I have, for over ten years now, been a devoted reader of the New Yorker Magazine .
It is the most beautiful thing to read, all the pieces so well put together that I have read with pleasure stories about American Football and even Eastern European economics without even realising that these subjects would normally bore me stiff.

Slowly but surely over the years I have begun to search the contents pages for certain writers who I have developed a certain rapport with, writers who seem to have the same fascination with nerdish subjects as I do, foremost among them is a writer called Burkhard Bilger.

One of the first articles of his that sticks in my mind was called The Height Gap which he wrote in April ’05.
This exposed the amazing fact that young American men had actually got shorter in the previous ten years, they were now overtaken and passed by their peers in Holland and Sweden. This loss of height had only been discovered in history as a result of famine, young America’s diet of Burgers and Fries was effectively stunting their growth.

This led almost directly to a piece he wrote in September ’06 called the The Lunchroom Rebellion which was about a courageous Chef in California who had taken on the schools authority in an effort to try and provide healthier school lunches.

(Shortly after that article was written I was in a hotel outside Turin attending Slow Food’s Terra Madre. I asked the lady I was sitting next to, if she, like me was a chef.
“Not really” she explained ” I do school dinners”
This started me in a speech of praise of the lady, Ann Cooper, whom Bilger had written about.
“That was me” she said.)

As I flick through the archives of the New Yorker it becomes evident he never wrote a piece I didn’t enjoy.

Just take these titles “A Better Brew ” about boutique breweries , “The Cheese Nun” about a catholic nun who travelled Europe helping artisan cheese makers better their understanding of how cheese is made.
Even when not writing about food “Spider Woman” fascinated me with its story of a woman who searched out venomous spiders in New York.

Just lately, while trawling the internet I came up with a nice little catch.
A book called “Noodling for Flatheads ” written by Bilger in the year 2000.

This is a gem, get it if you can.
It is mostly about vanishing, often food related, customs of the southern states of America.
His last essay in the book is called “The Rolley Holers” about a group of marble players in Kentucky.
I am going to leave you with a quote from the begining of this story which gives a description of the country and people of the area.

“The land here is as stingy with resources as it is profligate with beauty, making a living from it has never been easy. After more than two centuries the towns still look makeshift- the houses lean along the roadsides as if dropped there by a passing tornado- and folks can be so understated they can hardly talk at all.”