In New Memoirs, Food Writers Serve Up Stories About Their Beat

There are other hazards. In Tokyo he eats the engorged sperm sac (a delicacy, he is told) of the potentially poisonous fugu fish. His tongue tingles; he fears that he is dying. He gets “pork bloat,” whatever that is. At one meal someone accidentally spits a tiny speck of gristle into his eye and his vision is blurred for weeks. He’s often absent at night, and his wife, who is over the whole gonzo eating scene, works to maintain a semblance of regularity in their daughters’ lives.

Sometimes this book is too casual for its own good. Platt includes sections of essays he’s published previously (“Here’s one I made earlier,” as the TV chefs say), not all of which fit. Once in a while, the writing goes on autopilot. Nothing is really at stake. But his charm lashes this succession of small plates together.

Platt grew up wealthy and coddled. Ed Levine, the author of “Serious Eater: A Food Lover’s Perilous Quest for Pizza and Redemption,” grew up on Long Island under the Idlewild (now J.F.K.) flight path. His working-class parents were, he writes, “card-carrying Communists.” Their son Ed grew up to be a very hungry boy.

Levine is well-known in the food world as the founder of Serious Eats, a celebrated site defined by his obsession with vernacular New York fare: things like pizza, burgers, hot dogs and bagels. Founded in 2006, the site would make stars of talents like J. Kenji López-Alt, the author of “The Food Lab,” and the pastry chef Stella Parks.

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I’ve followed Levine’s food-writing career since it started, and if you gave me a bumper sticker that read “Ed Levine Is God,” I’d slap it on my refrigerator. (Nora Ephron thought he was godlike too; she made him an extra in her food-world film “Julie & Julia.”) His new memoir, though, is close to unreadable.

It’s a business book more than it’s a food book, and that’s okay. Levine has a lot to say about the scramble for survival among the food sites and blogs of the aughts and teens. There’s a fair amount to learn here about acquisitions and deal structuring and scaling up and monetizing content.