Gina Mallet

Anyone can write about food, and everyone does… Gina Mallet had no intention of joining the throng until she had a gig reviewing restaurants for the Globe and Mail in the late nineties.

All food is memory and eating as a job aroused dormant feelings of loss over the way the taste of food had changed from the days when her family’s corner store was Harrods Food Hall in London. Well-hung game, raw milk cheese, local Cox’s Orange Pippins and fat pork were Gina’s taste markers. Where had they gone? Where had the pleasure in food gone?

Gina Mallet is restaurant critic for the National Post. Her book, Last Chance to Eat: The Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World won the 2005 James Beard Award for Writing on Food and was sold around the world. A former New Yorker, she started writing at Time magazine and then became the theatre critic for the Toronto Star. She is now working on Last Chance to be Unique: the Irresistible Pull of Uniformity from Food to People and How it Happens.