The Birth of Jack Piepan: A Q&A Session

Hello and welcome! Dave and Beth here, christening this thing, as it were. We see you have some questions. Go ahead.

What is Jack Piepan?

More than anything, it's a space for us to be nerds about food. We love food separately, and in the past few years that we've lived together, that obsession with food has grown to the point that we thought it might be nice to post recipes and the like online.

Why would you do that?

To bring it to the masses, masses being a term which we are using in a very loose sense. And anyway, five years seems like a fair amount of time to begin ruining our relationship by starting this creative endeavor together. We think we have a unique take on things that will contribute to the many and varied strains of conversation being had about food.

What is that unique take?

Oh shit, we really didn't think you'd ask that. We don't have any idea. Sorry.

Okay, well, what do you plan on doing? What's your focus?

The idea is this: Beth likes to cook, Dave likes to bake. That covers a lot of ground. We want to share a bit of our experimentation (IN THE KITCHEN, MOM) with folks.

In addition, we're both of the notion that good food isn't just for the upper and upper-middle classes. A lot of food writing, despite the proliferation of it in this age of instant, infinitely spreadable information, is still for people with more money than sense, and leisure time out the wazoo. And whatever; that's fine. We're childless thirty-somethings, so we've no right to complain about free time. But we both work for a (kind of) living, and maybe don't always have a lot of cash to go around. Food does not exist in a vacuum; apart from its value as a nutritional commodity, it's a sociopolitical currency. What you eat (and how you eat) reflects certain values, and we want to explore some of those values in depth.

You're pretty long-winded.

Questions only, please.

Are you pretty long-winded?

No.

I fell right into that, didn't I?

Yes.

How often are you gonna post?

It's hard to say. We're gonna go for it and see how it works out. We will try to be regular, but there may be small breaks where we build up more material, like a shitty internet connection buffering that cat video you kind of want to see.