To reconnect with food, I'm unplugging my diet

PERSONAL ESSAY

The first step is walking out the front door, hungry and without a destination

Published February 25, 2024 12:00PM (EST)

Woman holding her smartphone while enjoying a cup of coffee with cake in a coffee shop. (Getty Images/d3sign)

When I first moved back to Chicago after over a decade away, I embraced the city by frequently practicing what English writer Virginia Woolf affectionately termed “street haunting” in a 1927 essay of the same name. Where she turned an errand to buy a new pencil halfway across London into an opportunity for flâneuserie — pausing to note that when “passing, glimpsing, everything seems accidentally but miraculously sprinkled with beauty” — I’d set out purposely hungry, ravenous for both food and some of the human connection stifled by pandemic lockdown.

As such, many of the restaurants that remain my favorites are the ones I discovered seemingly by happenstance: the empanada stand I found while biking in the shadow of Wrigley Field on game day, its electric blue and hot pink walls lined with glass bottles of Topo Chico and Mexican Coke; the Jewish deli with a ridiculously overloaded pastrami on rye, located just a few blocks north of the commercial stretch where I run weekly errands; the fern-lined neighborhood coffee shop which has transformed one of their two bathrooms into a propagation station for houseplants.

Of course, though, life sometimes gets in the way of wandering, especially once the gentle luster of getting reacquainted with one’s home begins to fade. Instead of being avenues of wonder, streets slowly become just streets, the thoroughfares we tread to get to grocery stores and dentist offices and train stations, where we can then be shuttled at a faster clip to yet other streets. And so it goes until you see a little detail out in the wild that truly surprises you (like an unexpected flock of clucking urban chickens, or back-alley graffiti written in a loopy, distinctly feminine font, warning, “I was here. I am here. I will hurt you”).

Or until a college student you know asks: “How did you all find new restaurants before the internet?”

That’s a good question.

While I’d like to say that I exclusively consult the food section of my local print publications for recommendations for where to eat that weekend, or that I’m more tied into the age-old tradition of solid word of mouth than I actually am, that’s just not the case anymore. It’s maybe a little embarrassing to admit, but outside of searching for places to eat and food trends for work, my relationship to food in my downtime has become increasingly passive — and increasingly digital. Instead of heading out my front door hungry for novelty, I come across a beautifully flaky croissant while doomscrolling Instagram and check to see if it’s local, or a random article pops up in my news feed, or I catch a sponsored restaurant ad on Facebook.

This isn’t just about how “organically” I find restaurants or the way in which I discovered that espresso martinis are back (through so, so many tweets); as a child of the early 90s, I often feel a bit like I was born on a cusp between the analogue and digital realms, but have become increasingly tethered to the World Wide Web since my middle school dial-up days.

I’m not alone. When the Pew Research Center began tracking Americans’ internet usage in early 2000, only about half of all adults were online, compared to the 95% who use the internet today. That said, those numbers don’t necessarily curb some broader concerns I have about how being “plugged in” for so long has impacted my ability to find, think about and create things I really care about, a rapidly growing apprehension that the student’s question had unintentionally pricked.

Since then, I’ve spent a fair amount of time considering what unplugging my diet would actually look like — and how that would tie to the ways I buy my groceries, how I satisfy my cravings and how I enjoy my community. I think the first step is simply walking out the door, hungry and without a destination.

Ashlie D. Stevens is Salon’s food editor. She is also an award-winning radio producer, editor and features writer — with a special emphasis on food, culture and subculture.

Her writing has appeared in and on The Atlantic, National Geographic’s “The Plate,” Eater, VICE, Slate, Salon, The Bitter Southerner and Chicago Magazine, while her audio work has appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered and Here & Now, as well as APM’s Marketplace. She is based in Chicago.