope you enjoy my culinary adventures.  Thanks for visiting.