Alton Brown shouting into a megaphoneThanks to a entry on one of my favorite weblogs Simple Bits, I stumbled onto a new weblog that after the first read has become my new favorite weblog. It’s the “Rants & Raves” section of Alton Brown’s web site and it’s an absolute hoot!
For those of you not familiar with Alton Brown, he hosts the Food Network show Good Eats. Before losing cable, something I’m still struggling with demons to try and keep from getting back, I use to watch his show regularly. Brown has this innate ability to go into great detail regarding food and cooking and yet make it VERY entertaining. He lives in Atlanta, which isn’t very far from here (so what that makes him a neighbor?) and in his show and now his weblog he comes across as a regular Joe. Well, a regular Joe who knows a LOT about food. I guess you could call him kind of a cooking geek and I mean that in a good way.


Geek is no longer a negative term, but is typically used to describe someone who’s really into something and likes getting into the nitty gritty of something. Typically it’s used when referring to someone, like me, that’s into technology, but you can be a geek of anything. For example, a friend of mine just got an Acura NSX and as we were talking I realized that he knows A LOT about cars, so I said to him, “I had no idea that you were a car geek.” I geek out over Palm OS handhelds and he geeks out over cars. Lucky for my wife, my geek fix starts at $75 and not $90,000. 😛

So IMHO Alton Brown is a food geek. He can dive deep “into the weeds” on just about anything to do with food, which explains why he was such a good host on Iron Chef America. He was the on-floor host who explained what all the chefs were doing. In addition, he’s just funny as hell, so although what he’s talking about can sometimes be dry, he makes it actually fun to watch.

Reading his bio also explained a lot of why I like him. Brown was a cinematographer and video director that found that his true passion was food because of his focus on it in-between shoots. So it looks like he was a foodie first and then made the switch to chef/food celebrity. Whatever the case, I’m glad he made the career change. 🙂

After checking out his weblog this morning, I noticed that he writes with the same style as his television shows, probably because he writes each episode. There are a lot of good entries ranging from his new motorcycle, to the movie “Supersize Me“, to the fact that he finds Martha Stewart “kinda hot”. However, my favorite entry is his shortest,

The fact that “Dr.” Phil has the number 1 cookbook on Amazon.com makes me want to end it all.

So if you’re an Alton Brown fan, or even just a “foodie”, you need to go check out Alton Brown’s weblog. He doesn’t post a lot, but when he does he always has something good to say.